An Indoor Olympics would finally open the way for Dungeons and Dragons players to get Lottery grants

One of the semi-regular bits of low-level warfare that cycling enjoys is attempting to get cycling into the Winter Olympics as well as the Summer. This is part of our plan for world domination – eventually all sports will be cycling and we can stop worrying about what sports TV channel to subscribe to.

Michael Hutchinson

Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

Most commonly, the suggestion has been that cyclo-cross should be in the Winter Olympics, on the basis that you do cyclo-cross in winter. There are other Summer Olympic sports that happen in winter, like football, but of course you can do these in summer too. You can’t do cyclo-cross when the weather is warm, because if you did people would notice that it was more or less the same as cross-country mountain biking. That is already in the Olympics, and in our quest for world domination, we wouldn’t want to draw attention to this.

More recently an idea has been floated that track cycling would also be better off in the Winter Games. And, until recently the UCI had indeed made track into a winter event, simply by scheduling the international events and the Worlds over the winter. Add to that the rich tradition of six-day racing, which is definitely a winter pastime, and it starts to seem almost rational.

There would be upsides. I think that if you took the Olympic track meeting away from the road season altogether it might get more attention all round. It would let riders double up more easily and almost certainly give us enough space in the Games schedule to increase the number of track cycling events at the Olympics – we might finally get the individual pursuit back, perhaps even the kilo.

And for the original cyclo-cross suggestion, it would give one of the most accessible routes into elite racing a real showcase. This could only be a good thing. It’s great for casual spectators too, because it’s full of crashes that are more or less harmless – it’s like a YouTube “fails” video re-imagined as a whole sport.

The downsides? Well, the main one is that the very point of the Winter Olympics is that they exist for events that need snow or ice. They shouldn’t be optional. While you can do cyclo-cross in the snow, there is no faster means known to man for turning a snowy winter scene into a mud-fest than a cyclocross race. The only reason the last ice age lasted as long as it did was that the ice caps didn’t get buzz-sawed to slush by cyclo-crossers.

For all that, cyclo-cross might just be able to sneak under the “snow and ice” wire by virtue of being a “cold’ sport. But track racing isn’t a cold sport. Most tracks are so hot that a snowflake drifting in would vaporise in seconds. What track cycling is, is an indoor sport. It should really be at the Indoor Olympics.

I think I might be on to something here – an Indoor Olympics would finally open the way for Dungeons and Dragons players to get Lottery grants, which would be great news for almost everyone I was friends with at school.

Then, with cyclo-cross at the Winter Games, track at the Indoor Games and road and MTB at the Summer Games, we’d be perfectly poised for total victory. We could even push for outdoor track racing to return in summer.

But even if we don’t manage that, I’ve come down in favour of track cycling for the Winter Games. If nothing else it would mean there was something to watch in the second week other than ice hockey – a sport so spectator-unfriendly that it calls into question the sense of the entire continent of North America.