The governing body for cycle sport in Great Britain, based at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester, overseeing eight disciplines from BMX to road and track.
British Cycling is the national governing body for cycle sport in Great Britain. It looks after eight disciplines: BMX racing, BMX freestyle park, cycle speedway, cyclo-cross, mountain bike endurance, mountain bike gravity, road and track. It runs the sport from local participation to the Great Britain Cycling Team that races at the Olympics and Paralympics. According to its website, it has around 145,000 members, 2,000 affiliated clubs and 12,500 volunteers, though these numbers are not dated. Wikipedia says it had about 165,000 members in 2020. Clubs and teams affiliate to it so that their riders can enter races.
British Cycling says its purpose is to 'bring the joy of cycling to everyone'. It talks about leading the sport and inspiring its communities by building on elite success and helping more people discover cycling. The organisation was founded in 1959 as the British Cycling Federation, when the National Cyclists' Union and the British League of Racing Cyclists merged, and later took the name British Cycling. Lottery funding and the World Class Performance Plan from 1997 helped build a track programme that won medals at the Olympics from 2000 onwards. Its website says it is a founding signatory to the UCI Climate Action Charter.
British Cycling's headquarters is the National Cycling Centre in Manchester, on the site of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and the executive leadership team is based there. Its staff work around the country, and it has regional volunteer boards across ten English regions. It works with Scottish Cycling and Welsh Cycling, which run the sport in their own nations. The Great Britain team's top riders are mostly based close to Manchester, and an academy programme for riders aged 16 to 18 has been based in Montichiari, Italy since 2016, according to Wikipedia.
On culture, British Cycling lists equality, diversity and inclusion as a priority, with a strategy called Our Ride, and says its board is partly elected by members and partly independently appointed. It also has an external Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group. Its history has included a major governance reform in the late 1990s after debt problems, and public criticism in 2017, which is part of the story of how it changed. Its pages say members, clubs and volunteers are central, and we have taken that as the organisation's own claim.
People work here in many roles: coaches and performance staff for the Great Britain team, sports scientists and engineers who look at equipment, event and race organisers, club and volunteer support teams, commercial and communications staff, and finance and governance staff. The history lists people such as a head of technology and a psychiatrist who worked with riders, which shows that engineering and psychology have been part of the story. If you enjoy cycling, engineering, data or coaching, this is a place to learn about. British Cycling's website lists current vacancies.
Website: www.britishcycling.org.uk
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