In secondary school, in first year French classes, in response to the standard <<qu'est-ce que tu fais comme sport?>> question I would clumsily explain that I did swimming, did judo, was forced to play football (this was years before those of us who despised football won the right to play hockey instead) and faisais du cyclisme. Unfortunately, this was a lie, as well as probably being grammatically inelegant. I cycled, but never sportingly; I still have yet to do so twenty-four years later. The closest I've come was when we did our cycling proficiency at age 10 and had a cross-the-playground slow bicycle race to assess our balance and low-speed bike-handling.
The conflation of physical activity with sport was quite pervasive even from primary school, presumably due to the need to train children to cope with the various competitive aspects of the outside world. PE sessions usually involved some sort of competition and teamwork. The health benefits of running around a lot were secondary to the usefulness of running around a lot in those team sports which involved running around a lot. I was quite good at running around a lot, eventually beating the dentist's son into the fourth-fastest-in-the-year spot and a place on the sprint relay team, but was fairly useless at football despite being able to run around the field as well as anyone. Other opportunities to run around a lot included village fun runs, where there was definite encouragement to race. Even normal childhood woodland scamperings could become races, albeit untimed and with unrecorded outcomes.
The same sometimes went for childhood bicycle-travel, though even unsophisticated childhood minds recognised that variations in equipment (wildly differing gear-ranges, tyre-thicknesses and frame weights and types) conferred advantages in cycle races up and down the street in a way from which foot-races (using no equipment other than shoes) were immune. The difference was that the future uses of being able to run fast (participation in athletic competition) were deliberately demonstrated much more than the uses of being able to cycle fast. Even in youth, the use of the bicycle was self-explanatory as a means of fast transport for people unable to drive. Running (alongside appropriate sport-specific motor skills) was a way of keeping fit, or an athletic discipline, or a component of sport, not a means of getting to school and back or a way to get to the swimming pool in under five minutes as soon as our tea had gone down.
I became more aware of the use of the bicycle in sport over time, vaguely hearing of a thing called the "milk race" through its mention in comics (though it took me a while to find out that it was a round-the-country cycle race), occasionally seeing strange races during televised athletics in which people balanced on the banked sides of a bicycle-racing track (creating the impression that the point, like the slow bicycle race across the playground, was to finish last without falling off) and hearing the term "racer" applied to things with complicated gears and dropped handlebars.
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