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Zolder's new velodrome is impressive, but the more interesting story is what surrounds it. Track, road, BMX and existing sporting infrastructure combine to create something closer to a cycling campus than a standalone venue.
The Velodroom Limburg is a superb modern facility, but the most interesting thing about Zolder may be that the velodrome is only part of the story.
It sits within an established sporting site that already includes Circuit Zolder, BMX facilities and decades of cycling activity. That immediately gives the venue possibilities that most standalone velodromes simply do not have.
Rather than building a track and then asking how to keep it busy, Zolder offers a different model: build cycling infrastructure around an environment that already gives people multiple reasons to be there.
Commonwealth Games
Glasgow brought sprinters, pursuit riders, sprint bars and aerodynamic positions into the same four-lap contest - and reminded us why the kilometre time trial once felt like one of track cycling's biggest events.
By the end of the women's kilometre in Glasgow, it already felt as though an old event had returned. By the time the men had raced the following morning, the kilo had become one of the highlights of the Commonwealth Games.
We genuinely cannot remember a better pair of championship kilos. Melbourne 2006 is the obvious comparison, along with the Olympic contests at Athens 2004 and Sydney 2000, when the event still carried the status to attract the strongest riders and produce a genuine sense of occasion.
Glasgow brought that feeling back.
Rising Stars
At 32, Australian rider Tara Neyland is five world titles and two Commonwealth gold medals into a para-cycling career that began only in January 2025. She is working towards her first Paralympic Games while adapting to a progressive muscular condition that makes the shape of that career difficult to predict.
On 9 January 2025, Neyland crossed the line at Bold Park in Perth thinking about the corners she had got wrong. She probably should have ridden the course again, she admitted afterwards. A few of its technical sections, including the bends into the finishing chute, had not been as clean as she wanted.
It was her first time trial. It was also her first para-cycling race, and she had just won the Australian C4 title by one minute and 29 seconds from Meg Lemon, an established international and two-time Paralympic medallist.
Rising Stars
There is a slight awkwardness in calling a rider a rising star once the results have already begun to stack up. Matteo Fiorin is 21, but 2026 has not been a quiet introduction
He won the UCI Track World Cup elimination race in Hong Kong, returned to the podium in Nilai, put himself at the front of the World Cup elimination standings, won the men's under-23 European elimination title in Cottbus, and took a stage of the Giro d'Italia Next Gen on the road.
The results are already there. The part still taking shape is the rider behind them.
Japanese Keirin
Matthew Richardson is in Japan. So is Harrie Lavreysen. Joe Truman has gone back, and on the women's side Ellesse Andrews, Hetty van de Wouw and Mathilde Gros have joined them. Put those six names together and the instinct is to read the story the way modern track cycling usually invites it to be read: medals, titles, speed, hierarchy, the familiar order of who has won what and who is expected to win next.
Rising Stars
Over a few weeks, Silje Weitze Antvorskov has looked comfortable in places young riders are not supposed to be comfortable yet: off the front of a WorldTour race, on the podium at elite Danish nationals, and inside the medal picture of a European U23 pursuit. Denmark has an exceptional endurance talent on its hands.
Silje Weitze Antvorskov’s first warning of the summer came in a race that was supposed to belong to someone else.
Rider Career Path
Katie Archibald's retirement at 32, and her move towards nursing, raises a question track cycling should take seriously. The sport knows how to prepare riders for performance. It has to become better at preparing them for the life that follows it.
Katie Archibald is 32. Old enough to have lived a complete elite career. Young enough for the word retirement to sound slightly absurd.
Track Cycling Travel
Nilai is not the glamorous stop on this World Cup run. It is the practical one. That matters. A good race city does not always need to be dramatic. Sometimes it just needs to get riders, staff and fans where they need to be, keep the week simple, and let the velodrome do the serious work. Nilai can do that. From 24 to 26 April, the 2026 UCI Track World Cup closes its opening series at Velodrome Nasional Malaysia, a 250m indoor track in Negeri Sembilan that has already hosted the 2017 Southeast Asian Games and the Asian Track Championships in 2023 and 2025.
Track Cycling Travel
Hong Kong is not a soft host city. It does not unfold slowly, and it does not ask to be admired from a distance. It moves. That is part of why it suits a World Cup so well. From 17 to 19 April, the 2026 UCI Track World Cup lands at Hong Kong Velodrome in Tseung Kwan O, with the second round of the series returning to one of track cycling's most proven modern venues.
The velodrome sits at 105-107 Po Hong Road, has a 250m Siberian pine track, and belongs to a city that has already staged the 2017 Track World Championships, multiple World Cups and Nations Cup rounds.
Track Legends
Erika Salumae was not simply a great sprinter who happened to live through history. She was a champion whose victories were asked to carry more than speed alone: first the weight of a system, then the weight of a country returning to itself.Barcelona, 31 July 1992. Velodrom d'Horta. Erika Salumae lost the first ride of the Olympic sprint final to Annett Neumann, then took the next two and defended her title. On one level, that was the race. On another, it was far more than that. Estonia, newly returned to the Olympic map under its own flag, had its first champion of the restored era. The medal ceremony even contained its own small absurdity, the Estonian flag briefly hung upside down before being corrected. Salumae's reaction was calm, dry, almost dismissive. They would get it right next time.
Event History
British track cycling spent two decades proving it could build winners. It also spent years being forced to answer a harder question: what kind of place was it to belong to? This is the story of a programme that built a dynasty, then had to confront what that dynasty had concealed, and now appears to be trying to prove that excellence does not need to come wrapped in fear.
It is a small memory, the sort that would barely register in another sport.
Event History
From 27 to 31 August 1997, the UCI Track Cycling World Championships were held at the newly opened Perth SpeedDome, then known as the Perth Superdrome. On the evening of 31 August, as racing concluded in Perth, news began to break across the world that Diana, Princess of Wales had died in a car crash in Paris. Within hours, the global atmosphere shifted.
Event History
When the UCI Track Cycling World Cup first came into being in 1993, it was a clear statement of intent - to professionalise, globalise and give structure to international track racing. What followed over nearly three decades was one of the most important recurring competitions in the sport.
Track Legends
There are careers measured in medals, there are careers measured in moments. And then there are careers measured in years, Helena Casas Roige belongs firmly in the third category. She has not won a world title. She has not stood on an Olympic podium. Her name is not printed in rainbow bands across the history of women’s sprinting. But for nearly twenty years she has been present, competitive and, most unusually of all, improving.
Track Legends
Koichi Nakano did not borrow the world sprint title for a season. He took hold of it and held it for a decade. In doing so, he forced international track cycling to recognise the depth, discipline and authority of the Japanese racing world that had made him.
San Cristobal, 1977, was the moment the sport had to stop being polite about Japan. Nakano won the professional sprint title there in an all-Japanese final against Yoshikazu Sugata, with the defending champion John Nicholson left in bronze.
Track Cycling Travel
As the UCI Track Cycling World Cup rolls into Western Australia, visiting teams, media and fans will discover that Perth is far more than a host city. Isolated geographically but confident culturally, Perth blends elite sport, outdoor lifestyle and vast natural space in a way few global cities can.
For many European teams, the journey is long. But once you arrive, the rhythm of the city quickly makes sense.
The Velodromes
As the opening round of the upcoming UCI Track Cycling World Cup approaches, attention turns to one of the Southern Hemisphere’s most established high-performance venues: Midvale Velodrome, more widely known as the Perth SpeedDome. Located in Perth’s eastern suburbs in Western Australia, the SpeedDome has long been the beating heart of elite track cycling in the region. While it may not carry the architectural drama of some newer European arenas, it remains a serious racing venue: fast, intimate, and technically demanding.
Track Traditions
If you come from road cycling, the rainbow bands are sacred. Former world champions carry them for life: thin horizontal stripes on the sleeves and collar, a quiet signal of pedigree that needs no explanation.
Track Legends
When Roger Kluge crossed the line to win the men's Madison at the 2026 European Championships with Moritz Augenstein, the moment landed with extra weight. It came on Kluge's 40th birthday. Not a farewell lap. Not a ceremonial ride. A full-blooded championship win at the sharp end of elite European track racing.
