The success of Mark Cavendish and expectations for the Games have raised cycling's profile – and the sport is now bringing a £3bn boost to the economy

It is only January, but this year has already been christened the "year of the bike". The international success of British stars such as Mark Cavendish and Victoria Pendleton has already raised expectations that the Olympics will result in a cycling boom.

As the countdown to the Games continues, retail sector watchers at investment bank Barclays Capital think 2012 will be big for both Cavendish's professional racing outfit, Team Sky, and the general public, who are embracing the grassroots Sky Ride campaign, which aims to get a million more people cycling regularly by next year.

"We expect the cycle market to grow by 5% in 2012, with the Games the main driver of growth," said the investment bank's retail analyst, Christodoulos Chaviaras. He thinks this summer's Games will deliver welcome news for chains such as Halfords, which has bicycles designed by both track sprint star Pendleton and Chris Boardman, the former world champion time trialistVictoria Pendleton and commentator.

"We expect the 2012 Olympics to act as a substantial catalyst for Halfords cycle sales," said Chaviaras. "We expect Boardman bikes especially to pick up given the association of the name with the British cycling team's success."

The signs look good. After Team GB's medal bonanza at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Tesco reported a 130% rise in bicycle sales in the following weeks.

After years buried in newspapers' sports sections, cycling is now big news, thanks to the likes of Cavendish and his teammate Bradley Wiggins, who won two gold medals on the track at Beijing. Cycling's rise to its position as one of the most popular sports in the UK was highlighted in December when Cavendish, who last year became the first Briton to win the world road racing championship for 46 years and the first ever to win the Tour de France's green jersey for top sprinter, was voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Cavendish used his acceptance speech to point out that winning the BBC accolade in a non-Olympic year – triple gold medal winner Sir Chris Hoy was awarded it after the Beijing Games – demonstrated just how fast the sport's appeal was growing.

Cycling's ever-increasing popularity comes as further details emerged of film director Danny Boyle's plans for the £81m opening ceremony at the Games. A 27-tonne bell inscribed with a line from Shakespeare's The Tempest – "Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises" – will form the centrepiece of the ceremony, and Cavendish is one of the main contenders to lead out the British team.

Nearly 900,000 viewers tuned in to watch the "Manx missile's" astonishing burst of speed over the final 250m of the cobbled Champs Elysées in last year's Tour de France. ITV4, which broadcast the whole race, revealed the audience tuning in for the Tour highlights had been more than 30% bigger than the previous year.

"Cycling has come back into the mainstream in the last five years," said Humphrey Cobbold, who runs the cycling and triathlon website Wiggle, where sales have more than quadrupled over the same period to reach nearly £90m. In an otherwise bombed-out retail sector, sales of bikes and cycling kit are holding up. Cobbold said specialist shops were now considered recession-proof, not least as soaring petrol prices meant commuting to work on two wheels made financial sense.

Last year the membership of British Cycling, the national governing body, broke through 40,000 – double its 2007 figure – and the organisation now hopes to have 100,000 members by 2013.

Cycle clubs are reporting a rise in recruits, while the internet is abuzz with forums such as those on bikeradar.com, where more than 200,000 enthusiasts log on to swap tips on hot topics such as "commuting in the dark". Another sign of the sport's growing appeal is the success of David Millar's recent memoir, Racing Through the Dark, which recounts his comeback from a two-year doping ban in 2004 to winning the silver medal in the world championship time trial four years later. The gripping tale has clearly made it on to the bookshelves of many non-cyclists.

Alexander Grous, an academic at the London School of Economics, has calculated that cycling provided a near £3bn boost, or "gross cycling product" as he puts it, to the UK economy in 2010, if you include manufacturing as well as retail sales and jobs. His study estimated that 13 million Britons are now cyclists, and reported that 3.7 million bikes had been sold in 2010, almost a third more than in 2009. "The growth in involvement we've witnessed in recent years feels like a sustainable trend for the first time," he said.

Halfords boss David Wild said its new Pendleton range, which goes on sale in March, would provide another "strong opportunity" for its cycle business, which has continued to grow over the last year despite the high street downturn. The Sky Ride campaign runs women-only events through its Breeze network and Wild said the bikes, which will start at around £300, "should appeal to women who want to make cycling a part of their daily lives".

Bike shops and websites such as Wiggle are also benefiting from a growing obsession with cycling and triathlons among "Mamils" – an analysts' acronym for "middle-aged man in Lycra" – who have swapped teeing off at the golf course on a Saturday morning for gruelling climbs.

Another important group has been dubbed the "performance activists". These train as if they too are chasing a gold medal, clocking up several hundred kilometres on their bike every week. "They push themselves hard in their training, it's not just about keeping fit," says Cobbold. "They are happy to spend the same amount of money on their bike as on a decent secondhand car." These 25- to 45-year-olds only account for about of 30% of cyclist numbers, but some 70% of the spending in the £1.5bn-a-year market.

The two groups have fuelled demand for weekend races, or sportives, which have mushroomed from around 30 a year to more than 300 in the last decade. Tickets for events like the 190km Dragon Ride, which involves huffing and puffing over the Brecon Beacons, sold out within two hours."It feels like there are enough things going positively for us," said Cobbold, who added: "So there's a reasonable case that this year's going to be the year of the bike."