Cycling
Team GB's cycling squad for Beijing totalled twenty five entrants in the four disciplines. Included were two reigning Olympic track cycling champions, Chris Hoy and Bradley Wiggins, plus a further two medal winners from 2004, as well as several reigning track world champions. Great Britain won fourteen cycling medals (eight gold, four silver and two bronze) in total to top the cycling medal table. The Cycling team won the BBC Sports team of the year award and was nominated for Laureus World team of the year.
On the track Mark Cavendish was the only member of the squad of fourteen not to win at least one medal. Chris Hoy became Scotland's most successful Olympic competitor ever, and the first Briton to win three gold medals at a single Olympic games since Henry Taylor in 1908. His success resulted in the velodrome for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow being named in his honour. Rebecca Romero became the first British woman to win a medal in two different Olympic sports by following her silver medal in the quadruple sculls rowing in 2004 with gold in the women's individual pursuit.
In the debut appearance of BMX events at the Olympics, world champion Shanaze Reade finished out of the medals after crashing out of the women's final. Reade had been unbeaten all year and was the favourite to win the women's title.
On the road Nicole Cooke's win in the women's road race provided the first Olympic gold for an athlete from Wales since Richard Meade in 1972.
Read more about this topic: Great Britain At The 2008 Summer Olympics
Famous quotes containing the word cycling:
“If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.”
—Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)