Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore
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Brian Annable, Edinburgh
Eddie Alexander was the club’s star in its early years and in 1986, at the second Edinburgh Commonwealth Games, he won a bronze medal in the men’s sprint, beating England’s Paul McHugh in the ride for third. That and other successes earned him selection for the world championships in Colorado Springs, from where he sent Annable a postcard, which he still has. On one side there is a picture of the majestic San Juan mountains, and on the other, beneath the date (19 August 1986), the scrawled message: ‘Dear Club. Very hot and sunny out here. Having a real good time – these BCF [British Cycling Federation] holidays sure are good value. I think we’re going to fit in some racing next week at the velodrome. Wish you were here. Eddie.’
He was joking about it being a holiday but it might as well have been, because men’s sprinting, the blue riband track discipline, was a closed shop. Alexander, the only British rider, had about as much chance of making an impression as Eddie the Eagle had of not embarrassing himself in a ski jump. Check the four semi-finalists: Michael Huebner, Lutz Hesslich, Ralf-Guido Kischy and Bill Huck. They had one rather significant thing in common, these four semi-finalists. They were all East German.
Now, you can speculate all you like about why the East Germans were so dominant. They were certainly awesome physical specimens – extraordinary physical specimens. There is a clip of a Huebner sprint, from 1990, that has proved popular on YouTube. Type in the words ‘pumped up Huebner’ and you will find it: Claudio Golinelli, the Italian, against Michael Huebner, in the final of the world sprint championship in 1990. Huebner, resembling the Incredible Hulk, is majestic, utterly impervious, while the words of the American commentator are unintentionally humorous. ‘With that show of upper-body strength [from Huebner] I think Golinelli will be heading for the health club,’ he muses, before suggesting: ‘He is on the podium today, perhaps starring in Rocky VI next.’
Not to suggest that Huebner – nor indeed Hesslich, Kischy or Huck –did anything illegal. But East Germany, a country of fewer than 17 million people, was, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the dominant Olympic force, in particular in sports such as swimming, athletics and cycling, for reasons that are now a matter of public record. Thousands of East German athletes were given performance-enhancing drugs during that time; many didn’t know what they were taking – some thought they were vitamins. Numerous ex-athletes have since suffered terrible health problems, including liver cancer, organ damage, psychological trauma, hormonal changes, and infertility. Eventually the German government set up a fund for doped athletes to pay medical bills arising from their years of being doped. By the March 2003 deadline 197 athletes had applied for the compensation of $10,000 each.
In 1987, Alexander’s second world championship, he qualified thirteenth but, once again, all four semi-finalists were East German. But by now there was also another Scot – and a City of Edinburgh club-mate – at the championships in the form of Stewart Brydon. Brydon qualified twenty-first and told Cycling Weekly: ‘The worlds have been an experience and it’s made me realize how much work needs to be done. The Eastern Bloc countries are in front, but not by that much, and it’s done me good to see them. You think they aren’t human when you read what they are doing, but on the line they have fear in their eyes, the same as everyone else.’
Alexander also earned selection to the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, and it was here that he demonstrated just what a talented rider he was – and hinted at how far he might have gone had the playing field been level. Being the Olympics, there was only one rider per nation, which meant a guarantee of only one East German in the semi-finals. And Alexander, incredibly, made it that far, finally finishing in the worst place of all – just out of the medals in fourth. Lutz Hesslich, ‘the man with the broadest shoulders in cycling,’ was the Olympic champion, as he had been in 1980. Alexander, though, became the first British sprinter to reach the last four since Reg Harris, some forty years earlier.
The near-miss prompted Alexander, an amateur whose day job was to design power stations, to reflect on the ‘Cinderella status’ of British track racing: ‘A lot of these guys have been in training camps or preparing in Europe. What did we get? Five days at Leicester [the outdoor track which hosted the British championships] and it rained on two of those.’
In the following years Brydon inherited Alexander’s title as Britain’s fastest sprinter, though he didn’t make the same impact as Alexander on the international stage. At the British championships the City of Edinburgh sprinters were dominant – the East Germany, if you like, of the British scene – with Alexander, Brydon and Steve Paulding taking a clean sweep of the medals in 1989. The success in this discipline satisfied the club’s ‘Godfather’, Annable, for it was sprinting that enthused and excited him. As far as he was concerned, it was real racing.
‘You have to make a distinction between an athletic event and a race,’ says Annable. ‘My emotions are for racing, which for me means match sprinting. The most boring event in the world for me is the qualifying round for the women’s pursuit. Riding fast against the watch doesn’t excite me, whether it’s the kilo, pursuit or team sprint. That’s not a race! Whereas the racing from the quarter-finals of the sprint is electrifying. It appeals to my emotions.
‘When I started there were two ways into the sport of cycling,’ he continues. ‘On the road you had the inspiration of the Tour de France, the mountains and all the rest of it. But in Britain at that time you couldn’t road race – massed start racing on the roads was banned. You could time trial or ride on the track, and track racing was huge. Heavyweight boxers and sprint cyclists were superstars in those days.’
And the biggest star of all was Reg Harris, whose bronze statue now looms over the final bend of the Manchester Velodrome, the home of British cycling. Harris, born in 1920, won the amateur world sprint title in 1947, following that with two Olympic silver medals in 1948, in the sprint and tandem sprint, despite having fractured two vertebrae three months earlier, then falling and smashing his elbow just weeks before the games. But it was as a professional that he made his name: he won the world sprint title four times between 1949 and 1954. Then, perhaps even more famously, he came back twenty years later, winning the 1974 British title at the age of fifty-four.
Harris embodied the familiar traits of the star sprinter. He had panache, and, with his huge legs and puffed-out chest, the confident swagger of the sprinter. Backing up Annable’s claim that the sprinters were huge stars, his feats also captured the imagination of the wider sporting public: in 1950, for example, he was named Sportsman of the Year by the Sports Journalists’ Association, and he was twice named BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
Harris was colourful and controversial. He married three times, ran numerous businesses, including the Fallowfield Stadium velodrome, which he renamed the Harris Stadium, and started a ‘Reg Harris’ line of bikes. The man dubbed ‘Britain’s first cycling superstar’, and known as ‘Sir Reg’ on account of his incongruously cut-glass accent and debonair manner, died after a stroke in 1992.
In some ways it seems strange that Harris is held up as the gentleman of British cycling and the grandfather of British sprinting. He was certainly utterly ruthless in pursuit of victory, and, according to some witnesses, not above skulduggery or dubious tactics. Tommy Godwin, the other great British track rider of the 1940s and 1950s, writes about Harris in his autobiography, It Wasn’t That Easy, and the picture that emerges is of a devious, scheming rider. In one race, writes Godwin, ‘I passed Reg on the final bend and was into the straight when suddenly a pull on my saddle almost stopped me. My friend Harris [safe to assume he is being sarcastic here] wanted to win the final sprint in front of his home crowd, which he did. My response was to get to him as soon as possible and physically attack him.’ Godwin also makes allegations of race-fixing and, at one point, tells of an exchange with a Belgian soigneur – a cyclist’s masseur/trainer/unofficial doctor – named Louis Guerlache, who offers him ‘a little help’. Writes Godwin: ‘The inference of this I understood. I immediately said, “No, if I can’t do it with what I have been gifted with then I don’t want it.” But at the mention of “No” Louis had picked up all the things laid out for the massage, threw them into his suitcase, which was packed with about half a chemist’s shop, and stormed away.’ Later in his book, Godwin notes wryly, and