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

Hoy has joked of having to wait for hours for his son to finish endurance events. At least, I had assumed he was joking. ‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘The car park would be empty at these events and I’d be thinking about going and checking with First Aid. Then, finally, he would appear over the hill.’

      Hoy, notes his father, ‘was just the wrong type of athlete’ for such events, ‘not that he knew it at the time. He enjoyed it. It started off with him heading into the Pentlands’ – the range of hills that sit on the southern boundary to Edinburgh, around six miles from the family home in Murrayfield – ‘and they’d be up there all day exploring the wee tracks and trails. There are miles of them; it’s a terrific place. Then he’d be back for his tea.’

      Mountain biking could be dangerous, of course, not least on hidden paths in remote glens. Although the Pentland Hills are close to Edinburgh, they seem miles away when you are in the middle of them. While the hills are visible from every corner of the city, the same cannot be said in reverse: the city is invisible from the remoter parts, and there is no road access. So there were obvious dangers associated with riding in the hills – especially down them. ‘He told me he clocked 65 [mph] coming down one of the steep hills once,’ says David in conspiratorial tones, confirming that, although he officially disapproved, he was secretly quite proud. ‘We reached a compromise with him: we gave him a whistle and if he fell off he was to use it to attract attention.’

      Hoy’s competitive debut on a mountain bike followed the appearance of a small advert in a mountain biking magazine, announcing the start of a new Scottish Cyclists’ Union (SCU) cross-country mountain bike series. David spotted the advert and called SCU headquarters – then and now a Portakabin parked beside the velodrome at Meadowbank – and spoke to their executive officer, ‘boring him stupid for half an hour’ about his son’s glittering BMX career. The best thing, he was told, was to join a club. He recommended the Dunedin Cycling Club, run by Ray Harris. ‘He’s a good coach,’ said the man from the SCU.

      At the same time, at school, Hoy was playing rugby and also rowing. Rugby legend Gavin Hastings, a former pupil at Hoy’s school, was the teenager’s first sporting hero. The Scotland and British Lions captain came to the school one day to take training, though Hoy ‘was very cool about it, as teenage boys are’, recalls his mother, Carol. ‘But later, during dinner, he was full of it: it was “Gav this, Gav that …” as if they were best mates!’ (A decade later the roles were reversed. Interviewed at the official opening of the Scottish Parliament, Hastings was asked what the Parliament should do as a matter of priority. ‘It should build an indoor velodrome,’ urged Hastings, ‘for Chris Hoy and the Chris Hoys of the future.’)

      Hoy showed promise as a rugby player. He captained his school team – no mean feat at a school as renowned for producing good rugby players as George Watson’s College – and he was also recognized at district level. On one occasion he even captained Edinburgh Schools against the North of Scotland at Under-15 level.

      But he showed even more promise as a rower, going one better, competing for Scotland and, with his school, winning a silver medal at the British championship in the junior coxless pairs. His mother today expresses some regret that he finally opted for cycling instead of rowing, noting with a sigh, ‘I quite wanted him to do the rowing … I fancied myself at Henley, cheering him on – “Come on chaps!” – with a wee gin and tonic in my hand. The banks of the Thames seems more civilized than a sweaty velodrome. Ah well …’

      But despite his involvement and interest in the sports offered by his school, cycling remained a big interest. It occupied most of Hoy’s spare time, though he continued to find the transition to mountain biking difficult. His easy superiority at BMX was forgotten as he struggled up the hills and through the mud of mountain bike courses – in fact, he seemed at the time to be showing more promise as a rugby player and rower than as a cyclist.

      Yet Hoy was convinced it was just a matter of time before it clicked. It didn’t seem to occur to him that it might not. He was in it to win it, says his dad: ‘Oh yeah. He wanted to win; he didn’t just want to take part. He kept thinking, “I need to work harder. I’ve stepped up to a different sport so I need to learn.” If he finished five hours down one week then he’d try to finish four hours down the next! That was his attitude.’

      Hoy himself gently disputes some of his father’s claims. ‘I realized fairly early on that I wasn’t an endurance athlete, but I persevered because I do have an element of aerobic potential. At school I enjoyed cross-country running and rowing, where you needed power and endurance. It was the power-to-weight ratio that was a problem. It meant that anything that involved going uphill was a struggle.’

      Old school mates – and teachers – may dispute this claim, however. In the interview he gave to his school magazine, after returning from Athens as the Olympic champion in 2004, he recalled a third-year school cycling trip: ‘My lasting memory from those ten days of riding around the north of Scotland had to be the day I spent riding alongside Mrs Wylie, fifteen minutes behind the main group, as punishment for overtaking Mr Strachan on the hill the previous day.’

      Road cycling became something he also pursued, especially as he became involved with the Dunedin Cycling Club, which was run by someone with the enthusiasm of a teenager: Ray Harris. A well-known figure in the Scottish cycling scene, Harris had greying hair, combed in a side-parting, and a strong English accent, betraying his Midlands roots. He wore small half-moon-shaped spectacles, perched halfway down his nose, giving him a professorial look. He always seemed to be peering down into them, in a ‘let-me-see-what-we’ve-got-here-then’ kind of way. But then, he always seemed to be timing, or testing, or officiating – doing something that required his concentration.

      Harris talked a lot, and fast. Still does. Visiting him at his home in Coldstream, in the Scottish Borders, is like stepping into a time warp – he doesn’t seem to have aged at all since the late 1980s. Which only seems to confirm that he is indeed the Emmett Brown of Scottish cycling.

      ‘Chris’s dad came to see me,’ recalls Harris, ‘he was a schoolboy and he was keen to realize his potential beyond BMX, because BMX was limited at that stage. Chris had this conflict at the time, between rowing and rugby, and my first reaction was: if you really want to succeed in rowing or cycling, rugby has to go. Rugby was too risky, because of the free leg movement,’ and here Harris, with the agility of a gymnast, demonstrates what he means by free leg movement. ‘With no resistance, you can do tremendous damage. I’d witnessed at first hand, working as a masseur in other sports, the damage to knee joints in relatively young rugby and football players. Frightening.

      ‘In the Dunedin we had a membership of fifty or so, a great proportion of them youngsters,’ he continues, not pausing for breath. ‘We hadn’t entertained mountain biking’ – in fact, just like BMX, though not quite to the same extent, mountain biking tended in those days to be dismissed by the ‘connoisseurs’ of traditional cycling, which meant road and, to a lesser extent, track cyclists.

      But Harris’s Dunedin Cycling Club, with its youthful membership, and, in Harris, its youthful leader, embraced the new discipline. ‘We organized some short course mountain biking events,’ says Harris, ‘mainly because it gave us an opportunity to get youngsters involved. Initially we ran them in an old mining area in East Lothian; it was just mud, really. And that’s where Chris got involved. He was dead keen. Soon after, we started our Pentlands races.’

      Underpinning all of the Dunedin club’s activity – on the road, in the hills and on the track – was Harris’s fanatical interest in a subject that, at that time, few had heard of, and fewer still had any knowledge about: sports science. The term only entered the popular sporting lexicon some time in the 1980s. It referred, broadly speaking, to sophisticated methods of training and monitoring performance, using various ‘data’. Few knew anything about this mysterious ‘data’, never mind how to measure it or what to do with it; and even when heart rate monitors became ubiquitous among amateur cyclists, in the early 1990s, few really knew how to utilize them. They tended to be a source of interest and entertainment rather than a training tool – the ‘game’ being to go out and see how high you could get your heart rate.

      Harris’s