The Olympics have as much to do with the ancient Greeks as Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas has with the ancient Romans. It has a history in pro road cycling dating all the way back to 1996 making it exactly as venerable as the Hamburg Cyclassics and it is older than precisely one semi major race on the calendar, Strade Bianchi. It is an AstroTurf event.
The Olympics has a radically flattening effect on sports. One gold equals one gold, equals one bonus point of reflected national glory, equals one day of local press coverage pretending to care about a sport, equals one tick on a medal table. This is great for minor sports with no traditions anyone cares about, no audience except the one they borrow from the quadrennial festival of jingoism, little money and little glory. For them the Olympics is everything because otherwise they have nothing.
The situation is different in actual mass spectator sports, with their own audiences and their own histories and their own major events. In fact these sports usually go to some lengths to stop the Olympic marketing machine from impinging on the actually important events in their sports. They don’t get dragged up by the Olympics like dressage or curling. They get dragged down to the level of trivial sports. They don’t bother to participate, they restrict it to amateurs, restrict it to age group competitors or simply treat it as a nice minor prize.
Road cycling is not one of the very biggest sports but it is still a mass spectator sport with its own audience, major events and history. Unfortunately it also has a useless governing body which governs a wide range of other bicycle sports only one of which, cross, has even a small audience. The rest of its events are Olympic sports with no mass following, track, mountain bike, bmx. The UCI needs the Olympics in a way that road cycling does not, so it isn’t adequately defending road cycling from the Olympic hype machine and making very sure that rubes don’t start to mistake it for a very important event. It’s not going to pick a fight with the IOC no matter what.
If you think that Chris Hoy is one of the major figures in cycling history you should continue to inflate the significance of the Olympics. If you have any love for the sport of road cycling and for its traditional events you should loathe it.