Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore
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send Chris an email he always replies. It’s one of the endearing things about the lad. He keeps in touch, in quite regular contact really.’
Stepping into Harris’s shoes as mentor was Brian Annable: the inimitable, irascible Brian Annable – the Brian Clough of Scottish cycling. Annable ran his team – the City of Edinburgh Racing Club – with all the obsessive zeal, and occasional bursts of bad temper, of Clough. And the truly remarkable thing is that, twenty-five years on, he is still doing it. Since November 1982, when the City of Edinburgh Racing Club was established, Annable has been at the helm, skippering the good ship through some choppy waters, but invariably to success – which, in his book, means medals in British championships. Sitting in his large house in Edinburgh, behind a pile of immaculately blue-bound City of Edinburgh Racing Club annual reports – all twenty-five of them, in order – the well-spoken Annable spells it out, like an army major listing battles won: ‘By 2006, seventy-six championships and two-hundred and forty-eight medals, won by club members in British championships.’
Annable has been the driving force behind those seventy-six national titles and two-hundred and forty-eight medals. He was a competitive cyclist himself, and in the British team pursuit squad for the 1952 Olympics, but his training, as an architect, got in the way of his cycling ambitions. A peripatetic career took him to Coventry, then to Manchester, ‘to clear the slums of England in five years’, and finally to Edinburgh, in 1970, just in time for the Commonwealth Games. ‘I had been out of bike racing activity for several years,’ he says, ‘but I was appointed as deputy chief executive of the national building agency, based in Edinburgh.
‘I went to Jenners [Edinburgh’s big department store] on the first morning of the Commonwealth Games; down in the basement, where I was told I’d get tickets. But they had no plan of the track or anything,’ he says with disgust and disdain. ‘They didn’t know where the finish line was!’ Clearly this offended Annable on two fundamental levels – it showed an ignorance of sport, and an ignorance of the architecture of the arena. ‘If you’re in the left-hand end, where the track goes up, you can’t see the finish. And I ended up with tickets there, because they didn’t have a bloody clue.
‘The problem,’ he continues, now on a roll, ‘is that the track was not done properly. For some reason the city engineer’s department was involved in designing a cycle track, though they had no knowledge.’ He discusses some complicated-sounding facts pertaining to cycle tracks, mentioning German designers and UCI manuals, longitudinal expansion, roof trusses, metal angle irons, and slotted holes.
So, is he saying that there were no velodrome specialists involved in the building of the Edinburgh velodrome? ‘No! That’s what amazes me,’ he replies. ‘It was a bunch of amateurs. But somebody must have known something; if someone contacted Schuermann [the renowned German architects, reputed to have built 125 velodromes worldwide] then I wouldn’t be surprised.’
After the 1970 games Annable found himself down at the velodrome on an increasingly regular basis. A Scot, Brian Temple, from Edinburgh, had, surprisingly, won a medal at the games – silver in the ten-mile scratch race – and it provided evidence that Scottish cyclists could compete on such a stage, after all. There was also much in the ‘build it and they will come’ mantra of Field of Dreams, the baseball movie. The state-of-the-art Meadowbank velodrome proved quite a draw for cyclists from throughout Scotland during the 1970s.
But there was little organization to it. And there was certainly no pathway from participation to elite competition. When talented cyclists emerged, they had to make their own way. That is when mistakes tend to be made, and repeated ad nauseam.
In 1982 another talent emerged: Brian Annable’s son, Tom. With Eddie Alexander – a Highlander based in Edinburgh – he enjoyed some success at that year’s British championships, winning bronze in the junior points race. Two days later Alexander won bronze in the junior sprint. Incredibly, says Annable, these were the first two medals ever won by Scots in the British championships. ‘And they were getting no support in Scotland!’ he adds in characteristically bombastic fashion.
That winter Annable sat down with Alan Nisbet, ‘Mr Track Cycling in Scotland’, and discussed forming a specialist track club whose remit would be to ‘bypass Scotland and target success at British level’. They talked to Arthur Campbell, who agreed that the track cyclists needed more support but felt they should do it within an existing club. Annable was having none of that. ‘I got so fed up with the Scottish approach, still am, because it’s more concerned with the importance of people who are office bearers than with talented young riders. Bunch of blithering idiots! They were stuck in the past, obsessed with time trialling and with no advertising, sponsorship or money. They didn’t want to support people. Arthur was different, he was progressive, but he was keen we be part of a bigger club. In the end we said, “We’re going to do our own thing, we’ve got two youngsters here [Tom Annable and Eddie Alexander] with enough talent to start it, and others who are being ignored.”’
Annable wrote the constitution for a new track club, which remains, word-for-word, to this day, and appears on the first page in all twenty-five of those annual reports:
Cycle racing at the international level, including the World Championships, the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, and the British Championships, recognise champions in two road events and seven to nine track events.
In 1982 two Scottish junior riders won bronze medals on the track at the British championships. Eddie Alexander from Inverness in the Sprint and Tom Annable from Edinburgh in the Points race championship. It was clear to them and some other young Scottish track riders that they would have to concentrate their efforts and seek out specialized training and coaching and travel to competitions outside Scotland, if they were to have a chance of winning championships at the British and international levels. It also became obvious that an organisation devoted to this purpose was a prerequisite to success and that there was no such organisation in Scotland. Talks were held with an objective of winning medals at the British level, concentrating mainly, but not exclusively, on track racing and composed of young riders who were prepared to train, travel and race as necessary to reach that objective. It would be necessary to recruit expert coaching and team management and financial support.
The City of Edinburgh Racing Club was formed in November 1982. The country’s top track riders were recruited, and in 1985 the club could boast its first British champions. ‘Scotland has never had a British champion in track racing,’ read that year’s annual report. ‘It now has two: 1km Eddie Alexander; 20km Steve Paulding.’
The club was not wealthy. Sponsorship was modest and numbers were kept low. ‘I got sponsorship from the council, but I only asked for £1,000,’ says Annable, ‘because my experience, and advice, was to never go for a big team. Keep it simple and small. We’ve got nineteen members now [in 2007]. It’s always been a low number.’ Membership was – and is – restricted. ‘In terms of criteria for joining … well, I don’t think we’ve ever had anybody we didn’t know,’ says Annable. ‘It’s a small part of a small sport, so we know the riders. And we’ve always gone for riders who were talented and keen to travel – ambitious.’
Other individuals and companies put money into the club. In the early days they included Joe McCann, who gave £1,000. He described himself as ‘an enthusiastic optimist’. This was the kind of sponsor that clubs such as the City of Edinburgh RC tend to attract and upon whom they depend.
Within a few years, the club, by now known – and feared – as ‘The City’, was achieving its objectives. In fact, it was wiping the board. The City was so dominant in British track racing that in 1988 it was likened to the mafia by Kenny Pryde, a reporter for Cycling Weekly magazine. ‘The City of Edinburgh “mafia” were to be seen sitting at trackside cheerfully exhorting their team-mates to greater efforts,’ read Pryde’s report, which prompted a response, published in the magazine the following week. It was a letter that appeared beneath the headline ‘Message from the Edinburgh Godfather’:
Maybe your reporter Mr Pryde had little joke about the enthusiasm of members of the family encouraging the boys in the team. He calls them a ‘Mafia’, but the boys don’t understand what this means. I have arranged for one