Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore
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behind, Edgar holding off the challenge of Mickaël Bourgain of France to claim bronze.
‘I had no pressure on me today,’ says Hoy, who couldn’t have been more imperious in winning the gold medal, but for whom it was, nevertheless, an unexpected bonus. ‘Jan [van Eijden, the GB sprint coach] told me to relax, and in the final I used my kilo strength to lead out from a long way. It couldn’t have gone any better. But it’s a big surprise.’
And still to come, on the final night of the championships, is Hoy’s main event – the kilo, in which he is Olympic champion, three-time world champion and sea-level world record holder. In six weeks, at the altitude of La Paz in Bolivia, he will go for the absolute world kilometre record, currently held by his great rival Tournant.
As reigning world champion, Hoy is once again the last man to go. The kilo – he insists this will be the last time he will contest this event in a major championship – also gives him the chance to draw level with the two kilo kings, both of whom have four world titles to their name. Ahead of him in the table are Lothar Thoms and – who else? – Tournant.
Another British rider, Jamie Staff, the second man to start, is the early pacesetter. He tops the leader board for the best part of an hour, until the penultimate rider – another Frenchman, the youthful François Pervis. In Manchester, just a few weeks earlier, Pervis placed second to Hoy in the World Cup kilo – and gave him a real fright in finishing just thirty-five-thousandths of a second slower. Now, in Palma, it all comes down to Hoy and the clock. He races through the first of the four laps marginally up on Pervis, but down on the time set by fast starter Staff. Hoy has to lift it and he does; at half distance he is a tenth of a second ahead but it is in the second half that he makes the difference, accelerating to cross the line in 1.00.999, almost a full second quicker than Pervis. It is Hoy’s second fastest kilo and the second fastest time ever recorded at sea level.
It puts the icing on a generous cake: the championships have been an astonishing success for Hoy and for Team GB. In fact, Hoy’s haul here in Palma means that he is now the most successful British cyclist of all time in terms of gold medals won at world championships, with seven golds, one silver, three bronze, to add to Olympic gold and silver, not to mention two golds and two bronzes at the Commonwealth Games He can now be hailed as Britain’s most successful track cyclist ever. The debate over whether he is the best ever can rage in internet chat rooms.
Yet there is a sour taste in his mouth. It had been his final championship kilo, but not out of choice. The decision had been effectively forced on him by cycling’s world governing body, the UCI, who, in an act as bizarre as it seemed perverse, responded to the most exciting kilo of all time – at the Athens Olympics in 2004 – by dropping the event from the Olympic programme.
‘I’d love to do the kilo at the world championships in Manchester next year and go for a fifth title,’ Hoy tells the press in Palma, ‘and obviously I’d have loved to go to Beijing and defend my Olympic title, but I really have to draw a line under this event now and focus on an Olympic event. But it’s frustrating because I don’t think the powers-that-be really understand certain facets of the sport. I don’t think they realize the implications of what they’ve done.’
The challenge now for Hoy is to try his hand at new disciplines – the sprint and the keirin. His surprise victory in the keirin in Palma gives him confidence but Hoy is under no illusions: he knows he has much to learn. He also knows that, at thirty-one, he doesn’t have much time. He is a (comparatively) old dog having to learn new tricks if he is to have any chance at all of fulfilling his ambition of a second Olympic gold medal. Imagine Michael Johnson, at his peak, being told the 400 m was being scrapped; or Ed Moses being told to switch to flat racing. This is the scenario Hoy has been presented with thanks to the scrapping of the kilo. The next twelve months will tell him if such a transition is possible – he is acutely aware that it might not be.
But otherwise the taste in Palma is of sweet success. ‘Being here at the world championships with the British team has been great,’ says Hoy after his kilo victory. ‘We’re really unified. There are no cliques, no divides. We go into every event thinking we can win medals. We have a winning mentality.’
As he is talking, the opening bars of ‘God Save the Queen’ fill the Palma Arena (again), and Brailsford can be seen deep in conversation with a member of his four-strong senior management team – Britain’s 1992 Olympic pursuit champion Chris Boardman. Both are standing with their arms crossed. They uncross them and cease their conversation for the national anthem, then immediately recross their arms and renew the discussion. It looks like they’re plotting something.
They are. But eventually they part and Brailsford offers a review of the championships. Or, rather, he doesn’t. Instead, he looks forward. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, ‘I will be at my desk in the Manchester Velodrome, relentlessly planning our pursuit of medals in Beijing.’
In the final reckoning, the British team has claimed eleven medals in Palma, including seven gold: 41 per cent of all the available world titles. The other squads retreat from the arena licking their wounds. ‘We’ve just had a righteous kick up the arse,’ admits the Australian coach, Martin Barras. ‘That was the best performance by a track team, period,’ he elaborates. ‘It’s as simple as that. And Chris? What can you say? His win in the keirin was something else, and I’d put his kilo here in Palma above his performance at the Olympics. It was phenomenal. As a professional coach, never mind the coach of a rival team, you just have to go: “Wow.”’
Brailsford can well afford to be satisfied, then. The Olympics are the overriding goal, as he keeps stressing, but with every medal his stock – and that of the British team – rises. The unprecedented success in Palma means it has never been higher, and it was already pretty high before Palma, when it was reported that various performance directors from other sports had been beating a path to his door, to pick his brains and learn from Britain’s most successful team. Apparently, the people charged with running athletics, rugby and rowing had all been to visit Brailsford in recent weeks. Brailsford is coy on this.
In talking to Brailsford, however, there is one subject that looms ominously and lurks malevolently in the shadows. This being cycling, there has been a gathering cloud of suspicion, rumour and innuendo, whispered in the past, but inevitably set to be more explicitly stated the more successful they become. In the Italian camp there have been accusations that the secret to the British team’s success must be doping – organized, systematic doping.
When asked about this, Brailsford doesn’t sigh in exasperation. He doesn’t fix you with a withering stare. He doesn’t point out that it is impossible to prove a negative. In short, he doesn’t dodge the subject. And what he says, though it may look almost naive, contains an irresistible logic. ‘We create an environment in which athletes don’t want to dope,’ he says. Ah. Okay, then. But how? ‘Come and have a look at what we do,’ shrugs Brailsford. ‘We have nothing to hide. We look at aspects of performance that have nothing to do with doping. But anyone who wants to check us out can come and have a look at our anti-doping programme and draw their own conclusions.’
But if it isn’t a highly sophisticated and organized doping programme, then what is the secret? Is there one? Still hanging around the track centre is Boardman, whose remit, as director of coaching, includes ‘research and development’. The man who was once famous for winning the Olympics on a machine christened ‘Superbike’ is now – appropriately enough – charged with sourcing and developing the latest, most cutting edge equipment, from clothing to bikes. Boardman is leaning over one of the barriers that segregate the teams, in their ‘pens’, when I approach him. He looks furtive. Nothing to hide, eh? Yeah, right – not according to Boardman. While Brailsford stresses that the anti-doping programme is open for inspection, Boardman makes it clear that the equipment bunker – the ‘Secret Squirrel Club’ he calls it – is strictly off-limits. So the implication is clear. Effectively, what they seem to be saying is: ‘You can come and watch our athletes piss into a bottle; just don’t ask them about the fancy saddles they use in training.’
‘We have kit we’ve been using in training but we haven’t used it here,’ confirms Boardman. ‘We produced some really sexy handlebars