Cycling has been contested at every Summer Olympic Games since the birth of the modern Olympic movement at the 1896 Summer Olympics, at which a road race and five track events were held. Women's cycling did not enter the Olympic programme until the road race at the 1984 Summer Olympics. Women have competed in track events as well since 1988. Mountain biking (for men and women) entered the Olympic programme in 1996, followed by BMX in 2008.
The 2012 Summer Olympics were the first at which men and women competed in the same number of events in all cycling disciplines including track cycling, which previously had more men's and fewer women's events than the 2012 programme.
Famous quotes containing the words cycling and/or summer:
“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)
“The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us, visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)