London Olympics – Cycling Road Race Route

The final route for the cycling road race, at next year’s London Olympics, has been published today. Unfortunately it’s only available as a PDF, so I’ve plotted it on BikeRouteToaster, you can see it here.

Here’s a download as a GPX file or as a KML file (for Google Earth.)

I like the inclusion of both Richmond Park and Bushy Park in the outward route. I normally try to include both when doing a day-cycle out to the west, recently they featured in routes to Windsor and to Oxford. Box Hill’s Zig Zag Road is a classic hair-pin climb. The cyclists will go down Coombe Hill – I know this hill well. It’s a pretty evil hill to go up and I would imagine it’s a lot of fun going down. Indeed it was the biggest hill I went up on the last day of my Land’s End to London cycle last year, and the hill that nearly broke my cycling partner, Paul, during training for that trip. However we both managed Box Hill just fine an hour later.

My route only goes around the Box Hill loop twice, whereas the Women’s Race goes around three times and the men cycle around it nine times! This is why my route is only 142km with 900m of climb, while they have considerably further and a lot more climb! However I think 142km is manageable for me as a nice bike ride this summer.

Here’s the profile:

The photo at the top shows part of the KML file of the route in Google Earth. The middle pic is using OpenStreetMap as a background map.