Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore
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it was useful, really. I said to them: use it for making comparisons with yourself. Don’t ever say, “I’ve got to get 350 watts, or 500 watts.” Because, at the end of the day, someone who didn’t make 500 watts could still win the race. That’s one of the curious things about cycling. Power is bloody important but it isn’t the be-all and end-all. Having the power is one thing, employing it is another.’
Hoy, whose passion for training remains undimmed, remembers the Kingcycle tests with something approaching fondness – which could explain a lot. ‘Cycling is one of the most advanced sports in terms of scientific development,’ he says, ‘and the Kingcycle was an early example of a scientific way of looking at performance. I remember going for these tests in Ray’s lab at Moray House [the teacher training college in Edinburgh] and I remember just loving the measurability of it all. Getting that power read-out at the end of it, and looking at it thinking, “In April I was there; it’s July now, I’m here; by October I want to be there.” It appealed to my personality, this idea that if you did X it will result in Y happening to your performance.
‘As a kid I wasn’t the kind of person who did really well at sports that required a lot of intuition, skill, interpretation or subjectivity,’ he continues. ‘I wasn’t good at racket sports, which required good hand–eye coordination. I did alright at rugby but I was never that great. But I loved the science behind training for cycling.’
As well as his performance testing, Harris was particularly adept at working with young people; he was the adult who took your passion for cycling – and, by extension, you – seriously. Clearly he knew his stuff, and, through the likes of Graeme Obree and other leading Scottish cyclists, he did work with elite adult athletes. But what he was really interested in was helping aspiring young athletes, especially those just starting out, as Hoy was in the early 1990s.
It was unusual, in these circumstances, that he was taken seriously as a coach at all. As Harris explains: ‘You get your coaching credibility through coaching at the highest level. Your credibility comes from coaching someone who went to the Commonwealth Games or Olympics. But I resented this. I rebelled. I’m a bit of a reverse snob. This was really cherry picking, I thought.
‘The thing is, people think that you can coach children with a limited knowledge. But you can’t. You have to understand that children are not yet physically mature. You can push them too hard; I’ve seen this happen in swimming, with interval training for eight- and nine-year-olds. You can break them. So I thought I could really help young people.
‘A lot of my coaching has been with what I’d call minority groups – juveniles, juniors and women [Harris was the Scottish women’s team coach for a while]. I haven’t looked for the kudos of coaching elites. That was never my ambition. Plus, there was no shortage of people wanting to coach top riders. I could see where the gaps were, and I tried to fill those gaps.’
Apart from the coaching from Harris, there were other aspects of being in the Dunedin club that were different and progressive. ‘On Friday nights they did circuit training in the scout hut and then had a club meeting,’ says David. ‘So they were exposed to democracy, because they voted for what the club was going to do. It was good. Ray used to take the circuit training then he’d talk to the guys who really wanted to do something, and chat to them.’
Hoy says that it was Harris who taught him, early in his Dunedin career, the importance of keeping a training diary, and of setting goals. ‘He gave us these sheets and told us what information to put on them – heart rate, training, that kind of thing. I took my resting heart rate every morning and filled in my sheet. I didn’t really know at that age why I was doing it, but it was about getting into good habits, and learning – and I had a fascination with numbers anyway … He also taught me the importance of goal-setting – he was the first person who explained goal-setting to me. He told me there were three types of goals: long-term, medium-term, and short-term.’
In his Coldstream home, Harris digs out one of these goal-setting sheets for me to see. In fact, it’s pages: one for each of the goals. And it is with particular pride that Harris recalls what Hoy wrote on his. Beneath the heading ‘Long-Term Goal,’ he wrote: ‘Olympic champion.’
Harris says: ‘He said very early on, he wanted to be Olympic champion. Now, many kids say that, but I wasn’t going to mock him for it. Why should we try and limit what somebody wants to dream about? That dream might be achievable; let’s look at it, break it down.
‘Targets and goal-setting should never be the criteria for a coaching plan,’ he continues. ‘You don’t focus as a fifteen year old on being Olympic champion. The first thing to look at is, what can we do in the immediate future, to spur you on to stage two? If you can’t do stage one – the short-term goals – then you can forget the rest.
‘So with Chris we looked at the stages. Something that was – and still is – really important to Chris was the Commonwealth Games, because he could represent Scotland, and he’s very patriotic, without being anti-the other thing. So we looked at it: when can you go to the Commonwealth Games? Nineteen ninety-eight was realistic. If he did that, the Olympics in 2000 was realistic. If he did that, then becoming Olympic champion in 2004 was realistic. And it was spot-on. It’s almost a fairytale.’
David Hoy – who still, somewhere in the family home, has the goal-setting sheets, with their short-term goals: ‘Scottish champion’; medium-term ambitions: ‘go to the Commonwealth Games’; and long-term dreams: ‘become Olympic champion’ – believes that Harris’s role in this fairytale can hardly be exaggerated. ‘Dare to dream’ might have been his motto, founded on a solid bedrock of self-belief. ‘It was Ray who took away the inhibition,’ says David. ‘When they sat down and talked about goal-setting he let him know, “You can say whatever you like. I won’t laugh at you.”’
Of course, Hoy wasn’t going to be an Olympic champion on a mountain bike. For all his enthusiasm, even Harris would surely have discouraged that notion. But by the time he came to writing down his goals, he had swapped the muddy courses of the mountain bike races for the smooth boards of the velodrome.
Meadowbank velodrome, Edinburgh, 1994
Of all the ill-considered sporting arenas in the world – from the ski centre in Dubai, to the two football stadiums that back onto each other in Dundee – Edinburgh’s velodrome has to be up there with the very daftest.
Not that there is anything wrong with the track at Meadowbank, which is a good, internationally-renowned wooden oval that, in its day, has hosted top class competition, producing world championship medal-winning cyclists and one Olympic champion – Chris Hoy. But there is one glaring, not to mention fundamental, glitch: one oversight; one fatal flaw; one unforgivable omission. It has no roof.
We are talking here about a velodrome in Scotland, one of the wettest and most inclement countries in the world, which is rendered unusable every time it rains. A few drops are enough, in fact, to have them postponing the action and running for the covers, à la Wimbledon.
Even more remarkably, it is a state of affairs that has existed since 1970, when the velodrome was built for the first Edinburgh Commonwealth Games. Since then there have been numerous proposals to build a roof, but the roof – unlike the rain – has consistently failed to materialize, as a consequence of which the poor wooden boards have suffered, oh how they have suffered, through their constant exposure to the elements.
Still, that the track was built at all was something of a triumph for the sport in Scotland. The country had several concrete cycling tracks – longer than a wooden velodrome, with comparatively shallow banking – and there was a proposal, popular with the spendthrift council, to hold the track cycling events of the 1970 ‘Edinburgh’ Commonwealth Games at Grangemouth, twenty-five miles away. One man who led the fight for an Edinburgh velodrome was Arthur Campbell, then president of the Scottish