Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore
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for a doping scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympics, when he lost his bronze medal after inadvertently using an American-made inhaler that contained a banned substance, was also a talented cyclist. He was a good training partner, though MacLean says that neither was as dedicated to sport in those days, and that much of their training was instigated by their respective fathers, who had competed against each other years earlier, in skiing and cycling. ‘We had pushy parents,’ jokes MacLean. ‘I think they were using us to carry on their rivalry. Alain and I would meet up and have a bit of a blether, then tell our dads we’d been training hard.’
There is a strong possibility that MacLean is exaggerating his lack of commitment – and he is certainly joking about he and Baxter having pushy parents. In fact, both athletes went on to develop training regimes bordering on fanatical; and both became supreme athletes – as demonstrated by Baxter winning the BBC’s Superstars series – as they reached the pinnacle of their respective sports.
Another influence at the time, adds MacLean, was Euan Mackenzie, an Olympic biathlete and ‘formidable cyclist’. ‘He really dragged me out on the bike until I was fit enough to enjoy it,’ says MacLean.
MacLean also had a short stint working in a family business with his uncle, who was an undertaker. He once made the mistake of mentioning this to a journalist, prompting the description of him as the ‘cycling undertaker’. Another quirky fact about MacLean that was – for journalists – irresistible was that he studied piano tuning at college. Thus he has repeatedly been labelled ‘the piano-tuning-undertaker-cyclist’, or a variation on this. All he can do now is roll his eyes whenever he is asked about piano tuning, or undertaking, or both – which means a lot of eye rolling. His undertaking, or piano tuning, or both, tend to be raised every time he is interviewed.
Although MacLean was able to make some money on the grass tracks of the Highlands, it was obvious his cycling income would never be enough to live on. More conventional track racing offered few career possibilities. For both MacLean and Hoy, in fact, the opportunities to make any kind of living through cycling appeared, at that time, to be minimal to non-existent. Track cycling was the poor relation of international cycling – the big money was in road racing, with, apart from in those countries that put money into their track programmes, only crumbs available, and to only a very few of the top performers. It didn’t really matter how ambitious Hoy or MacLean were; like Eddie Alexander before them, they would in all probability have to fit cycling around jobs, and they would, as a consequence, be unlikely ever to realize their potential.
This was the reality faced by both, and so when Hoy left school, in 1994, he went to university. He says it didn’t occur to him not to follow the traditional path of getting a degree and then a job. And so, only a couple of months after his breakthrough at the British track championships, when he claimed a silver medal in the junior sprint, he began a four-year honours degree in maths and physics at St Andrews University, forty miles north of Edinburgh.
He threw himself into university life. ‘It was great,’ says Hoy, ‘a whole new experience, feeling independent even though you’re living in halls, getting all your meals cooked and forty-five minutes from home … But I was going out all the time, partying, enjoying a good social life. I relished it. And I didn’t touch my bike.
‘Then towards the end of the first term I got a call from my dad. He said he had invitations to two races. He asked me, “Do you fancy the Tour of the North in Ireland …” and I said, “Great! That would be brilliant.” Then he added, “… or a track meeting in Trinidad?”
‘I said, “Fantastic! Where’s Trinidad?”’
The promise of two weeks in the sun at Easter 1995 gave Hoy some motivation to get back out on his bike. ‘I pretty much hadn’t touched my bike the entire first term. But at Christmas, when I went home, I started training again. I’d eaten a lot of junk food that term, drunk a lot, gained some weight, swapping fat for muscle. It was so hard getting back into it.’
The trip to Trinidad kick-started Hoy’s first season as a student-cyclist – also his first season in the senior ranks – and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, it brought some success. At the national championships he was a member of the City of Edinburgh team that won gold in the team sprint; he was also still competing in the odd endurance event, and was a member of the quartet that claimed silver in the team pursuit.
And in the Scottish championships there was a snapshot of the future when, in the men’s sprint, the two riders who made it to the final were Hoy and MacLean. It was a thrilling contest, going to three rounds; MacLean winning match A, Hoy winning match B, and then, according to his harshest critic – Brian Annable – ‘going to sleep in the decider and getting jumped with 250 m to go’. The title thus went to MacLean.
But towards the end of the first term of his second year at St Andrews University, Hoy phoned home. ‘He just said he was absolutely miserable,’ says David Hoy. ‘“Give it another few weeks,” I said. But he said: “I can’t do this.”’ Then he corrects himself: ‘What he actually said was, “I can do this, but I don’t see any point in doing it.”’
‘I just thought, “What am I doing?”’ says Hoy. ‘I enjoyed St Andrews, liked the place, had a good group of friends, a great social life, but I didn’t enjoy the course and I wanted to be doing something that was gong to help me. I had developed my interest in sports science. At the training camp I’d been to in Majorca, the previous year, there was a guest coach, Louis Passfield. Louis wasn’t a sprint specialist but he had enough knowledge to answer the questions I had, and he was quite scientific. It gave me a taste for sports science. I had this hunger for knowledge in terms of physiology and wanting to know the best way to train – all these questions that I hoped sports science could answer for me.’
Hoy returned to Edinburgh from St Andrews in October 1995, contacted Moray House – the scene of Ray Harris’s Kingcycle tests – and enquired about enrolling there to study sports science. His application was accepted, and he went straight into second year the following autumn. In the meantime, and to teach him something of ‘the real world’, his parents insisted that he either get a job or sign on the dole. He opted initially for the latter, though returned from the local dole office asking ‘What was that all about?’ and decided to get a job instead, working in the Edinburgh bookshop Thin’s.
It was in 1996 that he was joined in the City of Edinburgh Racing Club by MacLean. In fact, it was a case of second time lucky for MacLean – his written application had been rejected the previous year. But he proved a more than useful signing: in the kilo at the British championships he won a bronze medal, while Hoy was fifth – having this time managed not to pull his foot out the pedal with his starting effort. But another significant episode that summer was a dreadful accident at the Meadowbank Velodrome, involving Hoy and, more seriously, another of Britain’s up-and-coming riders – Jason Queally.
As Ray Harris has noted, the constant exposure of the wooden boards to the elements was making the velodrome increasingly dangerous and prone to splinter. This was borne out, horrifically, by Queally, who needed hospital treatment after coming off worst in a pile-up in the closing stages of the Meadowbank Mile. In crashing he was impaled by an eighteen-inch-long, one-and-a-half-inch-wide piece of wood. That was as much a ‘splinter’ as a whale is a minnow. The resulting wound needed seventy stitches, with the doctors telling Queally that the thickness of his chest muscles – developed during his earlier career as a swimmer and international water polo player – possibly saved his life. Had the splinter pierced his chest cavity, it would probably have killed him.
Hoy had a ringside seat, being the first rider to go down. ‘It was the last corner, there had been a train of four or five City riders on the front, then Craig had done the big push and I was on his wheel; so we’re rounding the last corner, I’m coming up on his back wheel, and Craig flicked slightly to the side. It wasn’t intentional, but I caught his wheel, came crashing down, and took Jason, and everyone else, down with me. Craig was the only one who stayed upright. Jason hit me, went over the top and landed on his back, then slid down the track. He was screaming, shouting: “I’ve got half the fucking track in my back!” And I was lying there, pretty sore, thinking, “Aw, shut up, will