Seven Olympic champions, six men and one woman, have ever participated in the VCV
With just a few hours to go until the main cycling event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, we take a look at all the cyclists who have won Olympic glory and who have also competed in the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana.
Valencia. August 1st, 2024. This Saturday, August 3rd, the men’s road cycling race of the Olympic Games will start at 11:00 am in Paris. On Sunday, at 2:00 pm, it will be the turn of the women’s category. An ideal moment to look back and remember the champions who one day rode the Olympic glory on the roads of the Comunitat Valenciana in the VCV. In total, seven Olympic champions have competed in our race, six men and one woman.
Road cycling is one of the original Olympic events, as it was on the competitive programme of the first modern Olympiad in Athens in 1896. However, the discipline did not participate in the next three Olympic Games until it returned at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics with the time trial. The road race would not return to the Olympic programme until Amsterdam 1928. Women’s cycling was added to the Olympic programme in Los Angeles 1984 with the road race and the time trial four years later in Seoul 1988.
To find the first connection between the Olympic Games and the VCV we have to go back to the 1970s. The protagonist, the Swede Bernt Johansson. At that time, professional cyclists were not allowed to compete in the Olympic Games. Johansson was not a professional, but he had already been competing for years in his country, where he had been national champion in 1974. Two years later, in Montreal 1976, Johansson won the gold medal in the road race, beating Italy’s Giuseppe Martinelli and Poland’s Mieczysław Nowicki.
Olympic success led Johansson to turn professional. Joining the Italian Fiorella team, the Swedish rider competed in the 1977 ‘Vuelta a Levante’ just a few months after his Olympic glory in Montreal. Johansson won stage 2 between Benicàssim and Calpe and, despite three stage wins by the German Horst Schutz, the Swede took the overall victory in Valencia. Johansson’s professional career would last until 1981, with a third place overall in the 1979 Giro d’Italia being his most outstanding result.
Bernt Johansson paraded his Olympic champion status on Valencian roads in 1977, something that only one other cyclist has been able to do since then. He is the Belgian Greg Van Avermaet. Olympic gold medallist at Rio 2016, the sprinter took part in the next four editions of the VCV. In one of them, in 2019, he even won a stage with a finish in Chera. He was the last Olympic champion to race on Valencian roads, as the gold medallist in Tokyo 2020, the Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz, has never participated in the VCV.
Apart from these two cyclists, there are four other Olympic champions who have raced in our race. All of them, however, touched Olympic glory after having competed at the VCV. The first, Jan Üllrich. The German raced in Valencia in 1996 and 1997, three years before winning gold in Sydney 2000.
A special case is that of Kazakh Aleksandr Vinokurov, the only cyclist next to Bernt Johansson to have won Olympic and VCV gold. However, he did so at two very different stages of his career. In 1999, a young Vinokurov surprised everyone and won the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana ahead of names like Melcior Mauri, David Millar or Tyler Hamilton. It took 13 years for a veteran Vinokurov to win gold at London 2012 in what was the culmination of his professional cycling career.
Los otros dos ciclistas campeones olímpicos y con presencias en la VCV son, el español Samuel Sánchez, oro en Pekín 2008 y cuatro veces participante en la VCV (2001, 2002, 2006 y 2007); así como el italiano Paolo Bettini, oro en Atenas 2004 y participante en tres VCV (1999, 2000 y 2001). En definitiva, un selecto grupo de ciclistas que tienen en común haber tocado la gloria olímpica y haber corrido, ya sea antes o después, en la Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana.
La última campeona olímpica, en la VCV Féminas
El pasado mes de febrero de 2024 tuvimos el lujo de ver correr en las carreteras valencianas a la última campeona olímpica femenina. Se trata de la austriaca Anna Kiesenhofer, quien enrolada en las filas del Team Roland participó en la 6ª edición de la VCV Féminas Gran Premio Tuawa. La veterana ciclista austriaca no pudo seguir el ritmo endiablado que impuso en el tramo final la francesa Cédrine Kerbaol y terminó clasificada en 40º posición en la carrera.
