Cycling
Great Britain's cycling team consisted of ten riders, including returning Paralympic gold medalists Aileen McGlynn, her tandem partner Ellen Hunter, and Darren Kenny. Former swimmers Jody Cundy and Sarah Storey were also named in the squad. The Paralympic cycling team, coached by Chris Furber and managed Helen Mortimer, trained alongside the British Olympic cycling team. Darren Kenny won five medals, four gold and one silver, more golds than any other British competitor at these Games. Cundy set a new world record and won two gold medals on the track to add to his five swimming medals from previous Games; this meant he matched Rebecca Romero's achievement in the Olympics of becoming a medal winner in two different sports. In all British cyclists won twenty medals, seventeen of them gold, to top the cycling medal tables for both road and track events.
- Factor time
To ensure a fair event when athletes with differing disabilities compete, times achieved are sometimes modified by a percentage rate, to produce a result known as "Factor Time". It is this time that decides the result of the races, and is listed below. Where this differs from the actual time recorded, actual time is also listed.
Read more about this topic: Great Britain At The 2008 Summer Paralympics
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)