Futurism was an early twentieth-century movement in Italy that sought to free the country from what the Futurists saw as the dead weight of its classical past.

Boccioni's preparatory drawings for the painting (two shown below) depict a head-down racing cyclist, behind in the air, his movement indicated by the characteristic Futurist "force lines" and echoing curves.

Even in 1913, the bicycle, and the high speeds obtainable on it, still represented for the Futurists one of the modern forms of transport that they idealised.

[2] In the final work, the lines of the preparatory drawings are translated into curves and cones, outlined using Boccioni's characteristic divisionist technique.

Boccioni, after visiting Parisian avant-garde painters, added new elements to the style, including the typical Cubist segmentation of planes.