Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore

brakes – pushed back hard on the pedals. At a slow speed that can be as effective as braking – you stop immediately. But on this occasion he pushed too hard: his effort stripped the rear sprocket. And so now, with his feet strapped tightly into the pedals, he was careering down the ramp, picking up speed, with no way of slowing down, far less stopping.

      He squeezed past the trolley, and, like something from Benny Hill, carried on straight past him, gathering speed, out of control, and with, eventually, only the steps leading up to reception in his path. The only thought in his brain, he says, was ‘Shit, what am I going to do here?’ But there was no flash of inspiration and he carried on, ‘going very fast by now’, until he collided with the stairs, sticking his arm out to try and protect his face. The bike was a mess – it concertinaed. So was his arm – it was broken.

      Initially the national track coach, Marshall Thomas, reassured him that his arm wasn’t broken. ‘Wait and see how it is in the morning,’ he told him. But in the morning it was ‘massive – like an old lady’s leg’, says Hoy. ‘Really swollen, straight up and down. I went to the hospital, had it x-rayed and had a cast put on it. And this was two-and-a-half weeks before Moscow. I was gutted.’

      But he was still ‘determined to go. I thought, “What if I modify my handlebars?” I just couldn’t face the idea of not going.’ Neither could the BCF, who had paid for his travel and arranged a non-transferable visa. So it was agreed that Hoy would go anyway. ‘If you can ride, then ride,’ he was told, ‘and if you can’t, then help the others.’

      He was determined to ride. So when he got to Moscow he visited the Dutch team’s mechanic – ‘because we had no tools with us’, Hoy points out – and asked for a large set of clippers. With these he went to work adapting his plaster cast, removing the bit that covered his hand. That allowed him to grip the bars, though it was sore to do so. But, gingerly, he took the start line for the kilo, managed a personal best by ‘four or five tenths of a second’, recording 1 minute, 6 seconds, and placing twelfth of the twenty-five starters. ‘I was over the moon with that,’ he says. In first place, meanwhile, was an eighteen-year-old prodigy from France – Arnaud Tournant – who went three seconds faster than Hoy. When he returned, Hoy faced some awkward questions. His doctor asked, ‘What on earth have you done to your plaster cast?’ Hoy told him his hand had swollen up so badly that he had needed to modify it.