Cycling Road at the 2012 Summer Olympics

The road cycling program was the same as it had been since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, with a men’s and women’s mass start road race and individual time trial. The road race began and ended at The Mall, a street leading to Buckingham Palace, and travelled through Surrey County along the way while Hampton Court Palace served as the start and finish lines for the time trial.

On the women’s side American Kristin Armstrong defended her title in the time trial, and she would return to three-peat at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Dutchwoman Marianne Vos, considered among the greatest women’s cyclists ever, won the road race, which the women raced under a deluge.

Bradley Wiggins of Great Britain won the men’s time trial. Wiggins was a remarkable all-around cyclist, excelling on the road and track. He would win eight Olympic medals and five gold medals, and win the Tour de France in 2012. The men’s road race went to Kazakh cyclist Aleksandr Vinokurov, who had been the silver medalist in 2000, and then retired in 2007, only to come back in 2009. A crash at the 2011 Tour de France led Vinokurov to announce another retirement, but it was short-lived. He would finally retire later in the season after the 2012 Clásica de San Sebastián.