Cycling
A maximum of three places were allocated to Portugal in the men's road event, due to a tenth place in the 2006-2007 UCI Europe Tour nations ranking, which corresponded to a second place in terms of continental Olympic qualification. A quota place was available for the men's time trial event, but it was not taken. The national cycling federation chose to send 2004 Olympic silver medalist Sérgio Paulinho together with André Cardoso and Nuno Ribeiro. However, just five days before the road race event, it was announced that Paulinho would not compete in Beijing due to asthma problems, and that he would not be replaced by another rider.
Read more about this topic: Portugal At The 2008 Summer Olympics
Famous quotes containing the word cycling:
“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)
“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)
“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)