Angelo Fausto Coppi was an Italian cyclist, the dominant international cyclist of the years after the Second World War. His successes earned him the title Il Campionissimo. He was an all-round racing cyclist: he excelled in both climbing and time trialing, and was also a good sprinter. He won the Giro d'Italia five times, the Tour de France twice, and the World Championship in 1953. Other notable results include winning the Giro di Lombardia five times, the Milan–San Remo three times, as well as wins at Paris–Roubaix and La Flèche Wallonne and setting the hour record (45.798 km) in 1942.
BMX racing is a type of off-road bicycle racing. The format of BMX was derived from motocross racing. BMX bicycle races are sprint races on purpose-built off-road single-lap race tracks. The track usually consists of a starting gate for up to eight racers, a groomed, serpentine, dirt race course made of various jumps and rollers and a finish line. The course is usually about 15 feet (4.6 m) wide and has large banked corners, which are angled inward, that help the riders maintain speed. The sport of BMX racing is facilitated by a number of regional and international sanctioning bodies. They provide rules for sanctioning rules, specify age groups and skill-level classifications, and maintain a points-accumulation system over the racing season. The sport is very family oriented and largely participant-driven, with riders ranging in age from 2 to 70, and over. Professional ranks exist for both men and women, where the age ranges from 17 to over 40 years old.
Thomas Simpson was one of Britain's most successful professional cyclists. He was born in Haswell, County Durham, and later moved to Harworth, Nottinghamshire. Simpson began road cycling as a teenager before taking up track cycling, specialising in pursuit races. He won a bronze medal for track cycling at the 1956 Summer Olympics and a silver at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games.
Cycle sport is competitive physical activity using bicycles. There are several categories of bicycle racing including road bicycle racing, cyclo-cross, mountain bike racing, track cycling, BMX, and cycle speedway. Non-racing cycling sports include artistic cycling, cycle polo, freestyle BMX, mountain bike trials, hardcourt bike polo and cycleball. The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) is the world governing body for cycling and international competitive cycling events. The International Human Powered Vehicle Association is the governing body for human-powered vehicles that imposes far fewer restrictions on their design than does the UCI. The UltraMarathon Cycling Association is the governing body for many ultra-distance cycling races.
Liège–Bastogne–Liège, also known as La Doyenne, is a one-day classic cycling race in Belgium. First run in 1892, it is the oldest of the five Monuments of the European professional road cycling calendar; usually coming as the last of the spring classics. It is held annually in late April, in the Ardennes region of Belgium, from Liège to Bastogne and back.
Six-day cycling is a track cycling event that takes place over six days. Six-day races started in Britain, spread to many regions of the world, were brought to their modern style in the United States and are now mainly a European event. Initially, individuals competed alone, the winner being the individual who completed the most laps. However, the format was changed to allow teams, one rider racing while the other rested. The 24-hours a day regime has also been relaxed, so that most six-day races involve six nights of racing, typically from 6pm to 2am, on indoor tracks (velodromes). Six-day events are annually hosted in London, Berlin, Ghent, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Manchester, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The 7-Eleven Cycling Team, later the Motorola Cycling Team, was a professional cycling team founded in the U.S. in 1981 by Jim Ochowicz, a former U.S. Olympic cyclist. The team lasted 16 years, under the sponsorship of 7-Eleven through 1990 and then Motorola from 1990 through 1996. From 1989 to 1996 it rode on Eddy Merckx bikes.
Tom Ritchey is an American bicycle frame builder, Category 1 racer, fabricator, designer, and founder of Ritchey Design. Ritchey is a US pioneer in modern frame building and the first production mountain bike builder/manufacturer in the history of the sport. He is an innovator of bicycle components that have been used in winning some of the biggest cycling competitions in the world including the UCI World Championships, the Tour de France and the Olympics. In 1988, Ritchey was inducted into the inaugural Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in Crested Butte, Colorado : and 2012, inducted to the United States Bicycle Hall of Fame in Davis, California.
Seamus "Shay" Elliott was an Irish road bicycle racer, Ireland's first major international rider, with a record comparable only to Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche. He was the first Irish person to ride the Tour de France, first to win a stage, and first to wear the yellow jersey, and first English speaker to win stages in all the Grand Tours.
Percy Thornley Stallard was an English racing cyclist who reintroduced massed-start road racing on British roads in the 1940s.
Leonard "Leon" Lewis Meredith was a British track and road racing cyclist who competed in the 1908 Summer Olympics, in the 1912 Summer Olympics, and in the 1920 Summer Olympics. He won seven world championships and set up one of Britain's largest cycle-parts companies and ran a roller-skating rink and ballroom.
Robert ("Bob") Charles Mionske is a two-time U.S. Olympic racing cyclist and U.S. National Champion (1990). In the 1988 Summer Olympics, held in Seoul, South Korea, he placed fourth in the Individual Road Race. He retired from professional cycling in 1993 and is now an attorney based in Portland, Oregon, with a practice in bicycle law. He wrote Legally Speaking, a national column on bicycle law, between 2002 and 2009, and has also written Bicycling & the Law: Your Rights as a Cyclist, a book on bicycle law published in August 2007. Mionske has written his Legally Speaking column on bicycle law for VeloNews and his Road Rights column on bicycle law for Bicycling Magazine. In February 2015, Mionske returned to writing his Legally Speaking column at VeloNews.
Arthur Augustus Zimmerman was one of the world's great cycling sprint riders and winner of the first world championship in 1893. His prizes as an amateur were a consideration in the establishment of the International Cycling Association (ICA).
Audrey McElmury was the first American cyclist to win the Road World Championship. She won in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1969, having fallen and remounted her bike. Hers was the United States' first world cycling championship since Frank Kramer won the professional sprint race in 1912 and the first ever in road cycling.
Reggie McNamara was an Australian cyclist known as a roughhouse velodrome rider with a string of dramatic crashes and broken bones over 20 years. He was known as the Iron Man. He specialised in six-day races but rode races from 200m sprints to 100 km endurance races. He rode 3,000 races on three continents over 30 years and won more than 700 before he retired aged 50 in 1937.
Robert Howe Walthour Sr. was one of the best American professional cyclists of his era.
Norman Leslie Sheil was a racing cyclist who won world pursuit championships for Britain in 1955 and 1958 and rode the Tour de France in 1960. He became national coach of the British Cycling Federation and later of the Canadian Cycling Association. He returned to racing in the 1998 and won the world points championship for over-65s, in Manchester England.
Francesco Ginanni is an Italian professional road bicycle racer for UCI Professional Continental team Acqua & Sapone, after turning professional with Diquigiovanni–Androni in 2008. As an amateur, Ginanni won five races in 2006 and four races in 2007, including the Giro del Casentino, a 1.2 rated single-day race on the UCI Europe Tour. Ginanni's first professional victory came in the Gran Premio Industria e Commercio Artigianato Carnaghese in August 2008, which he followed up by winning the Tre Valli Varesine and Giro del Veneto, both races classified as 1.HC – the highest rating for single-day races on the UCI Europe Tour. The Daily Peloton called 2008 "a real breakthrough year" for Ginanni. Ginanni won a further three single-day races in 2009 and, as of March 2010, one in 2010. Ginanni won the Trofeo Laigueglia in both 2009 and 2010, emulating Eddy Merckx and Filippo Pozzato. Ginanni is aiming to win Milan–San Remo, one of the five monuments of road bicycle racing. In the 2010 edition, he finished 7th.
The Global Relay Gastown Grand Prix is a criterium cycling race held in Gastown, the oldest neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The race is part of BC Superweek, a series of nine races held over 10 days in July in the greater Vancouver area.
Justin Williams is a Belizean-American cyclist who currently is a rider-manager for UCI Continental team L39ION of Los Angeles. He began racing as a teen and won multiple amateur US National Championships in track, road, and criterium. He focuses on increasing the diversity of the sport and founded and manages a team in order to mentor young African American and Hispanic riders.
