The bicycle was invented in early 19th-century Europe as a means of transport. The first official bike race - a two-kilometre event - took place in Paris in 1868.

There are now approximately one billion bicycles in the world.

The provisions of the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic of 1968 considers a bicycle to be a vehicle. Oh, and a person controlling a bicycle is considered to be a driver.

Indoor track cycling takes place in an anti-clockwise direction around a 250m banked oval track, otherwise known as a velodrome. Races are contested both individually and as part of a team. They can also be contested against the clock or head to head, depending on the event.

Track bicycles are specifically designed to reduce aerodynamic drag caused by the machine and the rider’s position. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, in particular, witnessed a glut of futuristic devices, including the debut of the spoke-free, carbon-fibre disc wheel.

Track cycling has been part of the Olympic programme since the inaugural modern Games of 1896. Women’s track events were introduced to the Olympics in 1988.

There are 10 Olympic events in track cycling, seven for men and three for women. The men’s events are the individual pursuit, the individual sprint, the keirin, the Madison, the points race, the team pursuit and the team sprint. The women’s events are the individual pursuit, the individual sprint and the points race.

The Madison is a mass-start event which has two competitors in each team. Only one of the team riders is on the track at any given time, riding for a number of laps before exchanging with his colleague. A “handsling” describes the manner in which the two team colleagues swap positions, with one of them grabbing the hand of the other and then pushing him forward.

The keirin, which emanates from Japan, is a 2,000m paced event in which the participants ride behind a motorised pacer that starts at a speed of about 25km/h. Thereafter, it gradually increases the tempo to about 50km/h before leaving the track with about 600m remaining, at which point the cyclists begin a frantic sprint to the finishing line.

Great Britain’s Chris Boardman won the 1992 Olympic 4000m individual pursuit final by uniquely lapping Germany’s Jens Lehmann with a circuit still to go. To put Boardman’s achievement in some sort of perspective, the humiliated Lehmann (not to be confused, by the way, with the German goalkeeper of the same name) was the current world champion. It was Britain’s first Olympic cycling gold since 1920.

Bradley Wiggins won three track medals - one of each colour - for Britain at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, more than any other British athlete at the Games. He claimed gold in the individual pursuit, silver in the team pursuit and bronze in the Madison. He also won bronze in the team pursuit event at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, as well as gold in both the individual pursuit and the team pursuit at the 2008 Beijing Games.

The Beijing Olympics were astonishingly successful for the British track cycling team, who plundered seven of the 10 available gold medals. Chris Hoy, who won the men’s individual sprint and the keirin as well as being a member of the successful team sprint trio, became the first Briton to win three gold medals at a single Olympics since swimmer Henry Taylor in 1908, when the world was a rather different place.

The Olympic road-racing programme is made up of four events: the men’s and women’s road race and the men’s and women’s time trial.

The men’s Olympic road-race event has been held over a number of distances, with the shortest being the 87km at the inaugural modern Games of 1896 and the longest being a gruelling 329km in 1912.

The women’s individual road race, which spans a distance of approximately 120km, was introduced to the Olympic programme in 1984 before the time trial was introduced in 1996. The time trials are raced against the clock, with riders departing at 90-second intervals. The men race over a distance of 46.8km and the women over 31.2km.

Britain have won seven medals in the Olympic road-race event. In men’s competitions, Frederick Grubb (1912) and Frank Southall (1928) each claimed silver while Edward Battel (in 1896, when he was a servant at the British Embassy in Athens), Alan Jackson (1956) and Max Sciandri (1996) all won bronze. In women’s disciplines, Nicole Cooke claimed gold in the road race at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a Games in which Emma Pooley won silver in the time trial. Cooke was Wales’s first Olympic champion since 1972.

Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France a record seven times, acquired only one Olympic medal - a bronze in the individual time trial in Sydney in 2000.