Читать книгу Chris Hoy: The Autobiography - Chris Hoy - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIt was with the Dunedin Cycling Club that I started riding at Meadowbank Velodrome, the track in Edinburgh that was built for the 1970 Commonwealth Games, and rebuilt for the 1986 Games.
I vividly remember my introduction to Meadowbank. But I’d imagine that most people remember their first visit, because it’s so difficult to find. It’s in a strange place, out on a limb from the rest of the Meadowbank Stadium and sports centre, which includes an athletics stadium and football pitches on a sprawling, campus-style complex. You enter the car park, with the main stadium on your left, and then drive to the furthest corner of the car park, where a narrow, pockmarked road runs parallel to the main Edinburgh–London rail line. After about 100 metres it opens out into another small car park, with a Portakabin – headquarters to the Scottish Cyclists’ Union – on your left, and, straight ahead, a big, white, pebbledash building.
There is no clue that it is a velodrome, and no obvious entrance. You gain access to it by some steps that lead down into a dark tunnel, which tends to act as a repository for rainwater … ah yes, rain: a subject I’ll return to in a moment. There are often a couple of puddles to avoid as you make your way through the tunnel, heading for the set of steps at the other end, taking you back up into daylight.
I remember emerging from the tunnel that first time, blinking, into the light, and being taken aback, and a little intimidated, by what I saw. For all that the place was clearly quite run down, and the entrance so unprepossessing, there is nothing that really prepares you for your first view, ‘in the flesh’, of a velodrome. Before me there stood what looked like a wooden wall of death: the corners really were like vast vertical walls rearing up from the ground. Though I had known what a velodrome was, I hadn’t anticipated how steep its corners would be. And, funnily enough, that’s usually the first thing most people say when they enter a velodrome for the first time.
Meadowbank’s only failing – and one of the reasons for it looking so run down – is that it has never had a roof. Rain has always been the curse of the place, and many a scheduled session of racing or training has been destroyed over the years by rain, which renders the wooden boards unrideable by transforming them into an ice rink. But the problem goes beyond interruptions to the calendar. The constant exposure of the track to the elements has taken its toll, damaging the boards, and leaving them prone to splintering. As I write, the Meadowbank Velodrome still stands – just. I supported the ‘Save Meadowbank’ campaign in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, and following the Games the track – and indeed the entire complex – was granted a reprieve by Edinburgh Council. It would be nice to think that this was in response to the campaign, but I suspect it also had rather a lot to do with the economic crisis and its effect on the value of the land that the track sits on. The site of the velodrome had been earmarked for luxury flats, but as the value of land plummeted, this scheme made less and less financial sense to the council. So, Edinburgh still has a cycling track, though for how long, no one really knows. It could certainly do with a new one – nothing fancy, just something beginners can have a shot on, and serious riders can train on, 12 months of the year. In other words, preferably with a roof.
Thinking back to my early outings on the track, there was no real Eureka! moment; nothing, initially, that indicated to me that I had finally found the sport to which I would dedicate the next 20 years – and counting – of my life. The first time I turned up was on a Friday evening for a Dunedin track night. I suspect that everyone has felt daunted before going out there, and I was no different. I was given a track bike belonging to the East of Scotland Cycling Association – a very basic, fairly old machine with no gears and no brakes, as is the norm with track bikes.
Track bikes have ‘fixed wheels’ – only one gear and no brakes – and so you slow down by easing the pressure on the pedals, which is a lot less effective than squeezing some brake levers with your fingers. As a consequence, you have less control on a track bike, and once you are up there on the boards, you are largely at their mercy. Or at least that’s what it feels like at first.
As I wheeled my borrowed track bike over to the straight – where the gradient is more gentle – and swung my leg over, I was very nervous and a little bit excited. There was a group of riders lapping the 250-metre track, going at around 25 to 30mph, riding in a compact line, one tucked behind the other for maximum shelter. Riding in such close proximity to each other with no gears and no brakes looked as if it took skill and nerve in equal measure, and I wasn’t sure when, or if, I’d be able to do that. My first thought was that I should keep out of their way.
Our club coach, Ray Harris, who was running the training session, gave me a few pointers. ‘Keep your speed up – if you go into the banking too slowly, the tyres will lose their traction and you’ll slide … look where you want to go – straight in front of you … use the lines on the track, especially the black one near the bottom, to keep your bearings … overtake riders on the outside, not the inside … and whatever you do, don’t try to stop pedalling!’ This is the biggest danger for the fixed wheel novice. If you make any kind of effort on the road you can freewheel for a bit to recover. If you try that on the track, with the ‘fixed wheel’ bikes, you’ll do a good impression of a cowboy on an angry horse, and end up on your (soon to be splintered) backside. The pedals won’t stop, so you can’t just stop pedalling; you have to ease off gradually. Depending on how fast you’re going, it can take a lap or two to come to a complete halt.
As I set off off along the home straight, Ray shouted after me, urging me to press harder on the pedals, and to increase my speed as I entered the banking – to commit to it. Commitment was the key; if I backed off at all I’d slither down the track. But it’s counter-intuitive: your instinct is to back off, because if the banking seems steep from the centre, it appears even steeper as you ride into it. And it does appear, at first, as though you are riding into a wall rather than around a bend; it can induce a claustrophobic feeling, looming over you, almost swallowing you up and giving you nowhere to go. The bend curves to the left, but every instinct is telling you to lean to the right to try and correct that. It takes several laps just to begin to feel confident on the bends; to ride at speed, leaning, counter-intuitively, into them rather than trying, counterproductively, to lean out of them.
As I got up to speed on that first session I could feel my confidence growing, and my fear turning to exhilaration. By the end of my few laps I was enjoying it, though I didn’t have the confidence, yet, to ride in a group – or go too close to other riders. That would take a few more outings. But I started heading down to the track – about a 20-minute bike ride from my house – on a regular basis. Our Dunedin track nights weren’t formal training, as such, but more like a bit of fun. I worked up to riding in the group, and we’d do around 40 laps of ‘through-and-off’ – riding in a line, taking turns at the front before swinging up the banking, dropping back and latching on to the back of the string. If you’ve seen a team pursuit race, it’s the same idea, but usually with anything from four to about 15 riders.
Did I have any talent? If I did, it was well hidden – though, as I have said already, I think the notion of ‘talent’ is overrated. Counting against me, at this stage, was that I didn’t specialize in one event: I did everything. I began taking part in the Meadowbank Track League on a Tuesday evening – when it wasn’t rained off – where I would ride every race going. I was 16, still reasonably skinny – around 74 kilos, as opposed to the 93 I weigh now – and trying to be as lean as possible. If you look at most cyclists, they are as slender as jockeys, with large thighs, but sunken cheeks and protruding rib cages. The only cyclists who didn’t conform to that stereotype were track sprinters, but I was a long way from deciding that’s what I wanted to be. I was still riding the road, and doing endurance events – the pursuit and bunch races – on the track.
By 1993 I was riding the track league most weeks, and my first full season of track cycling coincided with the sudden emergence on to the world stage of a Scottish superstar. Graeme Obree, mentioned at the start of the last chapter, had been winning time trials for years, while enjoying a close rivalry with Chris Boardman, the English rider who, the previous year, became the first British cyclist in 84 years to win an Olympic gold medal, claiming the pursuit at the Barcelona Games – another event that I found profoundly inspiring. Boardman’s success seemed also to inspire Obree; he could see his rival’s career taking off and his name in lights and obviously thought, ‘That could be me.’
But the question for Obree was, how? He set his sights on the prestigious world ‘hour’ record, which had been established in 1984 by the Italian Francesco Moser, beating the mark set in 1972 by the legendary Eddy Merckx. ‘The hour’ is an unusual race, measuring simply the distance you ride in 60 minutes, and it was seldom ridden – mainly, perhaps, because it was so brutally tough. After his record ‘hour’ Merckx reckoned it had taken five years off his life.
Boardman had announced that he would have a go at Moser’s record in July, but Obree cheekily beat him to it, travelling to the Hamar track in Norway and bettering Moser’s mark just a week before Boardman’s planned assault. It was an audacious thing to do, but that was Obree all over. Though he had no real back-up or financial support, he lived by the credo of nothing is impossible – or ‘impossible is nothing’, as one of my sponsors puts it. Though Boardman beat his record a week later – only for Obree to claim it back the following year – Obree also won the world pursuit title that year, beating Boardman.
Obree became my cycling hero, as did Boardman. We weren’t blessed, in Scotland or Britain, with an abundance of world-class riders we could aspire to emulate, but Obree and Boardman’s rivalry sparked huge interest. Apart from them, the ‘heroes’ of the sport were, and had always tended to be, the continental road riders, or, on the track, the Australian and French sprinters. Boardman’s victory in the 1992 Olympics was a big inspiration to me – I listened to it on the BBC’s World Service on a family holiday in France – and Obree ticked every box as far as I was concerned – he was the best in the world, he was an original, he was inspirational … and he was from Scotland.
Cycling Weekly was a good resource for the latest Obree news. But it was surreal that he was one of us, competing in my own backyard. Guys from my club would come home from time trials in the West of Scotland, having competed against him on the GD21 course, or whatever, and report back. The times he was doing were unbelievable: he’d go four minutes faster than me over a 10-mile time trial. He seemed superhuman.
I first saw him at the national championships in Leicester in 1993, a month after he broke the hour record. This was before the world championships, and he had to win the national title to be selected for the British team alongside the Olympic champion, Boardman, whose selection had been guaranteed. Obree reached the final, where he faced Bryan Steel, one of the country’s most consistent pursuit riders. I was in the crowd watching, preparing to cheer on Obree, but my heart stopped as the race got under way and he pulled his foot out of the pedal.
He had been a strong favourite to beat Steel, having qualified fastest, but this mishap looked to have cost him the race, and his place at the world championships. Obree lost several seconds trying to get his foot back in – something that’s not easy on a fixed wheel bike, with the pedals constantly in motion – and when he eventually began to get going, working hard to turn the huge gear he used, he was well down on Steel. I was caught up in the excitement of it and moved to the edge of the track, cheering him on. It was a classic pursuit race, and gradually Obree began to reel him in, eventually coming through to win. It was an amazing performance, and entirely typical of Obree, whose life story was far from straightforward, and involved overcoming – sometimes selfinflicted – hurdles and difficulties. Funnily enough, I recently watched a Graeme Obree DVD with footage of this race, and saw myself standing watching in the back straight – a skinny youth in a white cap.
Obree wasn’t the only rider to pull his foot out of the pedal at those championships. I did, too. It was in qualifying for the junior pursuit, and I was using the old toe-clips and straps, which, ironically, were supposed to be more secure than the new clip-less pedals. Embarrassingly, and unlike Obree, I wasn’t able to reattach my foot to my pedal – there are echoes here of my traumatic foot-pedal mishap at the BMX world championships in Slough seven years earlier – and so I rode the entire race, all three kilometres, with my foot resting on top of the pedal, rather than secured in it. Consequently, it took me roughly the same time to cover three kilometres as for Obree to do four. I didn’t qualify.
And I didn’t do much better in the sprint, scraping through qualification in seventeenth (eighteen went through), then dead-heating in the first-round ‘repechage’. My campaign didn’t last much longer, but the experience of riding those championships, at the end of a summer when I’d been doing more rowing than cycling (I had just come from the Home Countries rowing championships, which were also a disaster: we sank the boat) was an eye-opener. As far as track cycling went, I recognize now that I was really only playing at it, and my going to the British championships was the equivalent of a golfer whose experience is limited to the driving range playing a round with Tiger Woods.
Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but I was certainly up against some serious opponents. Some of them had highly specialized, and very pricey, track bikes, whereas I used the same machine for sprint and pursuit, the only concession being to change the handlebars between races. I was competitive in terms of my attitude, but I wasn’t under any illusions – I knew I didn’t have the same experience, and hadn’t put in the same work as some of the others.
Really, the highlight of my first national track championships didn’t come in any of my races, but in briefly meeting Obree. He was so unassuming and approachable; no matter who you were (or weren’t), he put you at ease, and you got the impression he’d happily spend all day signing autographs, posing for photographs and chatting. He just seemed so normal. But as far as performance was concerned, he occupied a different planet.
When I returned to Leicester for the national championships the following year, having ridden virtually a full season of track league – and more or less finished with rowing – several things had changed, including my club. Over the winter of 1993/94 I decided I wanted to focus more on track cycling, and I joined a club dedicated to the track, the City of Edinburgh Racing Club. This was an impressive set-up, the Manchester United of British track racing, since it didn’t only sweep the board at the national championships, but it also tended to sign up all the best talent. I don’t include myself in that category, incidentally, but it was a club that took racing seriously, and it had an aura about it. A bit like the British track cycling team now, it was a club where mediocrity was not accepted; when you went to the British championships, you went there to win medals. At that time in Scotland only a very elite group of people had ever won a medal in a British championship. It was a big deal. But that was the purpose of ‘The City’, as the club was known. When I joined, I didn’t say I was going to do this or that, but I stated my goals, which were to win a medal at the British championships. That pressed the right buttons. British medals were the City of Edinburgh Racing Club’s raison d’être.
But in 1994 I came up against my bête noire – to keep the French going – in a fellow junior sprinter, James Taylor. He had been riding for a few years and he brought all his experience to bear in match sprinting, which is the most tactical of races. I was quicker than him – I was actually fastest in the 200m qualifying time trial, which came as a major surprise as I hadn’t trained for it. But, having exceeded all expectations by reaching the final of the junior sprint, against Taylor I had no idea what to do. I was naïve, and my tactics were dreadful. In the first race, he pinned me to the fence, at the top of the track; and from there he was in control. I knew I was faster than him; but I didn’t have a clue how to beat him in a headto-head scenario.
I came off after that first heat and received a bit of a dressing down from Brian Annable, who ran – and still runs – the City of Edinburgh club. He didn’t enjoy seeing his boys beaten; and he certainly didn’t enjoy seeing them humiliated. ‘What did you do that for?’ he asked, meaning: why did I allow Taylor to pin me to the fence? ‘He made you look like an arse!’ he added, just to make sure I got the message.
And it might have been true, but it didn’t really help me going into the second heat, where, predictably enough, the same thing happened. Though I knew I was quicker than Taylor, he had guile and what we call ‘track craft’. In a mano a mano contest he could dictate things – the mark of a skilful sprinter.
Still, a silver medal in the British championships, though it might not have pleased Brian Annable, was a fantastic result for me, especially as it got me a place on the British squad, which meant once-a-month sessions, under the watchful eye of the national track coach Marshall Thomas, at the brand new Manchester Velodrome. It vindicated my decision to join The City and to devote more energy to track racing. I was still growing, and beginning to fill out, which made me less suited to other cycling disciplines, and my enthusiasm was increasing at a similar rate. By now I’d usually be at Meadowbank twice a week, once for training, once for track league; I was really keen and motivated, and I felt that I could go somewhere. I was improving with every race, which was massively exciting. It felt as though I was embarking on a journey, and I didn’t know where it would end; I didn’t know what the limitations were, or even if there were any. But I was desperate for help, for guidance – and there wasn’t much of that to be had.
I was also at another crossroads, a more important one. I was in my final year at school and considering my next move – a decision that wasn’t really helped by the computer programme I completed at school, which was supposed to tell me what career my skills and interests were suited to. Other than being convinced that I should go to university, I didn’t have a clue what I would do in the longer term, so I was curious to see what the careers advice would be. After feeding in all the relevant information – in response to questions as bizarre as ‘Would you rather work in a blue room or a green room?’ and ‘What’s your favourite month?’ – I waited anxiously for the answer that could determine my future.
Or not. The computer said: Brewer. Or advocate.
At school, as I have said, I was more interested in the sciences. I quite liked English too, eventually graduating from my ‘What I did at the weekend’ essays about BMXing. But I preferred logic to ambiguity. For my Highers – the Scottish equivalent of ‘A’ levels – I did maths, English, physics, chemistry and biology, but I was disappointed with my results. Having got ‘A’s in the preliminary exams, I ended up with two ‘B’s and three ‘C’s in the actual exams.
There’s an interesting parallel with sport here, I think. Academically, I never felt that I struggled. I got top marks in my Standard Grades, and progressed through school without ever really working – or feeling that I had to. When I got to fifth year, and the all-important Highers, I had that same mentality, and didn’t really work for them. I was complacent, thinking that, since I’d always done OK in exams, I’d sail through.
Looking through some of my report cards – an embarrassing but necessary part of writing an autobiography – I spot a theme emerging around this time, one that is sometimes buried, though not too deeply, in the subtext. In one I’m described as ‘a highly motivated pupil [but] I agree with [another teacher’s] remarks about chatting. Perhaps this is just a sign of enthusiasm.’ In physics, apparently I ‘ask and answer questions frequently – usually about physics’. In French: ‘I hope Chris will not spend too much time trying to be funny, which he undoubtedly is, but it must not be an end in itself.’ I think he meant that I was funny in French, not English. I should have stuck at it.
But it was my English teacher, Christopher Rush – now the highly respected author of several acclaimed books – who identified my biggest shortcoming. ‘Chris has performed ably on all fronts except one … the weak front? Failure to revise adequately for tests. The same must not happen when it comes to exams.’ Alas, Mr Rush, it did.
I recognize now that I was complacent about my school work – that I never felt it necessary to work hard for exams. Yet in sport the converse was true. In each sport I took part in I recognized the need for hard work; I never felt that it came easily, because there were always people better than me. Nobody ever told me I was ‘the next big thing’ – as certain of my young rivals were told. (Subsequently, quite a few have told me, whenever I’ve had any success, that ‘I always knew you’d do that …’ though I don’t remember them saying anything at the time.) In BMX, rugby, rowing and cycling, there was always at least one person better than me, meaning that I could never rest on my laurels. One thing I’ve realized about myself is that I can put 100 per cent into something, but only if I’m really motivated to. Maybe that’s the case for most people, but I think that if sport had come easily to me – if I’d been top of the tree – I would probably have lost interest at an early stage.
After my silver medal at the 1994 British track championships I was satisfied, because it meant I had made progress, but there was absolutely no danger of me being complacent. I knew that if I were ever going to beat the James Taylors of this world I’d have to work very hard. And I’d have to combine it with my studies for a university degree. Despite my disappointing grades in the Highers, I got an unconditional offer from St Andrews University to study physics and maths. St Andrews was perfect: far enough away from Edinburgh to ensure that I wouldn’t go running home at the first opportunity, but close enough to return if I wanted to.
