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Among CYCLISTS

Among cyclists, Wong Kam-po ranks 1,065 out of 1,613.

After him are Olav Kooij, Jussi Veikkanen, Jack Bauer, Giampaolo Caruso, Roberto Petito, and Leopold König.

Most Popular Cyclists in Wikipedia

Contemporaries

Among people born in 1973, Wong Kam-po ranks 1,078.

He won Asian Games individual road race three times (1998, 2006, 2010) under competition from Pro tour cyclists of Central Asia countries such as Kazakhstan. Wong performed well at the 2007 UCI B World Championships road race, with a 4th-place finish, to win an invitation to the 2008 Summer Olympics. There are lots of newspapers and TV stations here too, and they get really competitive about things, so if one does a story on me the other has to go bigger.”

Then 33-years-old, he told me how he’d wanted to stop racing after the Athens Olympics in 2004, concluding that the show had gone on long enough, and how he was uncertain of where he would head after the coming 2007 season.

But just a few months after our chat, Kam-po, retirement seemingly vanquished from his mind, reinvented himself and secured the biggest victory of his career, winning the scratch race at the 2007 world track championships in Mallorca, beating the likes of future GreenEdge and EF pro Mitch Docker, Giro d’Italia stage winner Danilo Napolitano, and future world time trial champion and Team Sky Tour de France workhorse Vasil Kiryienka.

He would continue to race at the top level up until the 2012 London Olympics, where he finished 37th in the road race, before officially retiring the following year.

Had I had a dram too many of the old Great Wall red and uttered Jackie Chan’s name instead?

No, Wong Kam-po, a mere cyclist, was indeed a superstar in these parts, and mainstream with it. This is legendary."

At the 2012 London Olympics, Wong Kam-Po finished 37th in the Men's road race.

He quit the team after allegedly fighting with a teammate. His leg was injured. Over the years his English improved greatly through his racing travels, and we spoke many times during that period, with no need for translators.

In 2001 he was introduced to me as “the world’s greatest non-pro bike rider” (based on his early season ranking by a stats website), a moniker I initially scoffed at.

His time of 5 hours, 46 minutes and 37 seconds was just 40 seconds off the winner Alexander Vinokurov.

Wong was the first Hong Kong rider to gain Category One status in Europe.

Wong Kam-po is a supporter of Hong Kong's 2023 Asian Games bid. In any case, judging by the scale of the reaction everywhere he went, it was clear that Wong Kam-po – a name that would conjure only a vague flickering of recognition on the faces of European cycling’s cognoscenti – was sporting aristocracy in Hong Kong.

So shall he rise in the east

Although there was a long history of bike racing in many parts of Asia, which has grown hugely since the late 1990s, back then east-Asian road riders had never really made too much headway on the European (now WorldTour) circuit, and certainly no riders from Hong Kong, a place that possessed little historical cycling culture, let alone the roads and facilities for those wishing to take up the sport.

Then, in 1991, at the age of 18, Kam-po burst on to the scene, after starting out riding weekly around the local bay area on weekend group rides – where a certain David Millar, four years his junior, also used to tag along.

A year later, meteoric rise well underway, he was shortlisted for the Barcelona Olympics.

A threat was also made to destroy the HK team's car. On the 60km climb to Cameron Highlands he left future grand tour contenders Floyd Landis and Chris Horner in his wake to secure a solo triumph, showing that he could climb and sprint with the best in the world – and ride away from them, too.

In fact, at different stages of his career WKP could pretty much do everything and anything, and win.