Vélodrome Léon Bollée

Set in the heart of Le Mans' Pôle d'excellence sportive, a few steps from Antarès, the 24 Hours circuit and the MMArena stadium, the Léon Bollée Velodrome is the reference track cycling venue in the Sarthe. Its 250-meter asphalt track, with banked turns at 32%, is used for both track bikes and road bikes, while a smaller inner ring with gentler banking is used by beginners and young licensed riders in training.

The velodrome serves as a training ground for the Le Mans Sarthe Vélo club and regularly hosts sessions run by the Sarthe Departmental Cycling Committee, as well as departmental, regional and tri-departmental sprint, pursuit and omnium championships.

The velodrome's name honors Léon Bollée, an industrialist and automobile pioneer from Le Mans who loved cycling and was a former president of the Union vélocipédique de la Sarthe.

A bit of history

The name “Léon Bollée” is historically tied to an earlier velodrome, opened in 1906 in the Madeleine district on the Beaulieu site. The Léon-Bollée stadium combined a football pitch and a cycling track from the start. This historic stadium, which hosted Union Sportive du Mans matches from 1942 and later MUC 72 matches, was expanded several times before closing for good at the end of 2010. Its last grandstand was demolished in 2018 to make way for the Parc Beaulieu residential development.

Meanwhile, in October 2007, the City of Le Mans and the Sarthe Department inaugurated a new 250-meter asphalt velodrome near Antarès. In 2012, after the historic Beaulieu stadium was gone, this new facility was renamed the Léon Bollée Velodrome, to keep alive on this site the name of the Le Mans industrialist who had stayed linked to local cycling for more than a century.

Léon Bollée (1870–1913) is also a notable figure in Le Mans history for another reason: he invited American aviator Wilbur Wright to Le Mans in 1908, to the Hunaudières racecourse, where Wright made the first public airplane flights in Europe.