Chris Hoy: The Autobiography

Chris Hoy: The Autobiography Chris Hoy Fully updated to include Sir Chris Hoy’s incredible, record-breaking golds at London 2012 (making him his country’s greatest ever Olympian), this is the story of a sporting legend in his own words. This 33-year-old cycling fanatic from Murrayfield in the suburbs of Edinburgh defied the doubters who thought he would struggle when his specialist discipline, the 1km time trial, was dropped from the Olympics, and went on to reinvent himself as a track cycling sprinter and triple Olympic gold medallist in Beijing. His return to these shores sparked unprecedented celebrations and real admiration that here was a role model who was the epitome of all things that are good in sport. What makes a champion in sport? In his autobiography, Hoy returns to his roots as a child fully engaged with the BMX craze of the Eighties; when, even as a seven year old his will to succeed allied to an unyielding mental strength set him apart from other youngsters of his age. A promising rower and rugby player in school, it was when he joined his first local cycling club and spent most weekends of the year competing in national events from Blackpool to Bristol that the seeds of his future career were sown. With the devoted support of his family, Hoy drove himself to the pinnacle of his sport at the same time as British track cycling established itself as a pioneering force on the world stage. In the wake of his unparalleled achievements at London 2012, which filled the whole country with pride, there is no sporting icon better placed to demonstrate what it takes to reach the top than Sir Chris Hoy. To my mum and dad, Carol and David Contents Cover (#u612aa707-f987-5d35-b146-04683f5f09c2) Title Page (#u59c1d7d0-038d-50f5-8cf1-bc738bb436a2) Dedication (#ulink_23b98dd7-0c89-5376-afc6-1f4ca3d2fb54) Introduction (#ulink_1ce0759e-986d-5c9d-844d-d59569f7a19b) 1. The Art of Throwing Up in Secret (#ulink_3b4aca72-f775-55b2-99a8-3790a2048461) 2. Pimped-up Rides and Broken Hearts (#ulink_4036a071-947d-56c7-979d-159d10d4deab) 3. Smells of Sandwiches and Mars Bars (#ulink_c45221f8-5195-5788-a444-58ad63aaa5fa) 4. ‘That Can’t Be Good for You’ (#ulink_97efa9a6-84ed-57f9-ac20-59ef32eefe66) 5. Going Round in Circles (#ulink_63a25f49-84b6-59bf-9441-60e84b286459) 6. Craig and Jason (#ulink_ea0131e7-5a9e-5630-ad08-96e99c5aec2b) 7. Holding Your Hand in the Fire (#litres_trial_promo) 8. ‘They’ll Be Here in a Week to Ten Days’ (#litres_trial_promo) 9. Uncle Mick (#litres_trial_promo) 10. I Believe the British have Pastries for Breakfast (#litres_trial_promo) 11. Sydney, Silver and Stig of the Dump (#litres_trial_promo) 12. Primero? (#litres_trial_promo) 13. The Chimp Is in Its Cage (#litres_trial_promo) 14. Some of My Bark Is Missing (#litres_trial_promo) 15. ‘Would You Like Me to Lap Dance for You?’ (#litres_trial_promo) 16. Taking On the Tour de France (#litres_trial_promo) 17. The Final Kilo …? (#litres_trial_promo) 18. A Stroll in Beijing (#litres_trial_promo) 19. He’s Like Something from The X Factor – the Outtakes (#litres_trial_promo) 20. Rings and Roundabouts (#litres_trial_promo) 21. Perfect Ten (#litres_trial_promo) 22. The Helicopter Technique (#litres_trial_promo) 23. Pain, and Shane (#litres_trial_promo) 24. London (#litres_trial_promo) Chris Hoy in Numbers (#litres_trial_promo) Palmar?s (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION (#ulink_324c6e18-3107-58bb-a092-964621b7f531) The Danger of Disappearing up My Own Orifice (#ulink_324c6e18-3107-58bb-a092-964621b7f531) On the day after I won my third gold medal at the Beijing Olympics I was visited by a small posse of Scottish journalists, and asked a question I have never been asked before, or since. ‘In the last 24 hours everyone has offered their opinions of Chris Hoy,’ said Gary Ralston of the Daily Record. He may have been stroking his chin as he contemplated how he was going to phrase the next part of his question – I could tell that it wasn’t going to be of the more familiar ‘How does it feel?’ or ‘Has it sunk in yet?’ variety. ‘I wonder,’ continued Gary. ‘What does Chris Hoy think of Chris Hoy?’ There was only one answer to that. ‘Chris Hoy thinks that the day Chris Hoy starts talking about himself in the third person is the day that he disappears up his own arse.’ It maybe wasn’t the response that Gary was looking for, but he, and the others, looked reasonably happy with it, and it duly featured in their stories the following day. (Thankfully, it also got me out of having to offer up a cringe-worthy response to the actual question.) I bring it up because it popped into my head when thinking about this book. I asked myself: what kind of book would I like to read? Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the straight-forward ‘then-I-did-this-and-then-I-did-that’ life story. What I like, particularly in a book about sport, is an insight into what it’s actually like to compete at a high level, and what it takes to get there, and stay there – ideally sprinkled with a few semi-humorous anecdotes. In essence, I want to know how a sports person does what they do. I want to know why, too, but most of all I want to know how. It’s the way I’ve always been. At school, I enjoyed subjects where the answers tended to be ‘no’ or ‘yes’. I liked logical subjects – maths, the sciences – which involved some kind of puzzle and a definite or correct conclusion or answer at the end of it. I liked there to be a ‘right’ answer, I suppose, but I also enjoyed the process of working towards it. I wouldn’t want this book to read like a science manual or maths paper. But I hope that it can go some way to explaining ‘how’. If I were an aspiring athlete, or just a fan of sport – and without referring to myself in the third person – I think that is the kind of book I would enjoy reading. In any case, I am still just as interested in the question of ‘how?’ as I was when I was a 14-year-old, and making my first, tentative and very nervous pedal strokes around the forbiddingly steep-looking banking of the Meadowbank Velodrome. As I look ahead to the London Olympics, with the knowledge that, just to make the British team, never mind win another gold medal, I will probably have to be a better athlete in 2012 than I was in 2008, the question remains as pertinent as ever. The irony, of course, is that, while I say I like ‘right’ answers, in reality there seldom is a definitive answer. Training and competing are less an exact science and more an endless puzzle; they are a creative process of trial and error – and a process I enjoy, even though I know that the correct answer one season can be the wrong one the following year. After 25 years of competing as a cyclist, on BMXs, mountain and road bikes, and finally on the track, I would like to think that I have stumbled on some ‘right’ answers; if I have been paying attention then I should have learnt something. Yet at the same time, if I thought I had all the right answers, I’d be screwed. I know that I wouldn’t get near the team for 2012, never mind challenge for a gold medal, if I thought for a second I could just carry on doing the same things. So the search, the working out of the puzzle, continues. The answers or solutions to some problems remain elusive, while for others the nature of the problem, or challenge, changes; the variables do what the name implies: they vary. I’m getting older, for one thing – I’ll be 36 by the time the London Games come around – and my rivals are getting younger, if only in relation to me. And so I have to go back to the drawing board, come up with new ideas, and then work even harder. For me, it’s the puzzle and the inherent unpredictability of sport that keeps it fun – and endlessly fascinating. I hope this book can reflect that and, for aspiring athletes and armchair fans alike, prove interesting. Chris Hoy, Salford, 2009 1 (#ulink_2026f684-b375-5b32-9cdb-a81f5395cef4) The Art of Throwing Up in Secret (#ulink_2026f684-b375-5b32-9cdb-a81f5395cef4) Beijing, Tuesday 19 August 2008 It was 8.30 when I woke up and hauled myself out of bed. I was lucky, having my own room in the athletes’ village. Jason Kenny, my neighbour in the room next door, had been sharing with Jamie Staff. However, Jamie, whose Olympic Games had started and finished with our gold medal-winning ride in the team sprint the previous Friday, had moved out, so now Jason too had his own space. It was the final day of the track cycling programme: day five. I had raced on all four days so far, and I could feel it in my legs. First thing in the morning they were stiff and painful, having so far made 14 flat-out efforts in the course of long and draining days at the track. I could also see the fruits of those efforts, though: two gold medals, from the team sprint and keirin, in the bedside cabinet. I permitted myself the odd sneaky look, though it felt like a bit of a guilty pleasure. I didn’t feel I could – or should – enjoy them until my Games had finished. That would be today, a day that might even end with a third gold, in the individual sprint. But, bizarrely, there was every chance that my neighbour and team-mate, the aforementioned Jason Kenny, could be the opponent to stand in the way of what, I had been told by journalists a couple of days earlier, would be a historic achievement. No British sportsperson had won three gold medals in a single Olympic Games in a century, I was told. That was news to me: I hadn’t even allowed myself to contemplate the possibility of winning three Olympic titles prior to Beijing, let alone start considering any historical significance. And this morning that was certainly the case: the team sprint and keirin had gone, they were finished. I was focused only on the day’s racing. The individual sprint starts with a qualifying round – a time trial over 200 metres – and then proceeds over three days with man-against-man contests. Now, two days in, I had made it to the semi-finals. These and the final were both best-of-three rounds, so I would have six more races at most, if I got through my semi and if both rounds went the distance. At 8.30 in the morning, moving my legs slowly and painfully out of bed, then hobbling stiffly towards the shower, I didn’t know how I would cope with that. By bluffing, I imagined. Though I had my own room, Jason and I shared the apartment, and the shower. Not at the same time, I should clarify. But Jason, being more of a morning person than me – which isn’t saying much – was in there first, and so I waited, then showered, before joining Jason to ride down to the canteen for breakfast. It’s not as though it was far. It was only a few minutes’ journey, but cyclists abide by a set of absolute golden rules. Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you can lie down. And never walk when you can cycle. At this stage of the competition, in particular, it is a case of trying to preserve all the energy and strength you can. We freewheeled down to the canteen in silence, arriving at the entrance and locking up our bikes. It might be the Olympic athletes’ village, with stricter security than the Pentagon, but you still lock your bike. You can never be too careful – especially with a ?3,000 road bike. Looking back now, this would have been a quite surreal scene: Jason and I heading off to breakfast together, like best mates, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about the day ahead. It probably helps that Jason must be one of the most relaxed people in the team, if not the sport: nothing seems to faze him, and he is famous for his languid and laidback style (off the track, I should point out: on it, his reactions are a little bit faster). Both of us knew there was a chance that, just a few hours later, we would race each other for an Olympic gold medal, in arguably the most prestigious of the track cycling events, the sprint. We had qualified first and second in the initial 200m time trial two days ago, and we had both progressed reasonably comfortably to the semi-finals – separate semi-finals, with the German rider Max Levy as Jason’s opponent, and Micka?l Bourgain of France as mine. Beat them and we’d be meeting again a few hours later, in an Olympic final. But neither of us mentioned any of this. We didn’t talk about racing at all. We just chatted about the usual things, and spent breakfast engaged in the activity that occupies so much of your down time at the Olympics: people watching. This is a particularly entertaining and enjoyable pastime in the athletes’ village, where you get famous names, some extraordinary shapes and sizes, which inspire games of ‘guess the sport.’ Thus did Jason and I pass this very ordinary hour on this most surreal of days, before returning to our apartment, to prepare for the 40-minute bus journey to the Laoshan Velodrome, on the outskirts of Beijing. First, though, I paid a visit to the British team’s sprint coach, Jan van Eijden. Jan, from Germany, was the world sprint champion in 2000. He retired in 2006 and came to work for us the following year, having been poached from the Eurosport commentary box by our head coach, Shane Sutton, who reckoned Jan had the ingredients to become a top coach. Though he wasn’t the fastest in the world, Jan consistently won head-to-head ‘match’ sprint races. Tactically, I would argue that he is the best sprinter of the last decade. And Shane was right, as he often is (and sometimes isn’t): Jan’s knowledge and experience make him a brilliant tactical coach, and a real asset to the British team. Added to which is the fact that he is very upbeat and virtually always smiling. So he – like the incredible force of nature that is Shane Sutton – is also good for morale. But this morning I wasn’t going to see Jan to have my morale lifted, or to ask, in the eventuality of us meeting in the final, how I might beat Jason. I knew he wouldn’t discuss Jason’s tactics – and in any case, I wasn’t thinking of Jason … yet. I was thinking of my semi-final opponent, Bourgain. Before any race, we watch videos of our opponent in action. So Jan got his computer out, and together we watched every sprint race I had ever ridden against Bourgain. We looked for potential weaknesses (his, but also mine). I’d watched all these videos numerous times before. But this, I suppose, was like looking over your notes before an exam. It’s probably not going to make much difference (‘if you don’t know it now, you’ll never know it,’ as the mantra used to go before exams), but, as in the anxious pre-exam wait, you think that you should be doing something. It feels better than doing nothing. The videos for Beijing were prepared by our performance analysts: there were hours and hours of races on film, over 300 gigabytes’ worth; files and files, comprising a complete library, with every opponent racing and just about every scenario you could imagine. But the analysts’ work goes way beyond just having all this stuff on film. They’ve studied it and worked out things like, ‘If Bourgain is leading with half a lap to go there’s an 80 per cent chance he’ll win the race …’ or ‘When he’s behind his opponent with two laps to go, there’s a 30 per cent chance he’ll win.’ All these statistics and data (‘the numbers’, as we call them) have been prepared by the Great Britain team’s performance analysts – go to any World Cup meeting and you’ll see them sitting quietly at the back of the stand with a tripod, filming every single race. The thing is, a head-to-head match sprint race will often come down to intuition and what we call track craft – the fast/slow feinting and cat-and-mouse tactics that you see between two riders – but it’s reassuring to have the statistics to back it all up; it can give you extra confidence in your game plan. As Jan and I sat and watched the footage of my previous races against Bourgain, we focused on a couple in particular. One was at the same Laoshan Velodrome, at the Beijing World Cup the previous December. At that point, I was still taking my first, tentative steps as a sprinter. At 31, I was a bit old, really, to be trying something new – or so the accepted wisdom went. Match sprinting – since it demands the explosive acceleration of a Usain Bolt coupled with the quick reflexes and agility of an Olga Korbut – was seen as a young man’s game (and I’m no Olga Korbut). But having lost my specialist event, the kilometre, I was determined to add another string to my bow. And that’s really all I was thinking back in December 2007, at that World Cup in Beijing. The team sprint remained my priority as I looked ahead to the Olympics, while the keirin, in which I was also a relative novice, and the sprint gave me other options. My thinking was that if I could do all three events, I’d increase my chances of being selected for the team sprint. But at that point the idea that I could challenge for a medal in all three seemed like a pipe dream. I was expecting to be competent and competitive, nothing more. And I still had some distance to go, if my meeting with Bourgain in the quarter-final of the 2007 Beijing World Cup was anything to go by. He beat me in two straight rides. Both rides were quite close, as it happens, but the bare statistics don’t lie. Two-nil is a comprehensive beating. And it was to be expected: Bourgain, a 28-year-old Frenchman best described as a ‘pure sprinter,’ was certainly one of the top two or three in the world, having medalled in every world championship since 2004. The other race Jan and I watched was from two months later, when I met Bourgain again, this time at the World Cup in Copenhagen. This was the race that offered the first sign that I might yet make it as a sprinter. Shane Sutton, in typically excitable and enthusiastic style, told me it was ‘the turning point – the moment you became a sprinter’. Reminiscing about it months later, he seemed even more convinced about this. ‘What was the critical race?’ he’ll ask – expecting whoever he is asking to reply that it was my defeat of reigning world champion Theo Bos, the Dutchman who dominated sprinting in recent seasons, in the quarter-final of the world championships in Manchester a few weeks after that Copenhagen World Cup. He loves it if you respond: ‘Bos in Manchester.’ It allows him to counter with: ‘Nah, mate – Bourgain in Copenhagen.’ He’s right. I was riding in Copenhagen purely to try and qualify an extra British sprinter for the Olympics. My own ticket to Beijing rested on the keirin; I had to beat my old rival Arnaud Tournant, another Frenchman, to win the series, and thus qualify for Beijing. The meeting had started on the Friday evening with the team sprint, and we had a terrible night, giving one of our worst performances in this event in recent years. While the French dominated, again, we could only qualify fourth, and then lost out to the Netherlands – led by Bos – in the ride for the bronze medal. The next day was better: I reached the final of the keirin, which proved a bit of an epic. Tournant was just as keen to win, since that would guarantee him his Olympic place, and he and his team-mate, Gr?gory Baug?, both laid it on thick in the final, launching a series of attacks but ultimately failing to overake me, as I led from the front to win the race and the series, and secure my ticket to Beijing. Competing in the sprint, on the third day, felt a bit like doing my duty for the team. Thanks to the keirin I was now guaranteed my Olympic place, which I was delighted about. But I didn’t know if I’d ride all three events in Beijing. To be honest, I didn’t know if I had it in me, and worried that I could spread myself a little too thinly by attempting such a full programme. Added to this general uncertainty was the fact that there was a fourth event to do in Copenhagen: the lucrative Japanese invitational keirin, with its ?10,000 first prize. I was doing that, too – well, that prize was quite an incentive – and I knew that by Sunday evening my legs would be in bits. But first up in the morning was the 200-metre time trial that acts as the qualifier for the sprint, and determines the subsequent draw. I was third with 10.2 seconds, behind yet another of those fast Frenchmen, K?vin Sireau, with Bourgain second. I progressed fairly smoothly through a few rounds before my meeting with Bourgain in the semi-final. In the first race I didn’t ride well. It was the same problem that I often encountered in these head-to-head races. Though I had the raw speed, my tactics were a bit dodgy. OK, I’m being kind to myself. Basically, I only had one strategy. All the decent rides I’d done so far had seen me going from the front, setting a fast pace, trying to take the sting out of my opponent’s tail, and then countering them when they made their move. It was a very one-dimensional way to ride, and it only worked if I could get to the front in the first place. And – not surprisingly, given that my opponents would have studied me in competition, just as I studied them – they were getting wise to it. So Bourgain beat me. One-nil. I came off the track feeling pretty tired, and pretty discouraged. To add to my general dejection, I was then sick as I sat on the stationary rollers, keeping my legs spinning – and the lactic acid at bay – between races. I could feel that something wasn’t right, and called Jan over, asking him to discreetly fetch a bucket, or some other water- (or vomit-) tight container. ‘But make sure no one can see what you’re doing,’ I told him; I didn’t want any of my opponents to see that I was suffering so badly. Jan carried out the task to perfection, providing and then dispensing with the container before anyone saw anything. I should point out that vomiting is not uncommon; the repeated sprint efforts create such high lactic acid concentrations that they can, literally, make you sick. My little bout of sickness didn’t distract Jan from the mission that remained ahead of me: to beat Bourgain. ‘He knows you can do that,’ he said, referring to my one and only tactic. ‘You gotta go from the back!’ I had tried going from the back in previous sprint matches, but I found it difficult to commit. What would happen is that my opponent would stall, I would hold back a little, and then we’d both end up ‘jumping’ – that is, opening our sprint – at the same time. The whole point of coming from behind is that you should have the element of surprise. But to gain the advantage you have to jump first, preferably without your opponent seeing you. If you both jump at the same time, and are going at more or less the same speed, it’s extremely hard to come around the other rider, since he has the inside line, and therefore less distance to travel. ‘Look,’ said Jan. ‘You’re one-nil down, so you’ve got nothing to lose. I don’t care about the outcome. I just want to see you try to execute this race tactically.’ Why did I lack the confidence to go from the back? The problem, I think, was that I had bought into the misconception that the guy at the front controls the race. It’s very difficult to hold back, to be patient and sit a couple of lengths behind someone, maintaining your place high on the banking and waiting for the right time to make your move. But what Jan kept drilling into me was the idea that the guy at the back can be the one dictating the tactics; and, as he told me now, my second-round match against Bourgain offered the ideal opportunity to test this theory. As he kept saying, I had nothing to lose. I knew it was true, but it’s a difficult mindset to take into a race. I was determined, however, to follow Jan’s instructions, to force Bourgain to the front and then attack him. From behind I was able to force him to commit early, while I waited and waited and – going against my instincts – waited some more. Coming into the bell lap I was quite a bit down, but he was going full gas, while I was still winding it up. Even coming off the back straight I was still about a length behind, but I was gaining, and I remember thinking, I’m going to pass him here. And I did, eating up the gap on the home straight, crossing the line first and thinking: that was easy. Although it only levelled the contest at 1–1, I knew that was the turning point. Suddenly, I had the momentum – the upper hand. There was only a 10-minute break between the second and third rides – hardly even enough time to vomit – and I was feeling completely exhausted by now; as if I didn’t have another effort in my legs. But I suspected that Bourgain – though he hadn’t had as busy a weekend as me, missing the previous day’s keirin – would be feeling pretty tired as well. It’s at this stage of the competition that the mind games come in. You’re in the track centre, warming up in full view of your opponents, and the trick is to appear less tired than you actually feel (and, if you’re going to throw up, to do so secretly). I rode slowly around the track centre, preparing for that third ride, with Bourgain himself following the same routine just yards away, and then I made sure I went up to the start first. I wasn’t going to be seen delaying it, buying some more recovery time. When we were called, I was straight there, and I made sure I didn’t slouch in the chair as we waited to go to the line. When Bourgain came and sat beside me he was shaking his legs out, and stretching them, clearly trying to revive them. Beside him, I sat perfectly still and bolt upright, trying to send out the message that I was fresh, that I was up for it. A pre-race ritual is the presentation of the ‘pegs’ that determine the starting order: peg one means you are on the inside, and lead the sprint off, with peg two giving you the rear position. I picked peg one and sprang up, heading straight to the start. My legs were screaming, but it was all about bluffing it at this point. I’ve no idea whether any of this psychological warfare had any effect. Following Jan’s advice again, I used the same tactic in the third ride. Once I had forced Bourgain to the front he tried to get me to go past him again, slowing right down, almost coming to a standstill. I could have gone early – and in previous races probably would have panicked and done exactly that – but I stuck to the tactic of sitting patiently behind him, keeping high up the banking, forcing Bourgain to make the first move. Then, again as in the second ride, I swept past him to win, and make the final. I lost the final to Sireau – after another embarrassment, when I managed to fall off the rollers while ‘revving out’ during my pre-race warm up, pedalling at about 250rpm, and clattering very noisily to the floor – but I didn’t mind too much about losing. Like Bourgain, Sireau had had a day off the previous day. He was relatively fresh, whereas I was on my last legs. It was the race against Bourgain that had been important. To have executed it the way Jan wanted me to – that was the breakthrough. Shane knew it immediately. So did I. I don’t mean that I suddenly thought I could win the sprint title at the world championships, far less the Olympics, but I felt I’d cracked it, to a certain extent. There was this mythology around the sprint – it seemed like a bit of a black art. As a kilo rider, I was seen as a bit of a diesel engine, with plenty of power, but without the gift of great acceleration, and no tactical nous. If I beat someone in a sprint I was often told it was ‘just gas’ – just power – though Shane had always told me I could be a good sprinter, if I just put my mind to it. Defeating Bourgain was significant because I was beating a tactically ‘better’ rider, and someone who’d qualified faster than me. It wasn’t gas – I was doing what a successful sprinter has to do: imposing myself on the race, and on my opponent. Match sprinting is cycling’s equivalent of a boxing match, with two opponents going head-to-head, or toe-to-toe; it is as much a battle of wills, and confidence, as a test of speed. Finally I had beaten an accomplished sprinter, and it came simply from not letting my opponent do what he wanted to do. Four weeks later I surprised a lot of people by beating Theo Bos, also by two rides to one, on my way to reaching the final of the sprint at the world championships in Manchester. I then went on to surprise more people – including myself, I think – by beating Sireau in the final to become the first British rider since Reg Harris to be crowned world sprint champion. Harris, whose legendary status is acknowledged in the shape of an impressive bronze statue overlooking the home straight at the Manchester Velodrome, won the last of his five world sprint titles in 1954. Fifty-four years we had waited to claim the title again – and I was as shocked as anyone. And now here I was in Beijing, with a chance of adding the Olympic sprint title – something no British cyclist, not even the great Harris, had ever achieved. Given all that was at stake it was just as well, really, that as I ate breakfast with Jason, then spent time talking tactics with Jan, I didn’t allow myself to think about the possible ramifications of success. It is one of the golden rules in the British team, drilled into us by our psychiatrist, Steve Peters: focus on the process, not the outcome. Even now, with only hours left of the Olympic track cycling programme, I didn’t for a second consider the possibility of three gold medals, or the reaction back home to the success we – Team GB in general, the British cycling team in particular – were enjoying in Beijing. Any thoughts I might have had about how life could change in the event of winning that third gold medal would have been about as helpful as a puncture. At this point, there was only one thing occupying my mind: my semi-final against Bourgain … 2 (#ulink_24b75b13-8214-50b1-897a-69c1fb03ef81) Pimped-up Rides and Broken Hearts (#ulink_24b75b13-8214-50b1-897a-69c1fb03ef81) As a sports-obsessed seven-year-old boy Olympic gold medals were a long way from my thoughts, but bikes were not. Bikes were in my thoughts all the time during my childhood in Edinburgh; they occupied every waking hour, with the evidence plastered all over my school jotters, which were filled with poems about bikes, essays about bikes and detailed drawings of my ‘dream machine’. It’s probably more accurate, however, to say that cycling occupied every waking hour when I wasn’t thinking about football, and obsessing over my favourite team, Hearts (as in Heart of Midlothian), or later, when I was a teenager, when I wasn’t thinking about rugby, and then rowing. You get the picture: life revolved around sport. I have no idea how I found the time to do anything else. Such as chess, for example. Chess was my first passion, and in my first day at school, George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, I made a point of asking the head teacher how I might join the school chess club. I had been introduced to the game at the age of four by my uncle Derek, who had what was then an unbelievably modern piece of kit – an electronic chess board. I think I was fascinated both by the game and the novelty of the technology, and played my dad all the time; he let me win initially, before his competitive instincts kicked in. Sadly, my chess playing became a casualty of my all-consuming interest in more physical pursuits. But I’m really not sure I was Grandmaster material. There’s a story which has been told quite a few times now about how I was inspired to take up BMXing after seeing the bike chase scene in E.T., when it came out in 1984, and I was an impressionable seven-year-old. In fact, it has now appeared in the media so often that I’m sure many people’s instinctive reaction would be to assume that it isn’t true – or am I betraying my relatively newfound cynicism? It comes as a relief to be able set the record straight at last. It’s true. I was inspired by E.T. to take up BMXing. So thank you Elliott, thank you Steven Spielberg … though I suspect my love affair with cycling would probably have blossomed anyway, sooner or later. Whether it would have started without BMXs is another question. I really don’t know. All I know is that – thanks originally to what I saw in E.T. – BMXs looked like great fun. What’s more, they were the epitome of cool for a seven-year-old kid. It wasn’t just the bikes – though they were pretty cool. The padded outfits, complete with motorcycle-style helmets, were cool too, and the tracks were magical places, even the rudimentary ones, of which there were a few in Edinburgh. Not too far from my parents’ home, in Murrayfield, there were cinder tracks at Lochend and Danderhall. Lochend had been virtually destroyed, and Danderhall didn’t have a proper gate, but they were still great fun to tear around on our bikes. The nearest track with a proper start gate was in Livingston, a new town about 15 miles west of Edinburgh, and six or seven of us would travel out there midweek, usually on a Wednesday evening, to do gate practice – the start was critical in a BMX race, and it was my killer weapon. My mum got me my first bike, for a fiver from a church jumble sale, and my dad went to work upgrading it – pimping my ride, you could say. As a youngster my dad, David, had been quite into bikes himself, or, more accurately, into taking them apart and reassembling them. He built himself a bike out of old parts, which he used for his paper round in Edinburgh (he grew up there too), and when I became interested in bikes he was delighted, because it allowed him to indulge his passion. As I got better and better bikes – having broken the original one doing jumps on a home-made ramp in the garden – my dad’s role as mechanic became even more important. Once a week he’d strip the bike down, clean all the parts, and put it back together, often using the kitchen table as his workbench. My mum, Carol, was remarkably understanding … most of the time. But at that time the BMX was vying with football for my attention and affection. George Watson’s, a mixed-sex independent school, both primary and secondary, owed much of its reputation to its illustrious rugby-playing former pupils – the Hastings brothers, Gavin and Scott, foremost among them. I played football, which was, if not frowned upon, then not exactly a core part of the curriculum. But we were allowed to play for one year, before being introduced to rugby, and when I was eight I was part of the school team. We were unusual – ahead of our time, perhaps – in that we had a female coach, even if Miss Paton probably assumed the position by default. I don’t think any other teachers were particularly interested in football, so I think it fell to her to run the team. And yes, we had the mickey taken out of us by other teams for having a female coach in those unenlightened times, but she was clearly a fan of the beautiful game. As were we too, but that didn’t stop us from being rubbish. I cringe now in recalling some of the beatings we suffered at the hands of other schools. We weren’t just beaten; we were usually – to use a good Scottish word – gubbed. A seven-nil defeat by Juniper Green sticks in my mind for some reason, but I don’t know why, because that wasn’t too unusual. There was only one team in the whole of Edinburgh that we seemed to be able to beat: poor, hapless Bonaly. Despite all that, I loved football. I played midfield, though positions were fairly arbitrary. We played on these big old pitches, with no nets in the goal. It was ridiculous, no concession being made to the fact that we were about four feet tall, with tiny little legs. On the full-sized pitches we looked like the Lilliputians from Gulliver’s Travels, and games would consist of the ludicrous spectacle of 20 eight-year-olds chasing the ball, like bees swarming around honey. It didn’t matter what position you were supposed to play in, there was only one place to be – as close to the ball as possible. It was like one of those medieval games of street football, involving hundreds of people, a free-for-all with no organization. As for passing – forget it. Poor Miss Paton, who could often be seen enjoying a cigarette on the touchline, wasn’t really able to impart any tactical instructions, or strategy – though I suppose you could say that we were allowed to express ourselves! As well as playing myself, after a fashion, I became absolutely obsessed with Heart of Midlothian, the team that played about half a mile from my house, at Tynecastle Stadium. ‘H-E-A … R-T-S, if you cannae spell it, then here’s what it says … Hearts, Hearts, glorious Hearts,’ as the club song goes. I was a committed Jambo – Jambo being an abbreviation of ‘Jam Tarts’, the team’s other name – and occasionally went to games with the son of our local butcher, Bob the butcher. I didn’t go with my dad, because he was a supporter of Hibs, or Hibernian, the other Edinburgh club. When I didn’t go to games I’d listen on the radio, or watch the results coming in on the BBC’s teleprinter at 4.45 in the afternoon. The Hearts score that spewed out of that machine could make or break my Saturday evening. Not that, as a seven-year-old, I had particularly exciting plans most Saturday evenings. The worst season was 1985/86, and it had a profound effect on me. I was nine going on ten, and at the zenith of my Hearts obsession. Now, anyone who knows anything at all about Scottish football, and especially Hearts, will not need to be told about the 1985/86 season. But for a nine-going-onten-year-old it was traumatic, to say the least. The players, scores and games are burnt into my memory, engraved on my consciousness. To this day, I can still name the 1985/86 team: Henry Smith, Walter Kidd, Sandy Jardine, Craig Levein, Brian Whittaker, Gary Mackay, Neil Berry, Kenny Black, John Colquhoun, Sandy Clark, John Robertson. These players, whom I wouldn’t hesitate to call my boyhood idols – with John ‘Robbo’ Robertson, Gary Mackay and John Colquhoun particular favourites – took Hearts to the top of the Scottish Premier Division, and within one game of winning the league title for the first time in 26 years. There was no better time to be a Jambo. And, ultimately, no worse time. On the final day of the season Hearts were leading Celtic by two points. All they needed was a draw against midtable Dundee. All they needed to do, most of us imagined, was to turn up. In those days, it was two points, rather than three, for a win. Going into that final day, Hearts also had a goal-difference advantage on Celtic – they were on plus-28, with Celtic on plus-24. So if, in the worst-case scenario, Hearts lost and Celtic won their game against St Mirren, the Glasgow club would have to do so by at least three goals, unless Hearts lost by more than one. Got that? On the day, Celtic won 5–0. And Hearts lost 2–0. The impossible, in other words, happened. And thousands of scarves and T-shirts, already emblazoned with ‘Heart of Midlothian, League Champions 1985–86’, had to be discarded. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And don’t even get me started on the conspiracy theories … I was crushed – and if I hadn’t been, then I would be a few days later, when Hearts faced Aberdeen in the Scottish Cup Final, only to lose 3–0. It was bordering on cruelty. And, to be honest, I don’t know if I ever really rediscovered my passion for football. These days, I couldn’t name a single player in the Hearts team, which is a shame, because I would have liked to keep my interest going. But I feel that football has changed so much, and that a lot of what was so great about it – games packed with genuine and committed fans watching players they could identify with – has disappeared. If anything positive came of the experience of following Hearts through that rollercoaster season, then it was in the form of an important lesson, and a good one to learn when you’re young. It could be summed up thus: don’t get your hopes up; don’t take anything for granted; expect nothing. These, as I would find out, would be useful mottos for any Hearts fan, or, for that matter, Scotland fan – when it came to either football or rugby. There’s a postscript to my interest in, or obsession with, that legendary Hearts team – and they remain club legends, in part because we’re still waiting for a first league title since 1960. Ten years later, John Robertson came into the Texaco garage where I, by now an 18-year-old about to head off to university, was working. ‘Robbo’ had been my ultimate hero, as he was to most Hearts fans – he is the most prolific goal-scorer in the club’s history. And here he was walking across the forecourt and into my shop! I was completely star-struck, and as he walked towards me I realized something else: he was tiny. He could barely see over the counter. Still, it was quite a thrill to meet my boyhood hero, even if I was a little over-awed. In my flustered state I think all I managed to say was, ‘Pump four, mate? That’ll be sixteen quid.’ After our brief and largely unsuccessful foray into football, rugby took over. Rugby was a big part of the culture of the school, though there was no particular pressure to play, and it wasn’t cliquey, as I know it can be at some schools. Watson’s was a nice school, with a good atmosphere. There was a real cross-section of people among the teachers and pupils, and I felt fortunate to go there. My parents weren’t wealthy – Dad working in the building industry, eventually as a chartered surveyor, Mum as a nurse – and I know they had to make sacrifices to send my sister, Carrie, and me there. Not that they were explicit about that to us, but we were made aware that we were lucky to go to a good school, and we both knew, I think, that we shouldn’t waste the opportunities available to us there. I tried to do the best I could, because I was also aware, from a young age, that although sport seemed the most important thing in my life, ultimately education would be more important. After all, as I was later told by my school’s careers adviser, ‘You’re not going to make a living out of sport.’ (OK, so this turned out to be bad advice … but I wasn’t to know it at the time – and neither, to be fair, was he.) As far as the rugby went, there was no pressure to play, either from the teaching staff or from my peers. I suppose some implicit ‘pressure’ was applied by the roll call of illustrious rugby players among the school’s former pupils, headed by the Hastings brothers. But there are other notable alumni, too, including Martin Bell, the Olympic skier, Martha Kearney, the broadcaster, the MPs Malcolm Rifkind, David Steel and Chris Smith, the mountaineer Robin Smith, the architect Sir Basil Spence, and Mylo, the singer-songwriter. A pretty eclectic bunch – and even the three politicians all represent different parties. When I was at school, there were future Scottish rugby internationals Jamie Mayer, Marcus Di Rollo and Jason White, who would go on to captain the national side. When I started playing rugby we were coached by Mr French, a Rangers fan, but still a good guy. In those days it was straight into the full game, no mini rugby to break us in. And initially it was similar to the football in many regards, with 15 of us all chasing after the ball. Loosely speaking there were backs and forwards, but we didn’t stick too rigidly to that. That said, I quickly settled on the position of stand-off, and I became the kicker. There was a lot of pressure involved in being the kicker. As with the football, there was no concession made to the fact we were small, with puny legs: we played on full-size pitches, with full-size goals. So kicking was a challenge, and my record wasn’t quite as impressive as Chris Paterson’s. Like Paterson, I often managed 100 per cent, but that would be either 100 per cent over, or 100 per cent missed, with the ball invariably skidding along the ground. If I got the first conversion over, then I was fine; it would relax me, and I’d have a good game. But the kicking tended to mirror the game: if I kicked well, I played well; if I kicked badly, I found that it played on my mind and destroyed my game. I had some horrendous games. It’s funny, though, that kicking seems to be something that attracts the individualist. Think of Jonny Wilkinson and Paterson, and you tend to think of them obsessively practising the art of kicking, long after their team-mates have left the training pitch. Paterson has even spoken in the past about being given a hard time at school for spending so long on his own, practising his kicking. As an aspiring young rugby player I was similar, I suppose. If I’d kicked badly in a match, the following day would see me in one of our two local parks, with my dad, practising until it got dark – or until my dad got bored. But the problem – and this would be something of a recurring theme for me in my sporting life – was that all that practice didn’t really make much difference. Nobody ever really showed me how to kick. My dad knew the basics, but I had no one to help me with my technique. It’s a bit like having a bad golf swing: you can practise as much as you like, but without expert help you’re not going to get any better. It was also like golf in another sense, though. If I stuck one through the posts every once in a while it gave me a real buzz – and kept me practising just a little bit longer. My kick-offs were just as erratic as my conversion attempts. I had this knack of picking out the biggest guy in the opposing team, and I’d be confronted with the sight of this – relatively speaking – huge second row catching it and running straight back towards me. Thus, within the first minute of most games, I’d suffer a big bang to the head. But I only suffered concussion on one occasion, in training. I’d broken through and was running towards the try line; and I thought I was clear, so I throttled back as I neared the posts, and was cruising towards the line, oblivious to the fact that an opposing winger had chased me all the way. He dived and clipped my ankles, and I, clutching the ball to my chest, hit the ground like a sack of spuds. The ball ‘broke’ my fall, but it caused a whiplash effect, my head bouncing off the ground. I had no idea where I was, what day it was or what I was doing. Remarkably, the only other serious injury I suffered on the rugby pitch was a broken thumb. It was the first and only time my dad missed a game – an omen, perhaps. I was in fourth year at secondary school, it was on the eve of my first important exams, the Standard Grade (the Scottish equivalent to ‘O’ levels) prelims, when, in the early minutes of a game against Heriot’s, I went to hand off a big prop and felt my thumb bend right back. It was excruciating, but I gave it a shake and carried on playing. Until the next scrum, when I received a pass. Suffice to say that the resulting scream could probably be heard by my parents, who were out of town for the weekend. The result was an arm in plaster from hand to elbow, which meant I was assigned a ‘scribe’ – some poor sixth year – for the exams. This wasn’t as inconvenient as it sounds, because I remember my ‘scribe’ being pretty helpful with the multiple-choice questions on my Chemistry paper. If I said ‘C’ he’d say: ‘Do you want to think about that r-e-a-l-l-y c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y?’ The high point of my rugby career came when I was selected to captain the Edinburgh Schools under-15 team against the North of Scotland. It felt amazing to pull on the navy blue kit – which bore an uncanny resemblance to the Scotland jersey – for a match played up in Inverness, and which we won, with me kicking three out of three conversions. Eat your heart out, Chris Paterson. It was quite an eye-opener playing with kids from other schools, and there was a seriousness of purpose about us; it came, I suppose, from the sense of pride, and responsibility, we all felt representing not only our schools, but our city. I remember a prop from Musselburgh displaying a particularly impressive attitude for a 14-year-old. After he scored the first try he jogged back with the ball, and threw it at me – hard – with the instruction: ‘Make it count!’ No wonder I felt such relief at seeing that first one sail through the posts. He was a big guy. And I, by contrast, was small for my age. I had been big for my year in primary school, but found myself being overtaken by a lot of the others in high school. By third year, my last year in the rugby team, I was the second smallest in the team, which put me at a serious disadvantage. By the time I was 15 everyone had been growing and I hadn’t really started – I was a little shrimp, a Smurf. Only the scrum-half was smaller than me, and I used to take a real pasting in games. I loved going to rugby matches as well, and attended virtually all of Scotland’s Five Nations home games, sitting in the schoolboy enclosure and then running on to the pitch at the end of the match. After one game against Ireland, which Scotland won, I was the first on to the pitch – a sign of my promise as a sprinter, possibly – and ran up to Damian Cronin, the big second row, as he was filmed leaving the pitch. I ended up on TV, very visible in my yellow anorak, with my mop of almost matching hair, patting Cronin on the back. One of the greatest games in Scotland’s history – and arguably my greatest sporting memory – was the 1990 Five Nations decider against England at Murrayfield, the national stadium that was a stone’s throw from my house. It was the Grand Slam decider, with both teams in contention, but England almost certain to win. Or so they thought. Scotland, led out by David Sole, set the tone by entering the field at a slow, almost funereal, pace. England, led by Will Carling, had looked super confident, but – as crazy as it sounds – the way that Scotland walked on to the pitch seemed to say: we’re in charge. It gave them the impetus, and they sustained that in the game itself; you could see and almost feel how pumped up the Scotland team was as they got stuck into their opponents, and they won 13–7 to give Scotland the Calcutta Cup, Triple Crown and Grand Slam. All in all, it was a pretty good afternoon – one of the proudest in Scotland’s sporting history. Watching Sole’s slow march gives me goosebumps, even now, but the irony was that, having attended so many games at Murrayfield, I missed that one. I had a ticket, but I had faced a huge dilemma: go to the game or compete in a BMX race in Paris. I opted to travel to France, but I watched the video of the game when I got home the next day, and watched it again and again, until the tape wore out. Eighteen years later, I had the honour, and the unforgettable experience, of making my own appearance at Murrayfield for a Scotland international. It was the 2008 Autumn Test against the mighty All Blacks, who had just finished their haka when I was expected to perform the daunting task of delivering the match ball. My only hope was that it would prove more successful than my previous ‘guest’ appearance on a rugby pitch, during the half-time break of an Edinburgh Gunners match in 2002, following my gold medal at the Manchester Commonwealth Games. On that occasion, having been introduced and interviewed in the middle of the pitch, I was asked if I was a big rugby fan. ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I played at school, went to Murrayfield a lot – I love it.’ ‘OK, Chris, a final question,’ said the MC. ‘Who are you supporting today?’ ‘Well, no surprises there, I’m an Edinburgh boy, so I’m backing THE REIVERS!’ I was hoping to get a big cheer from the 5,000 in the crowd. Instead, and much to my surprise, there was a stunned silence, then a chorus of boos. Unbeknown to me, six months earlier, the city’s professional rugby club had changed its name from the Edinburgh Reivers to the Gunners. Which might sound innocuous enough, but in the highly politicized and heavily factionalized world of Scottish rugby, it was significant – they had only been the Reivers after an amalgamation, of sorts, with the Borders regional team. And now the name had been reassigned to the Borders; so ‘the Reivers’ referred not to Edinburgh, but to their bitterest rivals. What I had done was a bit like shouting ‘Come on, City!’ at Old Trafford – though fortunately rugby supporters are a little less partisan, and a lot more forgiving. There was no such faux pas at Murrayfield in November 2008. Wearing a Scotland shirt with ‘3’ and ‘Hoy’ on the back, and with my three Olympic gold medals hanging from my neck, I was introduced to the crowd and walked into a wall of noise, plonking the ball down in the middle, then turning to the Scotland team and making what I hoped would be a series of rousing, fist-clenched gestures. I may even have shouted ‘Go onnnnnnnn!’ or something similarly encouraging. There was nothing planned or rehearsed about it; it was completely spontaneous, inspired by the noise of the crowd and the exhilarating sense of anticipation, expectation and sheer drama inside Murrayfield Stadium. It didn’t work, unfortunately – Scotland lost, after a decent performance – but the response from the crowd had a similar effect on me to that of David Sole’s famous slow march: the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was stunned. In all my previous visits to Murrayfield, most of them in the schoolboy enclosure, I could never have imagined that one day a cyclist would receive such a reception. My souvenir Scotland shirt now hangs in a frame in my house, a memento of an unforgettable experience, and a reminder of my boyhood dream of one day playing for my country. The time has probably come to admit that it is the closest I’ll ever get to fulfilling it. 3 (#ulink_011eee38-bf8b-52d1-b121-b47b39e5fe83) Smells of Sandwiches and Mars Bars (#ulink_011eee38-bf8b-52d1-b121-b47b39e5fe83) Yes, my childhood revolved around sport – so far, adulthood hasn’t been much different – and bikes were the dominant theme. My BMX career, which started when I was seven, ran along parallel lines to my football, then rugby, and almost outlasted both. I retired from BMX when I was 14, and stopped playing rugby the following year. But my burgeoning interest in BMX coincided with a very difficult time for my family, following the deaths, within two weeks of each other, of my grandma and grandpa – my dad’s parents. To appreciate how profound an effect this had on me, not to mention my dad, mum and sister Carrie, I should describe our living arrangements, which were fairly unusual. We lived in the top-floor flat of a townhouse in Murrayfield, a nice suburb of Edinburgh, and, in the style of a big Italian family (not that we have a drop of Italian blood, as far as I know), we shared the house with my grandparents, who lived downstairs in a separate flat with a shared entrance. In other words, to enter our house I had to go through my grandparents’ front door, which meant I saw them all the time. It was the type of house, in the kind of setting, that presented myriad opportunities for boys’ own-style adventures. There was a decent-sized garden at the back, with a disused railway line over the wall at the end; a place that was, inevitably, out of bounds. I was always warned not to play on the railway line, that it was ‘dangerous,’ which naturally heightened my curiosity. Back in those days it was little more than a stretch of wasteland, overgrown and quite wild, though the platform from the old railway station, which was right behind our house, remained. These days, it has been tarmaced and is a popular cycle track, though I’m sure 8-year-old kids are still told to stay away. When I wanted to get round this rule, I didn’t clamber over the wall at the end of the garden – that was too obvious – instead, I sneaked around the side of the house, entering by the old platform, with my sister sometimes a partner-in-crime and willing accomplice in the illicit adventure. Poor Carrie. She is two years older than me, and could be a little bit bossy, as elder sisters are prone to be towards baby brothers; and I could be a little brat, as baby brothers are prone to be towards elder sisters. We always got on well and still do, but I could be a bit sneaky as a young kid and I would frequently land her in trouble. If she was being bossy, and I was winding her up by resisting her commands, I had a knack of being able to make her snap at precisely the moment that Mum or Dad would appear on the scene. In they’d walk, to Carrie screaming and shouting, and me sitting there looking put-upon, an imaginary halo floating above my head. Still, Carrie and I were always playing together, and we had a lot of fun, especially in the garden, and up at the top of the road – where we were allowed to play – in an area we called ‘the Conkers,’ a clearing with huge chestnut trees. As we got older Carrie and I only became closer and closer, even as our own interests diverged. She was more into art than sport, and she loved reading, going on eventually to work in publishing. She was always highly intelligent, and became ‘Dux’ of our school, though, despite her talents, she has never seemed to have any ego at all. That can be seen in her support for me throughout my cycling career, which has been incredible, from attending all my major events, to, afterwards, spending hours producing beautiful albums of the press cuttings and photographs. These are no Pritt Stick jobs – they are stunning coffee table-sized books, and priceless mementos which have to be seen, and flicked through, to be fully appreciated. My parents bought the family house in 1969, when they were newly married – and they remain there to this day, forty years on. It has proved a solid investment, then, though their friends questioned that at the time, since it meant – according to my dad – that they couldn’t afford furniture and didn’t go out for more than a year. After a year, so the family legend goes, they bought a fridge and went to the cinema. Or should that be ‘the pictures’? The story of how they bought the house was unusual, too. It was owned by a wealthy friend of my grandma – my dad’s mum – who allowed my parents to live in the top-floor flat while they were looking for property; the arrangement was for six months. But in the midst of that she decided to sell, and offered them first refusal. The house was valued at around ?5,000 and my parents, who had fallen for it, really pushed the boat out to buy it. The house was far too big for the pair of them, but, with the shared entrance, it was impossible to rent out one of the floors. A solution presented itself a year later, when my dad’s parents, Jerry and Mary, lost the house in which they lived. My grandpa was the manager of a grocery depot, and he and my grandma lived in a flat above the warehouse, which was in Leith, and thus explains my dad’s allegiance to the Leith football team, Hibernian. The flat came with the job, and when grandpa retired, in 1970, they had to move. So it was that they came to live with my parents in Murrayfield, occupying the first floor, while we – not that I was born quite yet – lived upstairs. Having my grandparents downstairs was fantastic, the perfect scenario for a young kid. There was the security aspect; if we were playing in the garden, or on the street, they could keep an eye on us (most of the time), as well as my parents. And of course, it meant I saw them all the time, frequently as I rushed past after coming in their – and our – front door, before dashing up the internal stair that led into our flat. After dinner I’d often sneak downstairs for some biscuits from my grandma, though my abiding memory of evenings with my grandparents was the intense heat. Like a lot of older people, they had the heating up to the maximum, and their living room was like a sauna. When I went back upstairs it wasn’t the crumbs around my mouth that gave away the fact I’d been scoffing biscuits, it was my rosy cheeks. I loved having my grandparents downstairs, though, inevitably, being so young, I didn’t fully appreciate how much I loved having them downstairs until they were gone. They died, as I have said, within a week of each other in 1984, my grandpa first and then my grandma, when I was eight. It was my first experience of dealing with a family death, and the sadness and sense of upheaval were exacerbated by the fact we were so close, in both senses of the word. Coming home from school and not passing my grandparents on my way upstairs was very strange and a hard thing to deal with; it meant everything changed instantly, and in more ways that I anticipated. It was a tough time for my parents, but they also had a pressing, and practical, problem: what to do with the house. It was too big – and too expensive – for my parents, Carrie and me, so they had to sell the bottom flat. The problem, however, was the shared front door. My dad worked in the building trade, having not gone to university. Eventually he did go to university, in his fifties, to do a surveying degree – he actually graduated the year before me – but when I was in primary school he ran a building company, with a team of three or four builders, though I think he did a lot of the work himself. He was very hands-on, and he’s got great practical skills. The trouble is – and I hope he won’t mind me saying – it takes him an age to get things done. He is great at taking on jobs, especially for other people; he can’t say no. If he has a fault, it’s that he over commits, and takes on more than he can manage. When my grandparents died business for my dad was far from booming: it was a tough time for industry, the property industry especially. So my dad decided to take a year out, more or less, and take on a big project: turning the house into two flats, with separate front doors. I can understand if my mum felt some trepidation – for the reasons discussed above, and because, though he did jobs for other people to perfection, our house was often a bit of a building site by contrast. Still, in the aftermath of his parents’ death, he got started on this project. First he removed the internal staircase, which led up to our flat. Then he built an external staircase, with a new front door. Where the internal stair had been, he built two new rooms. And then, to make the ground-floor flat attractive to prospective buyers, he built a double garage, which – much to my disappointment – reduced the garden by about half. It was like a Grand Designs project, and I can imagine Kevin McCloud, had the TV programme existed back then, wandering into our house-cum-building site, saying: ‘I just wonder if he’s taken on too much here.’ It really was like a construction site for much of that year, and at one point the plumbing was disconnected upstairs. Initially we still had a toilet downstairs, but then that was cut off, too. For about three days we had to visit the Texaco garage at the bottom of the road, each time with some spurious excuse for returning, in order to use the toilet there. On the plus side, we were never out of milk, since that was the standard purchase to justify all the toilet trips. After the best part of a year, though, my dad had managed to convert the house into two separate flats. And 25 years later, as he likes to joke, the job is … very close to completion. Mum, meanwhile, was a night owl. As a nurse she worked the night shift in the sleep department at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which meant she left at eight in the evening and got home at seven in the morning. She’d sleep during the day, and, when I came in from school at about four I’d put the kettle on, make her a cup of tea and wake her up. If that makes me sound like a model child, I should confess that, lurking towards the forefront of my mind, was the thought of dinner. I don’t know how Mum did it, but she would get up, do the housework, make our dinner, and then go back to work: that was her life, really. Carrie was good at helping around the house, but it makes me a bit embarrassed to think of my contribution, given how hard my mum and dad worked. If I picked my scattered clothes up off my bedroom floor, that was me mucking in and doing my bit. I know that I had a privileged upbringing – not financially, but in a far more important way, with my family providing the most stable foundation. We weren’t exactly the Waltons – more like the Simpsons – and there’d be nagging and arguments, but they would blow over, and it was a happy home; or, for the first eight years of my life, two homes, each as happy as the other, and one considerably hotter. * * * It was around the time of my grandparents’ death that I began to get really serious about BMXing. Though I was serious about football and rugby, my commitment to BMX was on another level. It had to be, because what started as a bit of fun on my pimped-up old bike from the church jumble sale soon developed to the point where I was no longer just riding local tracks, and competing against riders from the Edinburgh area, but joining sponsored teams, riding fancier bikes, and travelling first to England, then to Europe, in search of ever more serious competition. The race that sticks most firmly in the memory is the 1986 world championships in Slough, near London. Glamorous, eh? Slough these days stands almost as a euphemism for dreary and boring, a suburban town where nothing much happens, thanks to it being the setting for The Office, Ricky Gervais’s satirical comedy, though the town had an image problem long before that, the poet John Betjeman writing: ‘Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now …’ Well, Slough will always evoke entirely different emotions, and more colourful memories, in me. As far as I was concerned, Slough in 1986 was the height of glamour, and the centre of the universe, because it hosted the biggest BMX world championships in the sport’s young history. Around 1,600 riders – many of them having travelled over from America – descended on Slough for the meeting; there were 64 in my under-11 age group alone, which is a figure worth reflecting on. Could any other sport attract such a large field for an international event in such a young age category? But these were the glory days of BMX. If the E.T. chase scene had reflected this latest craze, then it had also acted as a catalyst, because BMX grew hugely in popularity from the mid to the late 1980s, before hitting a sharp decline. For me, those 1986 championships were a defining moment. They gave me a glimpse of what might be possible and shaped my desire to carry on; to up the ante and see how far I could go. I’d been racing for two years, and doing quite well, but Slough was my first international race. I was going well; I could feel it, and I felt confident as I lined up, alongside seven fellow ten-year-olds in my heat. I won, qualifying for the eighth-finals (the stage before the quarter-finals), and then won again, going through to the quarters. And I breezed through them, finishing second – with the top four going through. I was in the semi-finals of the world championships. Now it was really serious, because to make the final was the big thing. And here’s one reason why: all the finalists would have single-digit number-plates (i.e. 1–8, as opposed to some messy double- or triple-digit number) at the following year’s championships. There was huge kudos in that. Let me describe a BMX race. Or, rather, let the eight-year-old me describe a BMX race (copyright: my school jotter from p4M, mistakes as original): My Weekend I enjoy doing BMX. BMX stands for Bicycle Motocross. I race on my bike, there are jumps you go over and the corners are banked. Scotia is my favourite BMX shop [and also my sponsors, so I already understood that it was a good idea to namedrop my sponsors at every opportunity]. Yesterday I went racing at Glasgow. Gate two seemed to be putting me into third place (the gate is a thing at the start wich you put your front wheel against and somone says ‘Riders Ready, Pedels Ready, Go’ and pushes the gate down). You pick a card and it will have a number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. So I got third. Scotia are taking me training on Thursdays. I have done a picture of a track on the next page. Just for the record, this got a big red tick and ‘very good’. Giving another flavour of the sport, a few pages later, under the heading ‘My Favourite Place’, I find another tenuous excuse to shoe-horn my obsession into my school work (see also ‘My Holiday’, and numerous other ‘My Weekends’): My favourite place is at the Derby BMX track. You get to watch the famous riders and get their autographs. There is a commentator who tells you who is in the lead over a microphone. When you are on the start you feel very nervous! Once you are racing you can not really hear the people cheering because you are concentrating so much on the race. There is a smell of sandwiches and Mars bars [do these actually smell? I think I meant burgers and hot dogs, which, when I smell them now, evoke the BMX races of my childhood]. When I crash, if I fall on my mouth I have a mouth guard but dirt can get in your mouth. It tastes horrible! Especially when the ground is wet! Only a tick and ‘good’ this time. Obviously not my best work. A BMX track is ridiculously short (this is me writing as a 33year-old again, in case you weren’t sure) – only around 400 metres long, sometimes shorter. It’s over within 30 seconds. You line up eight abreast, behind the start gate, feeling unbelievably nervous. It’s intense. Before you are traffic lights, which give the signal to start. When the gate drops, you’re away. ‘On the “B” of the bang’, as Linford Christie would say; or, perhaps more accurately in this instance, the ‘G’ of the green light. You start in lanes, but as soon as the gate drops it’s a free-for-all and you’re into the first bend after around 30 metres. Often this will be a ninety-degree bend, with a U-bend after that, and three or four jumps located in between. It can be physical – it’s not officially a contact sport, but in fact it is, so you’re jostling with your rivals to hold position, and fighting for the best line into the corner. But the start determines so much, which is why I used to travel the 15 miles to Livingston one evening a week, to practise on the only track in the Edinburgh area with a proper start gate. That wasn’t all: I would also practise on the street outside our home every evening. A bit like the goal-kicking for rugby, it was something I could practise on my own, honing my reflexes, experimenting with different pedal start positions, and working on accelerating my bike up to speed as quickly as possible, using lampposts on the street as markers for distance. And all that practice seemed to pay off: starts became my strength, my killer weapon. So, back to Slough – where, incidentally, the other riders included Iwan Thomas, the future 400-metre runner, and, in my age group, a young German called Jan van Eijden, who, 20 years later, would become my sprint coach (see chapter one), as well as numerous other future track cycling champions, among them Australian Darryn Hill, the 1995 world sprint champion, and my future friend and team-mate, Craig MacLean. By the semi-final stage Jan had been knocked out – he only made it to the quarters, which shows the depth of talent there was in BMXing, given the career he went on to have as a cyclist. But I was still in the competition, preparing for my biggest moment – and with confidence, because I had progressed pretty smoothly to this point. Bang! The start gate dropped and the race started in the usual frantic fashion. Four from the semi would qualify for the final, and I made a reasonable start, lying third going around the second U-bend. Coming out of that last corner, still in third, and, with a place in the final in my sights, we negotiated the final jump. Get over that OK and I’m there: in the final. But disaster struck. Hitting the ground after the jump, my foot slipped off the pedal, and I crashed onto the crossbar – which hurt, but wasn’t as painful as it would have been had I been a little older than 10. But it was incredibly bad timing, and there followed one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had in a bike race. I was still moving, but somehow couldn’t reconnect my foot and pedal; despite my desperate attempts, the pedal remained empty. And the more I panicked, the less likely I was to rectify this situation. It’s a bit like when you’re really late and in a hurry, trying to unlock your door – that’s when you’re most likely to fumble and drop your keys. Paradoxically, time seemed both to stand still and speed up. As I tried to focus on getting my foot back on the pedal, one rider came past me on my left. Then, around 10 metres from the line, a second passed me on my right. My slip of the foot had cost me two places. It had also cost me my place in the final. I crossed the line fifth, just out of the qualification places. I was inconsolable. And I couldn’t get the race out of my head, re-running it over and over again – not only in my head, but on TV. One of the dads had recorded it on an early video camera, which was about the size of an outside broadcast unit, with the battery in a backpack that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a week-long safari. His video of the race was a bit shaky, but I sat and watched it again and again, thinking: maybe this time my foot won’t slip off the pedal. It was a source of huge regret for me. I had really, really, really wanted to make the final. Not just for the kudos of the single-number bib at the following year’s championships, but because each of the finalists was presented with a small trophy. And I loved getting trophies. After the race I was in tears. My dad tried to console me, telling me I’d ridden a good race, that I’d been unlucky and would have lots more opportunities in the future. Dad came to all my races – despite, for quite some time, being in the midst of his Grand Designs project back home – and he couldn’t have been more supportive, which was in contrast to some of the parents you’d see at these races. While I was crying because I was disappointed, others cried because their parents put pressure on them and reacted badly when they didn’t live up to the expectations they had for them. I saw kids being smacked on the head, their parents shouting, ‘What did you do that for?’ Then you’d see the bottom lip begin to tremble, and the tears start. As we drove home from Slough, my dad and I discussed the race, and I came to appreciate that it hadn’t all been down to bad luck; that I wasn’t necessarily a victim of outrageous misfortune. The main reason my foot had come off the pedal was because I could see the finishing line, and thought I was home and dry. I allowed myself to be distracted, my technique fell apart for a split second, and the error followed; a bit like dropping a pass in rugby due to taking your eye off the ball. I was 10, so none of this offered too much consolation at the time – and it didn’t stop me torturing myself by repeatedly watching the video of the race once I got home. However, I can see now that my dad helped me to analyse things rationally and logically, rather than seeing myself as the victim of a terrible injustice. It was about taking responsibility, I suppose, which starts with taking responsibility for yourself, and not looking for someone or something else to blame – opponents, team-mates, the pitch, track, referee, ball, weather, misplacing your lucky socks – when things went wrong. One of the other dads who helped run the team I was in, Scotia BMX, has said that I stood out from a lot of the other kids for being quite rational rather than emotional; and for analysing races in a rational way, rather than kicking and screaming and throwing my toys out of the pram. Well, yes and no. I would say I was – and still am – very emotional. But I also think that I appreciated fairly early in my sporting career that your own performance is all that counts, and that winning isn’t the be-all and end-all, because there’s sod all you can do about your opponent. If you do the best ride of your life and come fifth … there’s no point being unhappy with that, is there? As well as being my (more than willing) mechanic, my dad and the other dad I’ve just mentioned, George Swanson, helped organize the Scotia club’s training sessions. My dad thought a lot about training, and about ways we could replicate race efforts in practice. He and George used to take us to the closest beach to Edinburgh, Portobello. It wasn’t exactly the C?te d’Azur, but it was fringed by a long, wide footpath, which was excellent for training. They would line us up, six abreast, and have us race each other for 200 metres, before handing over to someone else, like a relay race. You’d rest a bit and go again – flat out. We’d be on our knees by the end of it, thanks mainly to there being a serious competitive dimension to this training, but it was a great way of raising our pain threshold, making these maximum efforts with nothing at stake but childhood pride. Yet perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from BMXing came from never being the best. Even as I progressed, there was always someone better than me – a target for me to aim at. I saw a lot of kids who would just sling their leg over a bike and win. Often it was because they had simply grown faster than the rest of us, but in some cases it was because they had outstanding natural talent, which owed nothing at all to training, or hours of hard work. It was the same in rugby. I remember that one of the rival Edinburgh schools (who on one occasion beat us 54–0) had a winger with astonishing speed, and the ability to execute a deadly sidestep. This guy was the most naturally gifted player I ever shared a rugby pitch with … and I think he packed it in at 15. I had been convinced he’d be a Scotland star of the future, but he disappeared and I never heard of him again. I imagine that he, like other prodigies I have come across, lost interest because it all came too easily. They had so much natural talent that there was never any correlation, for them, between hard work and achievement. Often, such talent is all you need as a youngster – but as you get older, and the competition gets stiffer, talent will only take you so far. At some point, you have to start working, and as people catch up, you have to work harder. Which can be hard to accept if you’ve never made the link between hard work and success. For this reason I think that ‘talent’ is vastly overrated in sport. I am thinking especially of power and endurance sports, but the idea that even tennis players and golfers such as Roger Federer or Tiger Woods are the best in the world simply because they are the most talented is ludicrous; they have talent, of course, but they have maximized it by hard work. It’s why, particularly when it comes to young athletes, I think the term ‘potential’ has far greater relevance and value than ‘talent’. Talent, as far as I am concerned, can in some cases be a nebulous, even damaging, notion; it can be a hindrance rather than a help. Winning – and I did win from time to time – is a buzz, no doubt about it. But I got almost the same buzz from imagining how hard work might translate into success in the future. Even back then, I saw sport as a process, with the rewards coming at the end of it. It was my potential, rather than my talent, that excited and inspired me, driving me on. The year after Slough, 1987, was another big one for me. I was fifth in the European championships in Genk, Belgium – the best ride of my BMX career, I’d say. But I had a bit of a disaster at the world championships in Orlando, going out at the quarter-final stage in the under-12 age group. * * * Genk, Orlando … Slough – international travel was one of the aspects of BMXing that I most enjoyed; these trips could be eye-opening and even educational. Many of them were undertaken by car, sometimes just my dad and me in his old Citroen BX with its hydraulic suspension, and a mattress in the back of the car for me to sleep on. We had some unforgettable experiences away from the BMX track. I remember driving to the World Games in Karlsruhe in Germany, and stopping en route at the Berlin Wall. My dad explained what it was, and what it stood for, and I stood and stared and struggled to comprehend that there were people on the other side who were trapped there, like animals in a cage, and shot dead if they tried to escape. The Berlin Wall came down about six months later, news which I could relate to and understand far better than if it had just been pictures on TV or in newspapers. I also raced at Aalborg, in Denmark, at Perpignan, in France, and at an amusement park in Holland with the very Dutch-sounding name of Slagharen. Slagharen, which was like a Dutch Butlins, had an amazing track, probably the best in Europe. What I remember most about Slagharen, though, is the chalets we stayed in, which had paper-thin walls. And I remember this detail so vividly because of an incident involving a slightly older guy in our club, a 19-year-old student known to all of us as ‘Voucher Man’, because he seemed to have money-off vouchers for everything. He was a very nice guy, but I suppose you could say he was the archetypal stingy Scot; he was always dictating that we had to go to a certain place because he could get 2 per cent off, or a free medium drink if you bought four main courses, or something. You get the idea. One night in Slagharen, Voucher Man announced he was going to eat in, while gently mocking us for choosing to waste our money in a costly restaurant. He had all the ingredients to make chilli, he said. So we went out and left him to it, returning a couple of hours later to retire to our beds and go to sleep. We didn’t sleep for long. Within an hour the chalet, with its paper-thin walls, reverberated to the unmistakable sound of Voucher Man’s bowels emptying, in a hurried fashion; it sounded like a flock of pigeons were taking off in there. He spent the night shitting into a bucket, while the rest of us pissed ourselves laughing. The other thing about Slagharen, which hosted the European championships, was that it had a freestyle area, with two half-pipes. I was desperate to play on these ramps, but Dad advised me not to. ‘You’re here to race,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to tire yourself out on those things; they’re dangerous, and you’re not a freestyler …’ I wasn’t an especially rebellious child, but on this occasion I ignored him. Well, all my mates were having a go. And it did look like good fun. As long as you knew what you were doing, and had the skills to pull off such stunts … Which, as it happens, I didn’t. But up the ramp I went, before swooping down, and back up, preparing for an aerial manoeuvre; into the air I soared, turning my bike and preparing to re-enter the ramp … or not. I overshot it, missing the ramp altogether and finding myself briefly suspended in midair – a bit like the moment when Wile E. Coyote, in the Roadrunner cartoons, realizes he has run straight off the edge of the cliff, and, with his legs still going through the motions, waits for gravity to kick in. I didn’t have the proper kit on for freestyling – I didn’t even have a helmet on. So when I hit the ground, with a thud, I … well, actually I felt nothing, because I was knocked out. As I came to, I realized that my face had taken the brunt of it, the left side covered in a livid red graze. But my main concern was what my dad was going to say. To make matters worse, I had hardly any time to prepare for gate practice, as you were allocated only limited time to practise on the track ahead of the next day’s races. I met up again with my dad, whose reaction – apparently – was mild; taking one look at my damaged face, he probably figured that I’d learnt my lesson without him having to reinforce it. Meanwhile, I apologized profusely – much later he said that I had spent about half an hour ‘havering’, which is a Scottish expression for talking nonsense – and got on with my gate practice. I must still have been quite badly concussed at this point, though, because when I returned to the track the next day I couldn’t remember anything about the course. It was the strangest thing: I had no recollection at all of the previous day. Sitting in the gate, waiting for the start, I might as well have been looking at the surface of the moon for all that I could remember about the previous day’s practice session. I have a picture of that race – there’s a great view of the scab forming on my face – which was won, as many were, by a Dutch rider known as ‘The Beast’. We were 11 at the time, but he was about six foot two and had a full moustache, having hit puberty when he was nine. I exaggerate, but only a little. At 14, having committed seven years to BMX, I retired. The realization that I wasn’t really enjoying it any more crept up on me gradually, and had much to do, I suspect, with the fact that many of my peers were also drifting away. It was 1990, and the bottom was about to fall out of the sport, in Europe at least. There remained a healthy scene in the United States, and that continues to this day, but by my mid-teens BMXing seemed pass?, a – ahem – young man’s game, and about as cool as Bucks Fizz. It was time to get out. But I look back now with great fondness on my BMX days, even if the sport that provided my introduction to cycling would inadvertently, 15 years later, cause me great heartache. These days, thanks to its inclusion in the Olympic programme, which came into effect in Beijing, BMX is enjoying something of a renaissance. The heartache I mentioned above owes to the fact that the inclusion of BMX in 2005 meant the axing of another discipline – my event, the kilometre. But there are no hard feelings: I maintain that it is the perfect sport for kids, and the perfect introduction to cycling, especially at a time when the roads are becoming more dangerous. It is also a great sport for adults – and the top BMXers are incredible athletes. Former BMX riders now excel in all cycling disciplines, from my GB team-mate Jamie Staff on the track to Robbie McEwen, the Tour de France cyclist, on the road. What all of us former BMXers have in common is confidence in our ability to handle a bike – watch Robbie McEwen pull a wheelie, as he usually does at the top of the final mountain pass of the Tour, and you will see what I mean. I’m pretty sure the boom days of the 1980s will never be repeated. But I am glad the BMX hasn’t gone the way of those other great inventions of the eighties, the ZX Spectrum and Sinclair C5, and disappeared without trace. 4 (#ulink_6ccca977-6be8-5a9b-9951-7c917934da41) ‘That Can’t Be Good for You’ (#ulink_6ccca977-6be8-5a9b-9951-7c917934da41) I started getting a bit of stick from my mates at school. Nothing malicious: just low-level, good-natured mickey-taking. I remember an art class in first year of secondary school where I was relentlessly slagged off for being a ‘BMX bandit’. I like to think that things have changed a little now, with cycling more mainstream and not perceived as being too weird a pastime, but traditionally the sport has attracted a lot of individualistic characters. As a kid, you would generally follow your mates into team sports – football and rugby. I did these too, but the fact that I was a cyclist singled me out a little from many of my schoolmates. I remember Graeme Obree, the former world record holder and champion, talking in his autobiography about cycling as a form of escapism, because he was bullied at school. I think that for him cycling was a way of justifying why he wasn’t out kicking a ball with his mates, or hanging around a shopping mall. Saying ‘I’m going out on my bike’ is a bit like getting the first punch in; it’s a good excuse for being by yourself. Fortunately I didn’t have the kind of negative experiences that Graeme had; I certainly wasn’t forced into cycling because of bullying, and I wasn’t bullied on account of the fact that I was a cyclist. All the same, by the time I got to secondary school, BMX had had its day. It was seen by most people as a kids’ sport – and there was nothing worse than that as you embarked on life in secondary school. One former classmate – Murdo, who is still a friend – has since claimed that any success I’ve had on a bike is all down to him, since he ‘convinced’ me to give up BMXing. He wasn’t the only one who applied peer pressure. The truth was, however, that it wasn’t anyone else’s opinions that mattered; I had just had enough of BMX racing and wasn’t enjoying it like I used to. I still loved bikes, so I transferred my allegiance to the knobbly-tyred older brother of the BMX: the mountain bike. Mountain bikes were new, and although perhaps not ‘cool’ in the eyes of all my classmates, they were a bit cool, or at least grown up. And in Edinburgh we had a huge natural asset in the Pentland Hills, more or less on my doorstep. My first mountain bike outings – they felt more like expeditions at that age – were into those hills, and they have left me with some fabulous memories. In the early 1990s, when I first tried it, I would often head up there with my dad, who was quite fit, though I always managed to drop him on the climbs. It was part sport, part exploration, but what I loved most were the descents, which felt like the reward for all the hard work of climbing – it was as though you had to earn your fun. When I got home, there was another reward, which was eating. I developed a ravenous hunger when mountain biking, and devoured mountains of food after rides. These days, when I’m travelling between Manchester and Edinburgh, as I frequently do, I pass the Pentlands as I drive into, or out of, my home city. It can prompt me to gaze a little dreamily at them (while keeping my eyes on the road, I should add, to reassure my mum, as well as any traffic police operating in the area). From the road they are just benign-looking lumps; the kind of rolling, rounded hills that are typical of southern Scotland. Further to the north, especially in the Highlands, the mountains are more rocky and jagged, often looking like mini-Alps. But don’t let the apparently gentle slopes of the Pentlands fool you: they are steep and rugged in places, and contain a labyrinth of hidden glens, meandering and often quite gnarly paths, and trickling burns (Scottish for small rivers). It’s a paradise for mountain biking, and I loved it. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty incompatible with my career in track cycling, because of the risk of injury. On a mountain bike, if you don’t crash on a fairly regular basis then you have to ask yourself if you’re trying hard enough … so it’s difficult to do now, though it is something I intend taking up again when I retire from track cycling. But I won’t be racing. Definitely not racing. When I was getting into mountain biking, in my early to mid teens, a series of cross-country races were staged in the Pentlands. They were gruelling tests of endurance and strength on courses that often got churned up; you’d finish looking as though you’d been down a coal mine. They were tough races, and they pushed me to levels I didn’t know I could reach. The contrast to BMX races, those 30-second blasts, could hardly have been greater. I think I realized, pretty early on in my mountain bike career, that I’d never be brilliant at this sport. But I did win one race. And it was an uphill race, bizarrely enough. It was at Innerleithen, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh: a mass-start event that went straight up a hill like a ramp and seemed to get steeper and steeper. Clearly organized by sadists. Not surprisingly, the front group was rapidly whittled down. This was the kind of race where the action is at the back rather than the front, with people hanging on for dear life, until they can hang on no more. The mental battle is a big part of it – when your legs are screaming, your lungs burning, your brain telling you to stop, and you have to dig deeper and deeper. With such efforts, the physical limits lie somewhere beyond the mental limits. Eventually there were only five of us left, at which point one guy attacked, jumping clear as though going for the finish. Nobody was mad enough to try to match his pace, preferring instead to watch him gradually slowing down in the distance and then ‘blowing up’ altogether. The words they use in cycling to denote that moment when you hit the wall – ‘blow up’ and ‘die’ being the most common – say it all, really. There is no return, especially on a hill. When this guy ran out of gas on the hill he became almost stationary – we had to avoid him as we went past, as if he was a bollard in the road. Then I attacked. I attacked! And nobody came with me. As ever, the effort started to really hurt after about 15 seconds, but I managed to keep a bit in reserve and avoid the fate of the earlier attacker. I won on my own, which, looking back now, seems hard to believe. Let me write that again: I won a hill climb. This, appropriately enough, represented the summit of my achievements as a mountain biker. I’d rather not dwell on other races, typically longer races, following which – as my dad likes to tell everyone – he would be waiting in the car park, thinking I must have suffered some mechanical or other disaster, only to see me finally haul my exhausted body to the finish, well after everyone else had packed up and gone home. At around the same time, there was another sport that was beginning to exercise me, in every sense of the word. Rowing. I still enjoyed rugby, but the increasing number of injuries I was suffering persuaded me eventually to give it up, and rowing was the sport that replaced it at school – cycling, unfortunately, not being part of the curriculum. One of my best mates at school, Grant Florence, had started rowing, but there weren’t many guys who did it. For some reason it was seen at my school as a girls’ sport; male crews weren’t really encouraged. Obviously, for us male rowers, this wasn’t an entirely undesirable situation. But that isn’t why I was attracted to it, honest. Seriously, it isn’t. If it had simply been a ruse to spend time splashing about on the water with the girls, then I wouldn’t have lasted very long, because this was a brutal sport. It was rowing rather than cycling, in fact, that opened my eyes to how hard it is possible to work at something. There was also a bit of family history in rowing. My uncle, John Poole, who’s married to my dad’s elder sister Joan, rowed in the ‘B’ crew for Oxford in the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race in the 1950s. At 6ft 8in he’s a good build for it. Where we trained, the Union Canal, is a seriously thin strip of water. In places it is not much wider – or less narrow – than the boat. A fractional misjudgement can cause the oar to hit the towpath, perhaps taking a runner’s legs from under him, or swiping an unsuspecting cyclist from their bike. Not that this has ever happened, to the best of my knowledge, but you feel it might. The Union Canal runs through the centre of Edinburgh and is a popular spot most days with crews of rowers. In terms of location the canal was ideal for us, the boathouse being just a stone’s throw from the school. There were other advantages, too. Apart from when it iced over, the canal wasn’t much affected by the weather. Whereas the big rivers might arguably have offered more in the way of ‘proper’ rowing, and more room to manoeuvre, they were too choppy to row on when it was wild and windy, as it often can be in Scotland. Plus, on those big tidal rivers there were only certain times when you could row, and I heard, without feeling any envy, stories of other crews having to be out on the river as early as 6 a.m. At least we could row at any time. We were out on the canal in all conditions. And I loved the whole scene, the social aspect, the camaraderie and the sense of being part of a committed team. You’d go down to the boat club before training and hang around, chatting to the boat manager, who happened to be Grant, the friend who got me into rowing in the first place. That was another thing: you were given responsibilities and jobs; I became club treasurer. George, who was in overall charge of the boathouse, tried to suss you out, I think, and if you passed the test you were trusted with the keys, given jobs to do, that kind of thing. Boat club treasurer was ‘a thankless task’, as was noted in a school report card at the time by one of my teachers, who added: ‘So I thank him now – on paper!’ The teachers were less impressed by one incident, for which I must hold my hands up. We were driving back to Edinburgh after a day’s training at Strathclyde Park when I found myself in possession of a super-soaker pump-action water machine-gun; a real beast of a weapon, which could fire jets of water up to about 30 feet. It was a hot summer’s day, we were hanging out of the windows of our minibus, and as we approached Edinburgh, and slowed down for a roundabout, we began to draw alongside a sports car with its roof down. It was irresistible. My weapon was loaded and I gave it both barrels: not just a squirt of water, but a proper skoosh. OK, it was immature and it can’t have been pleasant for the driver, but all I can offer in my defence is that there is something in the Scottish psyche that disapproves of ostentatious displays of wealth, or flashiness. Soft-top cars fall into that category. Monday morning came, however, and there was a letter waiting for me in registration. The head teacher was away, but I was to go and see his deputy, Mr Cowan. I knew it was about the water pistol incident. I had had a phone call the previous evening from George, the rowing man, who’d heard that the driver had complained to the school – well, we weren’t exactly hard to identify, given that the minibus was emblazoned with our school’s name. ‘I’m so disappointed,’ George had said. ‘I don’t know who it was.’ ‘It was me, George,’ I said. ‘I’m so disappointed, Chris. I don’t know why you did it – you’ll have to face the music.’ So on Monday morning I faced the music. ‘I’ve had this letter,’ said Mr Cowan. ‘It seems that someone has used a water pistol on a member of the public. This is clearly a serious offence,’ and as he said this, I thought I could detect a little smile. Still, he sentenced me to half an hour of picking up litter. On balance, I think it was worth it. The training for rowing was more serious – and perhaps explains this frivolous diversion. In fact, thinking about the training we did back then can still induce a cold sweat – it really was brutal. At the end of my first year as a fully-fledged rower I was in the ‘A’ crew. Our coach was a student from Edinburgh University. He had some interesting ideas, this guy. Somehow he’d got his hands on some old East German Olympic rowing squad training programmes from the 1980s. He modified them very slightly for us. But only very slightly. He was certainly committed. We had to be, too, or we’d be out. We trained before and after school, often five or six days a week, and through the summer holidays. It was highly structured, regimented even, but he put a lot into it, and so did we. Our coach had some good ideas, but he was inflexible. His training ethos could be summed up in three words: push, push and push. To elaborate: keep working harder, don’t listen to your body. We were pushing ourselves to the limit and beyond, and at least one of us was always ill with a cold, a chest infection, or run down. I remember one session when two of us were throwing up over the side of the boat, not through exertion but because we were ill. From the towpath, we heard our coach shout: ‘OK, you back to normal now? Off you go again.’ And it was about three degrees Celsius. As I say, brutal. Now, you may well be putting the words ‘East’, ‘German’, ‘Olympic’ and ‘1980s’ together, and coming to some fairly alarming conclusions. And yes, as we would all subsequently find out, many East German Olympic athletes were subject to state-organized doping programmes. While not wishing to condemn the East German rowers of the 1980s as doping cheats – I don’t know if they were; and many of them, in any case, were apparently oblivious to what they were given – this information could possibly shed some interesting new light on the training programme we were attempting to follow in our rowing days. Quite apart from the fact that they might or might not have been on drugs, they were grown men. We were 16-year-old boys. But the real problem for me was not so much the rowing training programme; it was doing the rowing training plus my cycling training; plus the fact that we all still had seven hours’ school, five days a week. I remember one Sunday when I took part in an 80-mile road race in the morning, then went, still in my cycling kit, straight to rowing training. Since rowing was a team sport, the schedule was sacrosanct – if you couldn’t make the session, you weren’t in the team. Despite my misgivings about the severity of the programme – on top of my cycling training – the discipline of doing this training, of being part of such a committed team (rowers and coach alike), and the routine and suffering, were all, I think, good for me in the long run. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that. And there were certainly times when I felt that it might kill me. It was as a pair with Grant, my best mate, that I enjoyed the highlight of my rowing career: winning a silver medal in the British schools’ championship, held in Strathclyde Park, near Glasgow. In 1993 I also won two Scottish gold medals, in the coxless pairs and coxed fours, and I represented Scotland in the Home Countries International. But in some ways a more memorable race saw me form part of an eight, when we took on our rival Edinburgh school, Heriot’s. The eight was made up of our top four (our only four, in fact), plus their ‘C’ crew, who were happy to join us. They felt they were as good if not better than their peers in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews, and were only too delighted to have a chance to prove it. Their ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews joined forces, meanwhile, to make up the other eight. There were a lot of personal niggles, little battles to be decided and scores to be settled on that day, partly because our boat clubs sat side by side on the Union Canal, and partly because of the historic rivalry between the two schools. I was pretty oblivious to this, to be honest, but there were some guys who virtually lived at the boathouse, with lots of time, and ample opportunity, for feuds to form and fester. It all gave the contest an unmistakable edge. As the race got under way they immediately, and with worrying ease, pulled a length ahead. They had been heavily fancied, not least by themselves … but then, with about 750 metres to go, we began pulling them back. In rowing you find that crews can build up incredible momentum; or hit reverse gear. When the tide turned, so to speak, we kept pulling them back, pulling them back, pulling them back, and eventually rowed through them – as the rowing parlance goes – as we came to the finish. We celebrated as if it had been the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. That was in 1994, and it proved to be my final outing in a boat. But what a way to bow out! I rowed for about three years, finally packing it in because my cycling was getting more serious. Having also moved on from mountain biking, I had now ‘retired’ from five sports, which is not bad for an 18-year-old. It either shows my versatility and willingness to try new things, or suggests that I was very fickle. I loved sport, but I suppose I was still playing the field, looking for ‘the one’ I would be happy to settle down with … but enough of the romantic analogies. I loved keeping busy, always being on the go – it had been a way of life from when I was seven, and riding BMX races – although some of my teachers were concerned about how my out-of-school interests would fit in with my work, and exams. One report card from 1993 says: ‘I hope he will heed his tutor’s comments and not neglect academic work in favour of all the other demands on his time.’ One of my teachers had said: ‘It is important that Chris does not spread himself too thin, i.e. that he balances the demands of his extracurricular interests with the academic demands of his school subjects.’ By now, my cycling ‘career’ had taken me away from the hills of the Pentlands and down two more conventional paths, one covered in tarmac, the other in wood: road racing – encompassing time trials and mass-start road races – and track racing. I was a member of the Dunedin Cycling Club, a longestablished Edinburgh club whose colours were (I thought at the time) a stylish, eye-catching combination of bright red and garish yellow. It was a club that catered for everyone, from dedicated club cyclists to aspiring racers. At the helm was Ray Harris, the club coach, and his wife Doreen, who did as much as Ray to help the club run smoothly. Together they would officiate at club 10- and 25-mile time trials, their stopwatches around their necks, clipboards in hand, but Ray’s speciality was coaching, in which he was way ahead of his time. Ray was into ‘numbers’ and tests, whereas many others were decidedly old school, still basing all their thoughts on tried and tested principles. On the road – which was by far the biggest area of the sport – that meant miles, miles and more miles. Typically, winters would be spent doing ‘club runs’ on a Saturday and Sunday; maybe 50 miles with a group of anything from a few to 20-plus on the Saturday, then around 70 miles on the Sunday, traditionally with a caf? stop. These rides would maybe average around 18–20mph, interspersed with a couple of sprints using 30mph road signs as imaginary finish lines. Midweek, club riders would do what they could, fitting their training around work, university or school. Most would do sessions on a ‘turbo trainer’, a contraption to which you attached your bike, having first removed the front wheel. The back wheel sits on a roller connected to a flywheel, meaning that as you pedal harder, the resistance increases. These lent themselves to shorter, more intense training – mainly because of the boredom of not going anywhere. To alleviate that, I used to listen to music. There were stories of others setting their turbo trainers up in front of a TV, and watching old videos of the Tour de France, or something similarly inspirational, as they pedalled away, going nowhere. It could have been my winter turbo sessions that did as much as anything to convey to my family how serious I was becoming about my cycling training. Though my dad understood it, having accompanied me to BMX and mountain bike races for the best part of 10 years, my mum, though always very supportive, appeared quite bemused by it at times. As I have said, she was a nurse at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, working night shifts in the world-renowned sleep medicine department, and she would frequently pass me on her way out in the evenings. Invariably I’d be sweating and wheezing, and in a generally pretty horrendous state. The reason for these encounters was that I would set my turbo trainer up in the stairwell, the half-way point between our flat, on the first floor of the house, and the freezing cold outside. I’d have the window open, an attempt to cool myself down, and Mum would have to squeeze past me and my turbo trainer on her way to work. I’d be between sets of intervals (short, sprint-like efforts), and I remember her looking at me with an expression that combined bemusement, affectionate amusement and mild concern. ‘That can’t be good for you,’ she’d say. To which I’d reply: ‘ ’. In other words, I’d be slumped over my handlebars in between sprint efforts, gasping for air, and incapable of conversation. Not that my silence ever stopped her shaking her head and remarking, on the way out of the door, ‘That can’t be good for you.’ Had I been able to reply, I might have said: ‘Well, actually, Mum, it is good for me. That’s the point.’ Because this kind of high-intensity interval training, which really only came more widely into vogue in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was considered essential for any racing cyclist, even if it ran against the grain of the old ‘miles, miles and more miles’ school of training. You didn’t really need to be a genius to work this out. In fact, the ‘old school’ methods of training made no sense at all. What would happen was that the bedrock of the amateur cyclist’s winter training would be the weekend club run. And in March he would start racing. The trouble is that races don’t tend to be run off at 18mph. And they don’t include a caf? stop. The saving grace, for many, might have been that most of their competitors were spending their winters doing exactly the same, accumulating lots of steady (a euphemism for slow) miles. As the season progressed everyone would get fitter – and faster – simply by racing. Ray was different. He ran tests on his fabled ‘Kingcycle’ machine, which resembled a modified turbo trainer. This measured power output, a measurement cyclists were hardly even aware of until about 1990, which is strange, given that it is arguably the single most important factor in performance. However, until the Kingcycle, and later ‘power cranks’, there was no accurate way of measuring the watts you were generating through the pedals. Incidentally, I say power is only ‘arguably’ the most important factor because there are others, such as pain threshold and mental toughness, and also because some riders who’ve gone on to have successful careers – the Tour de France cyclist Mark Cavendish being one example – have ‘failed’ lab tests intended to determine their potential based on their power output. As Mark, whose lab tests weren’t exceptional, has shown, there are other significant factors, in his case ambition, determination, guts, doggedness, a healthy level of cockiness and self-belief … and a loathing of lab tests. The converse is also true: you get ‘lab rats’ who perform outstandingly in tests, and less well in actual races. When I joined the Dunedin, my introduction to mainstream cycling – as opposed to BMX and mountain biking, both of which were regarded with some suspicion, or outright disdain, by cycling purists – consisted mainly of road cycling. But the club was more progressive and open-minded than some traditional clubs, embracing mountain biking, going on rides in the Pentlands and organizing races. This can be explained, I think, by two things – the fact that the membership was quite young, and that in our coach, Ray, we had someone who, though in his fifties, was young at heart and in his ideas. Now in his seventies, Ray still has his youthful enthusiasm – he is always one of the first people I hear from whenever I have any success, usually in email form, and with an exuberant message that is unmistakably Ray. Despite our mountain bike outings – on which we were usually joined by Ray – the bulk of the club’s activity centred on the road, and it was inevitable that I’d gravitate there as I moved away from mountain biking. Road cycling is quite diverse – time trials over any distance or duration from 10 miles to 24 hours; road races of up to 65 miles for juniors, 100-plus for seniors; hour-long criteriums, or circuit races. Theoretically there is something for everyone, and my early road career suggested my strengths lay in sprint finishes and short-distance time trials – I won the short ‘prologue’ time trial to the Forres Two-Day race, a race for seniors, though I was still a junior, then punctured, wearing the yellow jersey of leader, about 50 metres after the start of the first road stage. By 1990 I had started riding on the track – I’ll come to that in the next chapter – but I was persisting with the road, too, and in August I was selected to represent Scotland in the biggest event I’d ever ride on the road, the nine-day Junior Tour of Ireland. It was an eye-opening, and in many ways a chastening, experience. And, as with my rowing training, it can be summed up in one word. Brutal. Before the Ireland trip I had a busy summer, with a bit of rowing thrown into the mix, and a job as well. I had moved on from my shifts at the local garage – scene of my encounter with my childhood hero, the footballer John Robertson – to a famous Edinburgh bookshop, James Thin’s, before landing the plum job: in a bike shop. In fact, there was nothing very ‘plum’ about the work I did in Recycling, a shop located on a side street off Leith Walk, the well-known thoroughfare that runs for about two miles from Edinburgh city centre to the neighbouring port of Leith. Now I think about it, the name Leith Walk conjures up an image of an idyllic, meandering path, which couldn’t be more at odds with reality. Leith Walk is big, bustling, frenetic and fairly manic, and it’s no accident that it and some of its pubs provide the backdrop to much of the action in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, the novel that exposes a different Edinburgh to the one you might see in the tourist brochures. I always liked Leith Walk, though, and ended up living in a flat there from 2000 to 2002. My job in the bike shop was pretty unglamorous and definitely belonged more to the Edinburgh of Trainspotting than the posh Edinburgh. As the name of the shop suggests, its main business was recycling old bikes, scrubbing them up and making them roadworthy, then selling them on. There were some crappy jobs, and, as the most junior member of the team, I was given the crappiest ones. I’d get the real rust buckets, and have to go at them with the steel wool and TCut, scrubbing all the muck off, or as much as I could, then sticking on new tyres, and making sure the gears and brakes worked. I loved it, absolutely loved it – the banter, the oily smell of the place, being surrounded all day by bikes – but it was hard work. And, given my fondness at school for maths and other logical subjects, I had moments when I contemplated the economics of it. The owner of the shop paid about ?20 for the old bikes, then sold them on – sometimes just a few hours later, after I’d worn my knuckles to the bone – for about ?50. For my labour I was paid ?2 an hour. It didn’t really add up. And to make it worse, and on account of my considerable appetite, I spent approximately half my day’s earnings in the ‘deli’ around the corner. I loved working there, because I was mad about bikes. But I wasn’t daft. I didn’t like the idea of being taken advantage of, and so I decided that if I went back the following summer, I would ask for a raise. When the call came, I was ready. Sort of. ‘I might have a vacancy in the summer,’ said Mr Recycling when he phoned in the spring, ‘if you’re looking for a job.’ ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘Great,’ he said, ‘you’ll still be on ?2 an hour.’ ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, ‘and get back to you.’ There was another bike shop on the other side of town, called The New Bike Shop, owned by Chris Hill, who had been helping me out with a little bit of sponsorship. I knew Chris, but I didn’t speak to him about a job. Yet for some unfathomable reason, when I called Recycling back, I said: ‘I’ve been offered a job in a different bike shop at ?3 an hour. Could you maybe match that?’ ‘Oh yeah?’ said Mr Recycling. ‘Who’s that with?’ ‘Er … it’s The New Bike Shop,’ I said, mentioning the first bike shop that came to mind. It was his turn now to say he’d have a think about it and get back to me. Our game of poker was reaching its final stages, but I had just played a duff hand. When he phoned me back, he said: ‘It’s strange, Chris, because I spoke to the owner of The New Bike Shop, and he said he didn’t know anything about the job he’s offered you …’ The only consolation was that this conversation was taking place over the phone, because my face turned bright red. I spluttered something in response, but Mr Recycling just laughed and said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you ?3 an hour.’ I think he was quite impressed that I was sticking up for myself, even if my negotiating technique had been a little dubious. I didn’t waste a minute of that summer in 1994. I would work all day at the bike shop, and in the evenings I would be picked up to go rowing, or else went training on my bike, either on the road or at the nearby Meadowbank Velodrome. At the end of the summer I travelled to Leicester for the national track championships, and from there went straight to Ireland for the Junior Tour. Leaving Leicester, with my dad at the wheel, we were late getting to Holyhead for the ferry, which meant catching a later one and arriving at the race HQ, a school hall in a village, at around four in the morning. It wasn’t a disaster – I slept in the car, which is something I’d got down to a fine art 10 years previously on our travels through Europe for the BMX races – but the race started at 9 a.m. the next morning, which was far from ideal. The Junior Tour of Ireland is one of the most famous, and toughest, stage races for juniors, and it has proved a breeding ground for some top road riders, including the great Irishmen Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche. Not only did it last nine days, with stages as long as 65 miles each day, but the roads in Ireland were renowned for being tough – they were rarely flat, always undulating, and the surfaces in many places left much to be desired. I had never attempted anything like it before, but I felt reasonably confident I could hang on during the flat stages and then have a chance whenever a stage was decided by a mass bunch sprint. As we got under way, though, I remember feeling great relief. The peloton of around 120 eager juniors showed very little urgency, and ambled along. True, the roads were a little bit rougher than the wooden boards I’d been riding all week at the velodrome in Leicester – and in places bore a closer resemblance to the tracks I’d tackled on my mountain bike – but I could handle the pace. It was as if the riders had agreed a pact; that the race was so long, and so hard, that it would start in civilized fashion. I’d overlooked one thing: the race hadn’t started. Here I was, riding along thinking, ‘Phew, this is OK; I think I can handle this,’ totally oblivious to the fact that the flag hadn’t yet dropped. To my surprise, after about an hour we stopped en masse. Most riders peeled off to the side of the road to answer the call of nature, while I wondered what was going on, and how everyone except me seemed to be in the know. I soon found out. When the calls of nature had all been answered, we lined up again. This time a flag appeared, and someone shouted ‘Go!’ The race was on. And it really was on: it was flat out from there to the finish, 65 miles away. That first hour, I discovered, had been the neutralized zone, which would be another less than welcome feature of the Junior Tour of Ireland. In order to get around the rule that juniors could only race for a maximum of 65 miles in a day, they had these huge ‘neutralized zones’ – sometimes as long as 25 miles – taking the total distance for the day up to around 90 miles. When the stages started, the entire field would be strung out in a long line for most of the day, a sign that the bunch was going flat out. It was aggressive racing, too, with the Irish riders the main protagonists, and all eager to leave their mark on their national tour. It was a struggle to hold your place in the field, not least because of another rule that applied to juniors – the fact we were only allowed a maximum gear of 93 inches, which corresponded to a 52-tooth chainring at the front, and a 15-tooth sprocket at the back. The purpose of this rule was to encourage younger riders to spin small gears rather than push big ones; it was designed to protect joints and improve suppleness. A fine principle, and it shouldn’t have been a handicap in Ireland – after all, we were all using the same gear, so we were all in the same boat … Weren’t we? I started to wonder. Especially when I saw some of the Irish riders driving on the front all day, their legs seemingly turning a lot slower than mine, which were almost spinning off just trying to keep up. There were gear checks at the end of each stage, and at one of the gear checks the Irish got pulled over. A couple of guys had blocked off their gears, meaning that they had bigger gears on their bike, but couldn’t access them. That wasn’t allowed, but they weren’t disqualified – they were relegated to last on the stage, and allowed to carry on. After a few days of the Junior Tour I was on my knees. I was the Scotland team’s sprinter, expected to be up there at the finish, but I woke up each morning wondering how I’d make the start, never mind the finish. There were other challenges, too. The diet was decidedly ‘old school’, with our team manager insisting that we start each day with an enormous plate of pasta and beans. ‘Get it down you, boys,’ he would say, and it was interpreted as a sign of weakness if you couldn’t manage it all. Loss of appetite is one of the signs, on a stage race, that someone has gone beyond their limit. But the reality was that the pasta and beans combination was so disgusting, especially first thing in the morning, that it was a struggle to eat it no matter how hungry you were. The Junior Tour of Ireland exposed me to other aspects of cycling culture. Put a team of 17-year-old boys together in a stage race and there will inevitably be some shenanigans, even if they are focused on what they’re doing. One evening, about half-way through the race, our manager, who was also acting as soigneur (masseur), and whom we secretly christened ‘Wee Nutter,’ was addressed by one of the riders by this moniker. He flipped and it prompted a semi-light-hearted wrestling match between the two, which ended with our manager/soigneur hurting his thumb quite seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he couldn’t give us massages for the remainder of the race, which was quite a drawback in terms of helping our recovery for the next day. Another feature of the Junior Tour – which we riders didn’t experience – was the legendary ‘night stages.’ For many of the managers and mechanics these seemed more of a priority than the day stages – i.e. the races – and acted as an excuse for them to drain Ireland of its supplies of Guinness. As for the racing, it was like groundhog day. The painful legs when you woke up; the ordeal of breakfast; the long neutralized section; and then balls to the wall racing for three hours. I remember one stage in particular – 60 miles long, and covered in not much more than two hours. Our average that day was 29.6mph – you don’t get many stages of the Tour de France run off at that speed. Despite all that, I did manage to force my way into the top 10 on three stages, my best placing being fifth in one bunch sprint. But on stages where there were hills I had no chance – having had a growth spurt in my late teens, I was bigger than most other road cyclists, who tended to be small and wiry – and it turned into a massive test of endurance and willpower just to finish. By the end there were three of us left in the Scottish team – the other two having abandoned – but I did finish, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. The 1994 Junior Tour of Ireland also gave me the answer to one question that had lurked at the back of my mind, as it does with any young cyclist. Would I ever ride the world’s most famous race, the Tour de France? No. Definitely not. 5 (#ulink_9abdc290-0a11-537d-9727-b696729790a9) Going Round in Circles (#ulink_9abdc290-0a11-537d-9727-b696729790a9) It was with the Dunedin Cycling Club that I started riding at Meadowbank Velodrome, the track in Edinburgh that was built for the 1970 Commonwealth Games, and rebuilt for the 1986 Games. I vividly remember my introduction to Meadowbank. But I’d imagine that most people remember their first visit, because it’s so difficult to find. It’s in a strange place, out on a limb from the rest of the Meadowbank Stadium and sports centre, which includes an athletics stadium and football pitches on a sprawling, campus-style complex. You enter the car park, with the main stadium on your left, and then drive to the furthest corner of the car park, where a narrow, pockmarked road runs parallel to the main Edinburgh–London rail line. After about 100 metres it opens out into another small car park, with a Portakabin – headquarters to the Scottish Cyclists’ Union – on your left, and, straight ahead, a big, white, pebbledash building. There is no clue that it is a velodrome, and no obvious entrance. You gain access to it by some steps that lead down into a dark tunnel, which tends to act as a repository for rainwater … ah yes, rain: a subject I’ll return to in a moment. There are often a couple of puddles to avoid as you make your way through the tunnel, heading for the set of steps at the other end, taking you back up into daylight. I remember emerging from the tunnel that first time, blinking, into the light, and being taken aback, and a little intimidated, by what I saw. For all that the place was clearly quite run down, and the entrance so unprepossessing, there is nothing that really prepares you for your first view, ‘in the flesh’, of a velodrome. Before me there stood what looked like a wooden wall of death: the corners really were like vast vertical walls rearing up from the ground. Though I had known what a velodrome was, I hadn’t anticipated how steep its corners would be. And, funnily enough, that’s usually the first thing most people say when they enter a velodrome for the first time. Meadowbank’s only failing – and one of the reasons for it looking so run down – is that it has never had a roof. Rain has always been the curse of the place, and many a scheduled session of racing or training has been destroyed over the years by rain, which renders the wooden boards unrideable by transforming them into an ice rink. But the problem goes beyond interruptions to the calendar. The constant exposure of the track to the elements has taken its toll, damaging the boards, and leaving them prone to splintering. As I write, the Meadowbank Velodrome still stands – just. I supported the ‘Save Meadowbank’ campaign in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, and following the Games the track – and indeed the entire complex – was granted a reprieve by Edinburgh Council. It would be nice to think that this was in response to the campaign, but I suspect it also had rather a lot to do with the economic crisis and its effect on the value of the land that the track sits on. The site of the velodrome had been earmarked for luxury flats, but as the value of land plummeted, this scheme made less and less financial sense to the council. So, Edinburgh still has a cycling track, though for how long, no one really knows. It could certainly do with a new one – nothing fancy, just something beginners can have a shot on, and serious riders can train on, 12 months of the year. In other words, preferably with a roof. Thinking back to my early outings on the track, there was no real Eureka! moment; nothing, initially, that indicated to me that I had finally found the sport to which I would dedicate the next 20 years – and counting – of my life. The first time I turned up was on a Friday evening for a Dunedin track night. I suspect that everyone has felt daunted before going out there, and I was no different. I was given a track bike belonging to the East of Scotland Cycling Association – a very basic, fairly old machine with no gears and no brakes, as is the norm with track bikes. Track bikes have ‘fixed wheels’ – only one gear and no brakes – and so you slow down by easing the pressure on the pedals, which is a lot less effective than squeezing some brake levers with your fingers. As a consequence, you have less control on a track bike, and once you are up there on the boards, you are largely at their mercy. Or at least that’s what it feels like at first. As I wheeled my borrowed track bike over to the straight – where the gradient is more gentle – and swung my leg over, I was very nervous and a little bit excited. There was a group of riders lapping the 250-metre track, going at around 25 to 30mph, riding in a compact line, one tucked behind the other for maximum shelter. Riding in such close proximity to each other with no gears and no brakes looked as if it took skill and nerve in equal measure, and I wasn’t sure when, or if, I’d be able to do that. My first thought was that I should keep out of their way. Our club coach, Ray Harris, who was running the training session, gave me a few pointers. ‘Keep your speed up – if you go into the banking too slowly, the tyres will lose their traction and you’ll slide … look where you want to go – straight in front of you … use the lines on the track, especially the black one near the bottom, to keep your bearings … overtake riders on the outside, not the inside … and whatever you do, don’t try to stop pedalling!’ This is the biggest danger for the fixed wheel novice. If you make any kind of effort on the road you can freewheel for a bit to recover. If you try that on the track, with the ‘fixed wheel’ bikes, you’ll do a good impression of a cowboy on an angry horse, and end up on your (soon to be splintered) backside. The pedals won’t stop, so you can’t just stop pedalling; you have to ease off gradually. Depending on how fast you’re going, it can take a lap or two to come to a complete halt. As I set off off along the home straight, Ray shouted after me, urging me to press harder on the pedals, and to increase my speed as I entered the banking – to commit to it. Commitment was the key; if I backed off at all I’d slither down the track. But it’s counter-intuitive: your instinct is to back off, because if the banking seems steep from the centre, it appears even steeper as you ride into it. And it does appear, at first, as though you are riding into a wall rather than around a bend; it can induce a claustrophobic feeling, looming over you, almost swallowing you up and giving you nowhere to go. The bend curves to the left, but every instinct is telling you to lean to the right to try and correct that. It takes several laps just to begin to feel confident on the bends; to ride at speed, leaning, counter-intuitively, into them rather than trying, counterproductively, to lean out of them. As I got up to speed on that first session I could feel my confidence growing, and my fear turning to exhilaration. By the end of my few laps I was enjoying it, though I didn’t have the confidence, yet, to ride in a group – or go too close to other riders. That would take a few more outings. But I started heading down to the track – about a 20-minute bike ride from my house – on a regular basis. Our Dunedin track nights weren’t formal training, as such, but more like a bit of fun. I worked up to riding in the group, and we’d do around 40 laps of ‘through-and-off’ – riding in a line, taking turns at the front before swinging up the banking, dropping back and latching on to the back of the string. If you’ve seen a team pursuit race, it’s the same idea, but usually with anything from four to about 15 riders. Did I have any talent? If I did, it was well hidden – though, as I have said already, I think the notion of ‘talent’ is overrated. Counting against me, at this stage, was that I didn’t specialize in one event: I did everything. I began taking part in the Meadowbank Track League on a Tuesday evening – when it wasn’t rained off – where I would ride every race going. I was 16, still reasonably skinny – around 74 kilos, as opposed to the 93 I weigh now – and trying to be as lean as possible. If you look at most cyclists, they are as slender as jockeys, with large thighs, but sunken cheeks and protruding rib cages. The only cyclists who didn’t conform to that stereotype were track sprinters, but I was a long way from deciding that’s what I wanted to be. I was still riding the road, and doing endurance events – the pursuit and bunch races – on the track. By 1993 I was riding the track league most weeks, and my first full season of track cycling coincided with the sudden emergence on to the world stage of a Scottish superstar. Graeme Obree, mentioned at the start of the last chapter, had been winning time trials for years, while enjoying a close rivalry with Chris Boardman, the English rider who, the previous year, became the first British cyclist in 84 years to win an Olympic gold medal, claiming the pursuit at the Barcelona Games – another event that I found profoundly inspiring. Boardman’s success seemed also to inspire Obree; he could see his rival’s career taking off and his name in lights and obviously thought, ‘That could be me.’ But the question for Obree was, how? He set his sights on the prestigious world ‘hour’ record, which had been established in 1984 by the Italian Francesco Moser, beating the mark set in 1972 by the legendary Eddy Merckx. ‘The hour’ is an unusual race, measuring simply the distance you ride in 60 minutes, and it was seldom ridden – mainly, perhaps, because it was so brutally tough. After his record ‘hour’ Merckx reckoned it had taken five years off his life. Boardman had announced that he would have a go at Moser’s record in July, but Obree cheekily beat him to it, travelling to the Hamar track in Norway and bettering Moser’s mark just a week before Boardman’s planned assault. It was an audacious thing to do, but that was Obree all over. Though he had no real back-up or financial support, he lived by the credo of nothing is impossible – or ‘impossible is nothing’, as one of my sponsors puts it. Though Boardman beat his record a week later – only for Obree to claim it back the following year – Obree also won the world pursuit title that year, beating Boardman. Obree became my cycling hero, as did Boardman. We weren’t blessed, in Scotland or Britain, with an abundance of world-class riders we could aspire to emulate, but Obree and Boardman’s rivalry sparked huge interest. Apart from them, the ‘heroes’ of the sport were, and had always tended to be, the continental road riders, or, on the track, the Australian and French sprinters. Boardman’s victory in the 1992 Olympics was a big inspiration to me – I listened to it on the BBC’s World Service on a family holiday in France – and Obree ticked every box as far as I was concerned – he was the best in the world, he was an original, he was inspirational … and he was from Scotland. Cycling Weekly was a good resource for the latest Obree news. But it was surreal that he was one of us, competing in my own backyard. Guys from my club would come home from time trials in the West of Scotland, having competed against him on the GD21 course, or whatever, and report back. The times he was doing were unbelievable: he’d go four minutes faster than me over a 10-mile time trial. He seemed superhuman. I first saw him at the national championships in Leicester in 1993, a month after he broke the hour record. This was before the world championships, and he had to win the national title to be selected for the British team alongside the Olympic champion, Boardman, whose selection had been guaranteed. Obree reached the final, where he faced Bryan Steel, one of the country’s most consistent pursuit riders. I was in the crowd watching, preparing to cheer on Obree, but my heart stopped as the race got under way and he pulled his foot out of the pedal. He had been a strong favourite to beat Steel, having qualified fastest, but this mishap looked to have cost him the race, and his place at the world championships. Obree lost several seconds trying to get his foot back in – something that’s not easy on a fixed wheel bike, with the pedals constantly in motion – and when he eventually began to get going, working hard to turn the huge gear he used, he was well down on Steel. I was caught up in the excitement of it and moved to the edge of the track, cheering him on. It was a classic pursuit race, and gradually Obree began to reel him in, eventually coming through to win. It was an amazing performance, and entirely typical of Obree, whose life story was far from straightforward, and involved overcoming – sometimes selfinflicted – hurdles and difficulties. Funnily enough, I recently watched a Graeme Obree DVD with footage of this race, and saw myself standing watching in the back straight – a skinny youth in a white cap. Obree wasn’t the only rider to pull his foot out of the pedal at those championships. I did, too. It was in qualifying for the junior pursuit, and I was using the old toe-clips and straps, which, ironically, were supposed to be more secure than the new clip-less pedals. Embarrassingly, and unlike Obree, I wasn’t able to reattach my foot to my pedal – there are echoes here of my traumatic foot-pedal mishap at the BMX world championships in Slough seven years earlier – and so I rode the entire race, all three kilometres, with my foot resting on top of the pedal, rather than secured in it. Consequently, it took me roughly the same time to cover three kilometres as for Obree to do four. I didn’t qualify. And I didn’t do much better in the sprint, scraping through qualification in seventeenth (eighteen went through), then dead-heating in the first-round ‘repechage’. My campaign didn’t last much longer, but the experience of riding those championships, at the end of a summer when I’d been doing more rowing than cycling (I had just come from the Home Countries rowing championships, which were also a disaster: we sank the boat) was an eye-opener. As far as track cycling went, I recognize now that I was really only playing at it, and my going to the British championships was the equivalent of a golfer whose experience is limited to the driving range playing a round with Tiger Woods. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but I was certainly up against some serious opponents. Some of them had highly specialized, and very pricey, track bikes, whereas I used the same machine for sprint and pursuit, the only concession being to change the handlebars between races. I was competitive in terms of my attitude, but I wasn’t under any illusions – I knew I didn’t have the same experience, and hadn’t put in the same work as some of the others. Really, the highlight of my first national track championships didn’t come in any of my races, but in briefly meeting Obree. He was so unassuming and approachable; no matter who you were (or weren’t), he put you at ease, and you got the impression he’d happily spend all day signing autographs, posing for photographs and chatting. He just seemed so normal. But as far as performance was concerned, he occupied a different planet. When I returned to Leicester for the national championships the following year, having ridden virtually a full season of track league – and more or less finished with rowing – several things had changed, including my club. Over the winter of 1993/94 I decided I wanted to focus more on track cycling, and I joined a club dedicated to the track, the City of Edinburgh Racing Club. This was an impressive set-up, the Manchester United of British track racing, since it didn’t only sweep the board at the national championships, but it also tended to sign up all the best talent. I don’t include myself in that category, incidentally, but it was a club that took racing seriously, and it had an aura about it. A bit like the British track cycling team now, it was a club where mediocrity was not accepted; when you went to the British championships, you went there to win medals. At that time in Scotland only a very elite group of people had ever won a medal in a British championship. It was a big deal. But that was the purpose of ‘The City’, as the club was known. When I joined, I didn’t say I was going to do this or that, but I stated my goals, which were to win a medal at the British championships. That pressed the right buttons. British medals were the City of Edinburgh Racing Club’s raison d’?tre. But in 1994 I came up against my b?te noire – to keep the French going – in a fellow junior sprinter, James Taylor. He had been riding for a few years and he brought all his experience to bear in match sprinting, which is the most tactical of races. I was quicker than him – I was actually fastest in the 200m qualifying time trial, which came as a major surprise as I hadn’t trained for it. But, having exceeded all expectations by reaching the final of the junior sprint, against Taylor I had no idea what to do. I was na?ve, and my tactics were dreadful. In the first race, he pinned me to the fence, at the top of the track; and from there he was in control. I knew I was faster than him; but I didn’t have a clue how to beat him in a headto-head scenario. I came off after that first heat and received a bit of a dressing down from Brian Annable, who ran – and still runs – the City of Edinburgh club. He didn’t enjoy seeing his boys beaten; and he certainly didn’t enjoy seeing them humiliated. ‘What did you do that for?’ he asked, meaning: why did I allow Taylor to pin me to the fence? ‘He made you look like an arse!’ he added, just to make sure I got the message. And it might have been true, but it didn’t really help me going into the second heat, where, predictably enough, the same thing happened. Though I knew I was quicker than Taylor, he had guile and what we call ‘track craft’. In a mano a mano contest he could dictate things – the mark of a skilful sprinter. Still, a silver medal in the British championships, though it might not have pleased Brian Annable, was a fantastic result for me, especially as it got me a place on the British squad, which meant once-a-month sessions, under the watchful eye of the national track coach Marshall Thomas, at the brand new Manchester Velodrome. It vindicated my decision to join The City and to devote more energy to track racing. I was still growing, and beginning to fill out, which made me less suited to other cycling disciplines, and my enthusiasm was increasing at a similar rate. By now I’d usually be at Meadowbank twice a week, once for training, once for track league; I was really keen and motivated, and I felt that I could go somewhere. I was improving with every race, which was massively exciting. It felt as though I was embarking on a journey, and I didn’t know where it would end; I didn’t know what the limitations were, or even if there were any. But I was desperate for help, for guidance – and there wasn’t much of that to be had. I was also at another crossroads, a more important one. I was in my final year at school and considering my next move – a decision that wasn’t really helped by the computer programme I completed at school, which was supposed to tell me what career my skills and interests were suited to. Other than being convinced that I should go to university, I didn’t have a clue what I would do in the longer term, so I was curious to see what the careers advice would be. After feeding in all the relevant information – in response to questions as bizarre as ‘Would you rather work in a blue room or a green room?’ and ‘What’s your favourite month?’ – I waited anxiously for the answer that could determine my future. Or not. The computer said: Brewer. Or advocate. At school, as I have said, I was more interested in the sciences. I quite liked English too, eventually graduating from my ‘What I did at the weekend’ essays about BMXing. But I preferred logic to ambiguity. For my Highers – the Scottish equivalent of ‘A’ levels – I did maths, English, physics, chemistry and biology, but I was disappointed with my results. Having got ‘A’s in the preliminary exams, I ended up with two ‘B’s and three ‘C’s in the actual exams. There’s an interesting parallel with sport here, I think. Academically, I never felt that I struggled. I got top marks in my Standard Grades, and progressed through school without ever really working – or feeling that I had to. When I got to fifth year, and the all-important Highers, I had that same mentality, and didn’t really work for them. I was complacent, thinking that, since I’d always done OK in exams, I’d sail through. Looking through some of my report cards – an embarrassing but necessary part of writing an autobiography – I spot a theme emerging around this time, one that is sometimes buried, though not too deeply, in the subtext. In one I’m described as ‘a highly motivated pupil [but] I agree with [another teacher’s] remarks about chatting. Perhaps this is just a sign of enthusiasm.’ In physics, apparently I ‘ask and answer questions frequently – usually about physics’. In French: ‘I hope Chris will not spend too much time trying to be funny, which he undoubtedly is, but it must not be an end in itself.’ I think he meant that I was funny in French, not English. I should have stuck at it. But it was my English teacher, Christopher Rush – now the highly respected author of several acclaimed books – who identified my biggest shortcoming. ‘Chris has performed ably on all fronts except one … the weak front? Failure to revise adequately for tests. The same must not happen when it comes to exams.’ Alas, Mr Rush, it did. I recognize now that I was complacent about my school work – that I never felt it necessary to work hard for exams. Yet in sport the converse was true. In each sport I took part in I recognized the need for hard work; I never felt that it came easily, because there were always people better than me. Nobody ever told me I was ‘the next big thing’ – as certain of my young rivals were told. (Subsequently, quite a few have told me, whenever I’ve had any success, that ‘I always knew you’d do that …’ though I don’t remember them saying anything at the time.) In BMX, rugby, rowing and cycling, there was always at least one person better than me, meaning that I could never rest on my laurels. One thing I’ve realized about myself is that I can put 100 per cent into something, but only if I’m really motivated to. Maybe that’s the case for most people, but I think that if sport had come easily to me – if I’d been top of the tree – I would probably have lost interest at an early stage. After my silver medal at the 1994 British track championships I was satisfied, because it meant I had made progress, but there was absolutely no danger of me being complacent. I knew that if I were ever going to beat the James Taylors of this world I’d have to work very hard. And I’d have to combine it with my studies for a university degree. Despite my disappointing grades in the Highers, I got an unconditional offer from St Andrews University to study physics and maths. St Andrews was perfect: far enough away from Edinburgh to ensure that I wouldn’t go running home at the first opportunity, but close enough to return if I wanted to. 6 (#ulink_850113b8-fcec-5fc6-85e0-3ca70cc45e96) Craig and Jason (#ulink_850113b8-fcec-5fc6-85e0-3ca70cc45e96) My first year at St Andrews University, which turned out to be my only year, was brilliant. I threw myself into student life, going out most nights, making new friends, eating rubbish and enjoying a drink or two, or three. It was great fun, if incompatible with the life of an athlete, though I had decided not to be an athlete that first term. At least I think I had decided, but maybe I didn’t decide; maybe it just happened. And I was pretty sure I could get away with it, more or less. In those days track cycling was a summer sport – it switched to winter a few years ago – and the serious work wouldn’t need to start until the New Year. At home over the Christmas holidays I got back on my bike, and when I returned to St Andrews for the second term I scaled back on the social life. Easter brought an exotic racing trip to Trinidad and Barbados, which would set me up for a year of solid progress, though it started with a bang, following a crash, that ended with me sporting a neck brace. The racing in the West Indies really has to be witnessed to be believed; it is like nowhere else, and should definitely feature on the ‘must do’ list for any track cyclist. It is strange, because, at international level, riders from this part of the world haven’t had massive success; and yet to race there, in front of thousands of exuberant fans, you’d think it was the national sport. The meetings are like carnivals with an atmosphere similar, I would imagine, to the biggest cricket matches, with the fans singing, dancing and chucking ice cubes at you as you raced. Well, it is hot. Riding our bikes into Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, we were treated like heroes, but even that didn’t prepare us for the atmosphere inside the velodrome, with its large, concrete, lumpy track, a running track around the inside, and stands absolutely jam-packed with people, probably around 5,000 of them. I was there with two fellow sprinters, Craig MacLean and Peter Jacques, and the endurance rider Martin Williamson, all City of Edinburgh club mates, and on the first night I lined up alongside eight other riders for a keirin. The others were from the islands, with some South Americans there too, including a couple of Cubans who quickly gained a reputation for their no-holds-barred style of racing. There was some pretty rough riding, to be honest, with the rules sketchy, and an anything-goes approach, particularly when it came to ‘primes’. These are special prizes awarded at the end of certain laps, announced the lap before with a blast of the ‘commissaire’ (referee)’s whistle. Some of these guys would run over their granny to win a prime – a prime, I should add, that carried prize money (we worked out) of approximately ?3.50. In the keirin, with the lumpy track and the jostling, it felt dangerous, and so it proved. I was ‘hooked’ by one of the Cubans, meaning he cut across my line, and down I went, like a tonne of bricks. I was in a bad way, with multiple cuts and road rash, but it was my neck that gave most cause for concern. As I lay on the track I was attended to by an official from the Barbados Cycling Federation, who took me to the local hospital, where I was examined and fitted with a neck brace. I feared the worst, that my racing trip to the West Indies would be cut short after 24 hours of an intended three-anda-half week odyssey, but, after a couple of days, I had recovered sufficiently to remove the neck brace, get back on my bike and resume racing. The rest of the trip included racing in Trinidad, where we stayed in a terrible hotel, occupied by an army of cockroaches, and competing in one of the most bizarre velodromes on the planet, involving a two-and-a-half hour journey by mini-bus into the middle of a jungle in Palesco. It was a 500-metre track but with bends as steep as a 250m track, which made it unbelievably dangerous, and meant you could hardly ride above the black (bottom) line on the banking. You’d have to ride single-file around the bends and then overtake on the long straights. I fell off there, too, in an incident that proved the point just made: a guy was riding above me on one of the bends, and, even though he was going at a decent speed, his tyres slipped, and he slid down the banking, taking me out. Fortunately I wasn’t too badly hurt this time. The other memorable incident in Barbados concerned one of my team-mates, Martin. While Craig and I had travelled straight there from a training camp in Majorca, and therefore had a bit of colour – meaning that our skin had turned from the usual Scottish pale blue to creamy white – Martin was as white as a sheet. When he was in the local supermarket he decided to do something about it. On the shelf he saw something called ‘Melatonin’, which he mistook for a natural remedy that he had heard was used by bodybuilders to make their skin turn darker more quickly (basically making their skin more photosensitive). He didn’t realize melatonin was also a natural sleep-promoting remedy. When he looked at the packaging, it said to take one before bed time. ‘Why bed time?’ he asked, before stretching out under the sun for the remainder of the afternoon. It was our first day, we were racing in the evening (when I would suffer my heavy crash), but, as we started to think about leaving, we noticed that Martin had crashed out. We tried to wake him, but he was completely zonked. After several coffees a very lethargic Martin started to come round. But he wasn’t any browner. Even after living the typical life of a fresher student in that first term at university, I found that, once I got my head down and resumed training, with the training camp in Majorca and racing trip to the West Indies both providing essential building blocks in my preparation for the season, I was still on an upward curve. At the British championships that summer I won my first gold medal, riding with City of Edinburgh in a new event, the three-man team sprint, and added a silver medal in the team pursuit. As well as Graeme Obree there was another Scottish cyclist who proved a great influence, and an inspiration, at this time. Craig MacLean, one of my companions in the West Indies, was five years older than me. In fact, he still is. Craig and I were Dunedin club-mates, and he too had dabbled in mountain biking and road racing, but by the mid1990s he was committed to the track, and he was already enjoying some success. Like me, he did a bit of everything, but his main attribute was an incredible turn of pace. Whereas I was still relatively skinny, he was stockier and shorter – more the classic build of a sprinter. He was muscular, but as lean as a particularly lean piece of fillet steak. Craig was definitely going places, even if the City of Edinburgh Racing Club didn’t see that at first. His application to join the club in 1995 was rejected, so he raced that season with the Moray Firth club, based up in the Highlands, which is where he comes from. I had a long way to go to catch Craig up, although sometimes, if he was on his worst day and I was on my best, it would be close. I remember the first time I beat him. It was during that breakthrough season, 1995, at the Scottish 15km scratch race championship, in a bunch endurance race on the outdoor track at Caird Park in Dundee. This was a track in an even more decrepit state than Meadowbank, and concrete rather than wood, but on this occasion it hosted a great race – though I may be biased. As we came to the finish, I led it out, with Craig on my wheel. I was going hard, full gas, and I was aware of Craig moving off my wheel, and beginning to claw me back, inching up towards my right shoulder, when I dug as deep as I possibly could, and broke him; he swung off up the track fairly melodramatically, settling for second. Already Craig was seen as the main man, the daddy, and I was regarded as his prot?g?, which led some to the natural assumption that he had gifted me the race. John McMillan, the race commissaire, came up to both of us afterwards and said: ‘Craig, if you’re going to give him the race, do it more subtly than that …’ I was fuming! I knew I’d won it fair and square, but Craig didn’t correct John – he just laughed. It was like that Billy Connolly sketch, where he mimics someone tripping up on the pavement and breaking into a run as if he had been about to do that all along. Craig was happy to maintain the illusion, because it saved his face. Competitive bugger. And just to compound the insult, the annual Scottish Cyclists’ Union handbook, which is the bible of Scottish racing, later listed Craig as the winner! He had won it the previous year, and he would go on to win it again the following year, but his name appears as the winner of the title three years in a row. It was my first senior title, and something I was very proud of. Imagine how I felt when I found that my name was missing from the record. I was gutted! Returning to university after a summer that had yielded senior gold medals in the British and Scottish championships was difficult. St Andrews is picture-postcard beautiful: a seaside town surrounded by vast, golden beaches, as well as the most famous golf course in the world. But I was more interested in velodromes, and increasingly concerned about its isolation in relation to the nearest of them. Meadowbank was around an hour away, and Manchester, to which I was by now almost a weekly visitor, up to five hours. My dilemma was made worse by the fact that I was less and less sure about the course to which I had committed four years of my life. Maths and physics had been the subjects I’d done OK in at school, but now, though I was passing the exams, and coping with the course work, I was no longer enjoying them. I was also beginning to wonder where they would take me and, more to the point, whether I really wanted to go there … I returned for my second year harbouring these doubts, and within a couple of weeks I realized they weren’t going to disappear, but would grow worse. When I made the decision, I made it quickly. The degree I’d chosen wasn’t for me, and there was no point in prolonging the uncertainty. I phoned my parents, told them my decision, and, though I’m sure they were concerned, they couldn’t have been more supportive. Subsequently they have admitted to thinking ‘What the hell is he doing?’ and they weren’t all that reassured by my new plans: to try and get on a sports science course. At the time, though, they didn’t interrogate me too much. My dad came and collected me, and I returned home, where my parents made it clear that I couldn’t ‘sponge’ off them, and that I would have to get a job – or sign on. I signed on, for one week, and then got a job once again at James Thin’s, the bookshop. And so I became a ‘dropout’ – a loaded phrase if ever there was one, conjuring up an image of a Young Ones-style waster. That wasn’t quite the life I had in mind. There was a feeling of failure, I suppose, but I knew that I couldn’t keep going with the degree, because I wasn’t enjoying the course. I had a great social life in St Andrews, a really good group of friends, but that wasn’t enough to keep me committed, and motivated, for another three years. As for losing face, I wasn’t too worried about that, to be honest; the fact I had an alternative plan made it a justifiable decision, I reckoned. Still, when people asked, ‘So, you’ve packed in physics – what are you going to do?’ and I said, ‘Sports science’, the typical response would be: ‘Er … oh, OK’. What they were probably thinking was ‘Mickey Mouse’, because sports science degrees were fairly new back then, and there was a general lack of understanding about what they involved. Craig was another reason for wanting to be in Edinburgh. We had become good friends – we shared the same sense of humour and spent so much time together that we were practically finishing each other’s sentences. We also had lots in common, not least our enthusiasm for our sport, and, more importantly I think, our curiosity. Although Craig’s second application to join The City for 1996 was accepted, it was clear that we were, to all intents and purposes, on our own. If we wanted to succeed we’d have to do it together – there was a dearth of coaching expertise, or any practical support in terms of sponsorship and funding. The City was an ambitious club, and great to be part of, but it had few resources and minimal funding. But The City was as good as it got in the UK. Quite simply, there was practically zero sponsorship in track cycling, and it was ludicrous to think that it could ever be a career. It was a passion, a hobby, and for me it was coming close to being an obsession. It was all I thought about, all I wanted to do, and if that is the definition of ‘obsession’, then I suppose I’d have to admit it. But at the back of my mind – and occasionally venturing to the forefront – was one of life’s golden rules, instilled in me by my parents: that I needed, in the classic parents’ phrase, ‘something to fall back on’. In other words, a degree or qualification that would enable me to find a job when, inevitably, the day came to enter the real world. Craig already had something to fall back on, having qualified as a piano tuner. But now, as we prepared for the 1996 season, he was fully committed to cycling – and just as obsessed as I was. Looking back, I recognize the years 1995 and 1996 as key ones. My gold medals in the British and Scottish championships in 1995 acted as a catalyst for me to think that I could enjoy some success in this sport, if I worked hard at it. I mentioned in the Introduction that I was more interested in the question of ‘how’ than in that of ‘why’ some people decide to commit themselves so fully to something, to the extent that it does come close to being an obsession. But now, when I think of this period, when there was no real sponsorship, no lottery funding, few positive role models in the sport – at least few who actually made a living from it – and general uncertainty, I do ask myself: why? It’s hard to explain what kept me going. I certainly got huge satisfaction from achieving success, and winning races, but there was something far more powerful than that driving me on. For me the most potent motivational fuel was not ambition, I think, but curiosity. I wanted to see how far I could go. As I said earlier, it felt as if I were embarking on a journey, with the destination – and indeed the stop-off points – unknown. But that was the most thrilling thing about it: I could dream about where it might take me. The Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 was an obvious goal, the Olympics in Sydney in 2000 a long shot, but that’s all these thoughts were at this point: dreams. Some people take a gap year, and buy a round-the-world ticket, setting off with no fixed itinerary, only vague ideas of where they might go and what they might find. I suppose I was doing something broadly similar, but for no fixed period, and with Craig as my travel partner, even if our ‘travel’ usually entailed nothing more exotic than repeated visits to a secluded road by Edinburgh airport – but more on that in a moment. Craig was approaching his mid-20s, and I think he was very conscious of it being his time. Like me, he was also on a steadily upward curve of improvement, and he didn’t know when that would end, but he was probably in more of a hurry than me. I was his sparring partner but I was also like his mini-me, in his shadow. I was working in the bookshop and had applied to start sports science at Heriot-Watt University. Craig was unemployed, scraping by and no more, and it wasn’t easy for him. Then again, we had a friend the same age as Craig, who we’d cycled with before he gave up and got a ‘normal’ job. He was already earning a lot of money, but I remember him saying he’d give up what he was doing to have the opportunity to do what we were doing. ‘Living the dream’ was how he put it. And I don’t recall noticing that his tongue was in his cheek. Craig was no ‘workshy fop’, to quote Vic Reeves. He considered cycling his full-time job, even if there was no money in it. We became virtually inseparable, training together, and, when we weren’t training, poring over training manuals. Craig was a voracious reader of books, at least a voracious skimmer of books and borrower of library books. He trawled libraries in Edinburgh, taking out books about training, fitness, physiology, muscle power – anything that might yield even the tiniest nugget of useful information or advice. Some of this information influenced our training, which was experimental, to say the least. We became fascinated by the ‘big gear principle’ in training. Craig had watched Graham Sharman, an Australian sprinter, using very big gears, and it made sense to him. It could improve strength, and specifically cycling strength; it was like doing weights, but on a bike. We decided that this was important; that it should be a central plank of our training, pushing a huge gear, no matter how slowly you were going. We’d find hills and grind our way up them. And we found that quiet little road by Edinburgh airport, which was perfect. Traffic was virtually non-existent, it was over a mile long, and it was dead straight. It was just as well there was no traffic, because we might have caused an accident with drivers craning their necks as they went past, trying to work out what the hell we were doing. Picture the scene: two racing cyclists in full gear, pedalling very slowly, clearly making big, vein-popping efforts, but moving at a snail’s pace. Had anyone been out for a stroll, they would have overtaken us. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/chris-hoy/chris-hoy-the-autobiography/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.