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6

Craig and Jason

My first year at St Andrews University, which turned out to be my only year, was brilliant. I threw myself into student life, going out most nights, making new friends, eating rubbish and enjoying a drink or two, or three. It was great fun, if incompatible with the life of an athlete, though I had decided not to be an athlete that first term. At least I think I had decided, but maybe I didn’t decide; maybe it just happened. And I was pretty sure I could get away with it, more or less. In those days track cycling was a summer sport – it switched to winter a few years ago – and the serious work wouldn’t need to start until the New Year.

At home over the Christmas holidays I got back on my bike, and when I returned to St Andrews for the second term I scaled back on the social life. Easter brought an exotic racing trip to Trinidad and Barbados, which would set me up for a year of solid progress, though it started with a bang, following a crash, that ended with me sporting a neck brace.

The racing in the West Indies really has to be witnessed to be believed; it is like nowhere else, and should definitely feature on the ‘must do’ list for any track cyclist. It is strange, because, at international level, riders from this part of the world haven’t had massive success; and yet to race there, in front of thousands of exuberant fans, you’d think it was the national sport. The meetings are like carnivals with an atmosphere similar, I would imagine, to the biggest cricket matches, with the fans singing, dancing and chucking ice cubes at you as you raced. Well, it is hot.

Riding our bikes into Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, we were treated like heroes, but even that didn’t prepare us for the atmosphere inside the velodrome, with its large, concrete, lumpy track, a running track around the inside, and stands absolutely jam-packed with people, probably around 5,000 of them. I was there with two fellow sprinters, Craig MacLean and Peter Jacques, and the endurance rider Martin Williamson, all City of Edinburgh club mates, and on the first night I lined up alongside eight other riders for a keirin. The others were from the islands, with some South Americans there too, including a couple of Cubans who quickly gained a reputation for their no-holds-barred style of racing.

There was some pretty rough riding, to be honest, with the rules sketchy, and an anything-goes approach, particularly when it came to ‘primes’. These are special prizes awarded at the end of certain laps, announced the lap before with a blast of the ‘commissaire’ (referee)’s whistle. Some of these guys would run over their granny to win a prime – a prime, I should add, that carried prize money (we worked out) of approximately £3.50.

In the keirin, with the lumpy track and the jostling, it felt dangerous, and so it proved. I was ‘hooked’ by one of the Cubans, meaning he cut across my line, and down I went, like a tonne of bricks. I was in a bad way, with multiple cuts and road rash, but it was my neck that gave most cause for concern. As I lay on the track I was attended to by an official from the Barbados Cycling Federation, who took me to the local hospital, where I was examined and fitted with a neck brace.

I feared the worst, that my racing trip to the West Indies would be cut short after 24 hours of an intended three-anda-half week odyssey, but, after a couple of days, I had recovered sufficiently to remove the neck brace, get back on my bike and resume racing. The rest of the trip included racing in Trinidad, where we stayed in a terrible hotel, occupied by an army of cockroaches, and competing in one of the most bizarre velodromes on the planet, involving a two-and-a-half hour journey by mini-bus into the middle of a jungle in Palesco. It was a 500-metre track but with bends as steep as a 250m track, which made it unbelievably dangerous, and meant you could hardly ride above the black (bottom) line on the banking. You’d have to ride single-file around the bends and then overtake on the long straights. I fell off there, too, in an incident that proved the point just made: a guy was riding above me on one of the bends, and, even though he was going at a decent speed, his tyres slipped, and he slid down the banking, taking me out. Fortunately I wasn’t too badly hurt this time.

The other memorable incident in Barbados concerned one of my team-mates, Martin. While Craig and I had travelled straight there from a training camp in Majorca, and therefore had a bit of colour – meaning that our skin had turned from the usual Scottish pale blue to creamy white – Martin was as white as a sheet. When he was in the local supermarket he decided to do something about it. On the shelf he saw something called ‘Melatonin’, which he mistook for a natural remedy that he had heard was used by bodybuilders to make their skin turn darker more quickly (basically making their skin more photosensitive). He didn’t realize melatonin was also a natural sleep-promoting remedy. When he looked at the packaging, it said to take one before bed time. ‘Why bed time?’ he asked, before stretching out under the sun for the remainder of the afternoon. It was our first day, we were racing in the evening (when I would suffer my heavy crash), but, as we started to think about leaving, we noticed that Martin had crashed out. We tried to wake him, but he was completely zonked. After several coffees a very lethargic Martin started to come round. But he wasn’t any browner.

Even after living the typical life of a fresher student in that first term at university, I found that, once I got my head down and resumed training, with the training camp in Majorca and racing trip to the West Indies both providing essential building blocks in my preparation for the season, I was still on an upward curve. At the British championships that summer I won my first gold medal, riding with City of Edinburgh in a new event, the three-man team sprint, and added a silver medal in the team pursuit.

As well as Graeme Obree there was another Scottish cyclist who proved a great influence, and an inspiration, at this time. Craig MacLean, one of my companions in the West Indies, was five years older than me. In fact, he still is.

Craig and I were Dunedin club-mates, and he too had dabbled in mountain biking and road racing, but by the mid1990s he was committed to the track, and he was already enjoying some success. Like me, he did a bit of everything, but his main attribute was an incredible turn of pace. Whereas I was still relatively skinny, he was stockier and shorter – more the classic build of a sprinter. He was muscular, but as lean as a particularly lean piece of fillet steak. Craig was definitely going places, even if the City of Edinburgh Racing Club didn’t see that at first. His application to join the club in 1995 was rejected, so he raced that season with the Moray Firth club, based up in the Highlands, which is where he comes from.

I had a long way to go to catch Craig up, although sometimes, if he was on his worst day and I was on my best, it would be close. I remember the first time I beat him. It was during that breakthrough season, 1995, at the Scottish 15km scratch race championship, in a bunch endurance race on the outdoor track at Caird Park in Dundee. This was a track in an even more decrepit state than Meadowbank, and concrete rather than wood, but on this occasion it hosted a great race – though I may be biased.

As we came to the finish, I led it out, with Craig on my wheel. I was going hard, full gas, and I was aware of Craig moving off my wheel, and beginning to claw me back, inching up towards my right shoulder, when I dug as deep as I possibly could, and broke him; he swung off up the track fairly melodramatically, settling for second. Already Craig was seen as the main man, the daddy, and I was regarded as his protégé, which led some to the natural assumption that he had gifted me the race. John McMillan, the race commissaire, came up to both of us afterwards and said: ‘Craig, if you’re going to give him the race, do it more subtly than that …’

I was fuming! I knew I’d won it fair and square, but Craig didn’t correct John – he just laughed. It was like that Billy Connolly sketch, where he mimics someone tripping up on the pavement and breaking into a run as if he had been about to do that all along. Craig was happy to maintain the illusion, because it saved his face. Competitive bugger.

And just to compound the insult, the annual Scottish Cyclists’ Union handbook, which is the bible of Scottish racing, later listed Craig as the winner! He had won it the previous year, and he would go on to win it again the following year, but his name appears as the winner of the title three years in a row. It was my first senior title, and something I was very proud of. Imagine how I felt when I found that my name was missing from the record. I was gutted!

Returning to university after a summer that had yielded senior gold medals in the British and Scottish championships was difficult. St Andrews is picture-postcard beautiful: a seaside town surrounded by vast, golden beaches, as well as the most famous golf course in the world. But I was more interested in velodromes, and increasingly concerned about its isolation in relation to the nearest of them. Meadowbank was around an hour away, and Manchester, to which I was by now almost a weekly visitor, up to five hours.

My dilemma was made worse by the fact that I was less and less sure about the course to which I had committed four years of my life. Maths and physics had been the subjects I’d done OK in at school, but now, though I was passing the exams, and coping with the course work, I was no longer enjoying them. I was also beginning to wonder where they would take me and, more to the point, whether I really wanted to go there …

I returned for my second year harbouring these doubts, and within a couple of weeks I realized they weren’t going to disappear, but would grow worse. When I made the decision, I made it quickly. The degree I’d chosen wasn’t for me, and there was no point in prolonging the uncertainty. I phoned my parents, told them my decision, and, though I’m sure they were concerned, they couldn’t have been more supportive. Subsequently they have admitted to thinking ‘What the hell is he doing?’ and they weren’t all that reassured by my new plans: to try and get on a sports science course. At the time, though, they didn’t interrogate me too much. My dad came and collected me, and I returned home, where my parents made it clear that I couldn’t ‘sponge’ off them, and that I would have to get a job – or sign on. I signed on, for one week, and then got a job once again at James Thin’s, the bookshop.

And so I became a ‘dropout’ – a loaded phrase if ever there was one, conjuring up an image of a Young Ones-style waster. That wasn’t quite the life I had in mind. There was a feeling of failure, I suppose, but I knew that I couldn’t keep going with the degree, because I wasn’t enjoying the course. I had a great social life in St Andrews, a really good group of friends, but that wasn’t enough to keep me committed, and motivated, for another three years. As for losing face, I wasn’t too worried about that, to be honest; the fact I had an alternative plan made it a justifiable decision, I reckoned.

Still, when people asked, ‘So, you’ve packed in physics – what are you going to do?’ and I said, ‘Sports science’, the typical response would be: ‘Er … oh, OK’. What they were probably thinking was ‘Mickey Mouse’, because sports science degrees were fairly new back then, and there was a general lack of understanding about what they involved.

Craig was another reason for wanting to be in Edinburgh. We had become good friends – we shared the same sense of humour and spent so much time together that we were practically finishing each other’s sentences. We also had lots in common, not least our enthusiasm for our sport, and, more importantly I think, our curiosity. Although Craig’s second application to join The City for 1996 was accepted, it was clear that we were, to all intents and purposes, on our own. If we wanted to succeed we’d have to do it together – there was a dearth of coaching expertise, or any practical support in terms of sponsorship and funding. The City was an ambitious club, and great to be part of, but it had few resources and minimal funding.

But The City was as good as it got in the UK. Quite simply, there was practically zero sponsorship in track cycling, and it was ludicrous to think that it could ever be a career. It was a passion, a hobby, and for me it was coming close to being an obsession. It was all I thought about, all I wanted to do, and if that is the definition of ‘obsession’, then I suppose I’d have to admit it. But at the back of my mind – and occasionally venturing to the forefront – was one of life’s golden rules, instilled in me by my parents: that I needed, in the classic parents’ phrase, ‘something to fall back on’. In other words, a degree or qualification that would enable me to find a job when, inevitably, the day came to enter the real world.

Craig already had something to fall back on, having qualified as a piano tuner. But now, as we prepared for the 1996 season, he was fully committed to cycling – and just as obsessed as I was.

Looking back, I recognize the years 1995 and 1996 as key ones. My gold medals in the British and Scottish championships in 1995 acted as a catalyst for me to think that I could enjoy some success in this sport, if I worked hard at it. I mentioned in the Introduction that I was more interested in the question of ‘how’ than in that of ‘why’ some people decide to commit themselves so fully to something, to the extent that it does come close to being an obsession.

But now, when I think of this period, when there was no real sponsorship, no lottery funding, few positive role models in the sport – at least few who actually made a living from it – and general uncertainty, I do ask myself: why? It’s hard to explain what kept me going. I certainly got huge satisfaction from achieving success, and winning races, but there was something far more powerful than that driving me on. For me the most potent motivational fuel was not ambition, I think, but curiosity. I wanted to see how far I could go.

As I said earlier, it felt as if I were embarking on a journey, with the destination – and indeed the stop-off points – unknown. But that was the most thrilling thing about it: I could dream about where it might take me. The Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 was an obvious goal, the Olympics in Sydney in 2000 a long shot, but that’s all these thoughts were at this point: dreams.

Some people take a gap year, and buy a round-the-world ticket, setting off with no fixed itinerary, only vague ideas of where they might go and what they might find. I suppose I was doing something broadly similar, but for no fixed period, and with Craig as my travel partner, even if our ‘travel’ usually entailed nothing more exotic than repeated visits to a secluded road by Edinburgh airport – but more on that in a moment.

Craig was approaching his mid-20s, and I think he was very conscious of it being his time. Like me, he was also on a steadily upward curve of improvement, and he didn’t know when that would end, but he was probably in more of a hurry than me. I was his sparring partner but I was also like his mini-me, in his shadow. I was working in the bookshop and had applied to start sports science at Heriot-Watt University. Craig was unemployed, scraping by and no more, and it wasn’t easy for him. Then again, we had a friend the same age as Craig, who we’d cycled with before he gave up and got a ‘normal’ job. He was already earning a lot of money, but I remember him saying he’d give up what he was doing to have the opportunity to do what we were doing. ‘Living the dream’ was how he put it. And I don’t recall noticing that his tongue was in his cheek.

Craig was no ‘workshy fop’, to quote Vic Reeves. He considered cycling his full-time job, even if there was no money in it. We became virtually inseparable, training together, and, when we weren’t training, poring over training manuals. Craig was a voracious reader of books, at least a voracious skimmer of books and borrower of library books. He trawled libraries in Edinburgh, taking out books about training, fitness, physiology, muscle power – anything that might yield even the tiniest nugget of useful information or advice.

Some of this information influenced our training, which was experimental, to say the least. We became fascinated by the ‘big gear principle’ in training. Craig had watched Graham Sharman, an Australian sprinter, using very big gears, and it made sense to him. It could improve strength, and specifically cycling strength; it was like doing weights, but on a bike. We decided that this was important; that it should be a central plank of our training, pushing a huge gear, no matter how slowly you were going. We’d find hills and grind our way up them.

And we found that quiet little road by Edinburgh airport, which was perfect. Traffic was virtually non-existent, it was over a mile long, and it was dead straight.

It was just as well there was no traffic, because we might have caused an accident with drivers craning their necks as they went past, trying to work out what the hell we were doing. Picture the scene: two racing cyclists in full gear, pedalling very slowly, clearly making big, vein-popping efforts, but moving at a snail’s pace. Had anyone been out for a stroll, they would have overtaken us.