Читать книгу Chris Hoy: The Autobiography - Chris Hoy - Страница 8
ОглавлениеSmells of Sandwiches and Mars Bars
Yes, my childhood revolved around sport – so far, adulthood hasn’t been much different – and bikes were the dominant theme. My BMX career, which started when I was seven, ran along parallel lines to my football, then rugby, and almost outlasted both. I retired from BMX when I was 14, and stopped playing rugby the following year.
But my burgeoning interest in BMX coincided with a very difficult time for my family, following the deaths, within two weeks of each other, of my grandma and grandpa – my dad’s parents. To appreciate how profound an effect this had on me, not to mention my dad, mum and sister Carrie, I should describe our living arrangements, which were fairly unusual. We lived in the top-floor flat of a townhouse in Murrayfield, a nice suburb of Edinburgh, and, in the style of a big Italian family (not that we have a drop of Italian blood, as far as I know), we shared the house with my grandparents, who lived downstairs in a separate flat with a shared entrance. In other words, to enter our house I had to go through my grandparents’ front door, which meant I saw them all the time.
It was the type of house, in the kind of setting, that presented myriad opportunities for boys’ own-style adventures. There was a decent-sized garden at the back, with a disused railway line over the wall at the end; a place that was, inevitably, out of bounds. I was always warned not to play on the railway line, that it was ‘dangerous,’ which naturally heightened my curiosity. Back in those days it was little more than a stretch of wasteland, overgrown and quite wild, though the platform from the old railway station, which was right behind our house, remained. These days, it has been tarmaced and is a popular cycle track, though I’m sure 8-year-old kids are still told to stay away. When I wanted to get round this rule, I didn’t clamber over the wall at the end of the garden – that was too obvious – instead, I sneaked around the side of the house, entering by the old platform, with my sister sometimes a partner-in-crime and willing accomplice in the illicit adventure.
Poor Carrie. She is two years older than me, and could be a little bit bossy, as elder sisters are prone to be towards baby brothers; and I could be a little brat, as baby brothers are prone to be towards elder sisters. We always got on well and still do, but I could be a bit sneaky as a young kid and I would frequently land her in trouble. If she was being bossy, and I was winding her up by resisting her commands, I had a knack of being able to make her snap at precisely the moment that Mum or Dad would appear on the scene. In they’d walk, to Carrie screaming and shouting, and me sitting there looking put-upon, an imaginary halo floating above my head. Still, Carrie and I were always playing together, and we had a lot of fun, especially in the garden, and up at the top of the road – where we were allowed to play – in an area we called ‘the Conkers,’ a clearing with huge chestnut trees. As we got older Carrie and I only became closer and closer, even as our own interests diverged. She was more into art than sport, and she loved reading, going on eventually to work in publishing. She was always highly intelligent, and became ‘Dux’ of our school, though, despite her talents, she has never seemed to have any ego at all. That can be seen in her support for me throughout my cycling career, which has been incredible, from attending all my major events, to, afterwards, spending hours producing beautiful albums of the press cuttings and photographs. These are no Pritt Stick jobs – they are stunning coffee table-sized books, and priceless mementos which have to be seen, and flicked through, to be fully appreciated.
My parents bought the family house in 1969, when they were newly married – and they remain there to this day, forty years on. It has proved a solid investment, then, though their friends questioned that at the time, since it meant – according to my dad – that they couldn’t afford furniture and didn’t go out for more than a year. After a year, so the family legend goes, they bought a fridge and went to the cinema. Or should that be ‘the pictures’?
The story of how they bought the house was unusual, too. It was owned by a wealthy friend of my grandma – my dad’s mum – who allowed my parents to live in the top-floor flat while they were looking for property; the arrangement was for six months. But in the midst of that she decided to sell, and offered them first refusal. The house was valued at around £5,000 and my parents, who had fallen for it, really pushed the boat out to buy it.
The house was far too big for the pair of them, but, with the shared entrance, it was impossible to rent out one of the floors. A solution presented itself a year later, when my dad’s parents, Jerry and Mary, lost the house in which they lived. My grandpa was the manager of a grocery depot, and he and my grandma lived in a flat above the warehouse, which was in Leith, and thus explains my dad’s allegiance to the Leith football team, Hibernian. The flat came with the job, and when grandpa retired, in 1970, they had to move. So it was that they came to live with my parents in Murrayfield, occupying the first floor, while we – not that I was born quite yet – lived upstairs.
Having my grandparents downstairs was fantastic, the perfect scenario for a young kid. There was the security aspect; if we were playing in the garden, or on the street, they could keep an eye on us (most of the time), as well as my parents. And of course, it meant I saw them all the time, frequently as I rushed past after coming in their – and our – front door, before dashing up the internal stair that led into our flat. After dinner I’d often sneak downstairs for some biscuits from my grandma, though my abiding memory of evenings with my grandparents was the intense heat. Like a lot of older people, they had the heating up to the maximum, and their living room was like a sauna. When I went back upstairs it wasn’t the crumbs around my mouth that gave away the fact I’d been scoffing biscuits, it was my rosy cheeks.
I loved having my grandparents downstairs, though, inevitably, being so young, I didn’t fully appreciate how much I loved having them downstairs until they were gone. They died, as I have said, within a week of each other in 1984, my grandpa first and then my grandma, when I was eight. It was my first experience of dealing with a family death, and the sadness and sense of upheaval were exacerbated by the fact we were so close, in both senses of the word. Coming home from school and not passing my grandparents on my way upstairs was very strange and a hard thing to deal with; it meant everything changed instantly, and in more ways that I anticipated.
It was a tough time for my parents, but they also had a pressing, and practical, problem: what to do with the house. It was too big – and too expensive – for my parents, Carrie and me, so they had to sell the bottom flat. The problem, however, was the shared front door.
My dad worked in the building trade, having not gone to university. Eventually he did go to university, in his fifties, to do a surveying degree – he actually graduated the year before me – but when I was in primary school he ran a building company, with a team of three or four builders, though I think he did a lot of the work himself. He was very hands-on, and he’s got great practical skills. The trouble is – and I hope he won’t mind me saying – it takes him an age to get things done. He is great at taking on jobs, especially for other people; he can’t say no. If he has a fault, it’s that he over commits, and takes on more than he can manage.
When my grandparents died business for my dad was far from booming: it was a tough time for industry, the property industry especially. So my dad decided to take a year out, more or less, and take on a big project: turning the house into two flats, with separate front doors.
I can understand if my mum felt some trepidation – for the reasons discussed above, and because, though he did jobs for other people to perfection, our house was often a bit of a building site by contrast. Still, in the aftermath of his parents’ death, he got started on this project. First he removed the internal staircase, which led up to our flat. Then he built an external staircase, with a new front door. Where the internal stair had been, he built two new rooms. And then, to make the ground-floor flat attractive to prospective buyers, he built a double garage, which – much to my disappointment – reduced the garden by about half.
It was like a Grand Designs project, and I can imagine Kevin McCloud, had the TV programme existed back then, wandering into our house-cum-building site, saying: ‘I just wonder if he’s taken on too much here.’ It really was like a construction site for much of that year, and at one point the plumbing was disconnected upstairs. Initially we still had a toilet downstairs, but then that was cut off, too. For about three days we had to visit the Texaco garage at the bottom of the road, each time with some spurious excuse for returning, in order to use the toilet there. On the plus side, we were never out of milk, since that was the standard purchase to justify all the toilet trips. After the best part of a year, though, my dad had managed to convert the house into two separate flats. And 25 years later, as he likes to joke, the job is … very close to completion.
Mum, meanwhile, was a night owl. As a nurse she worked the night shift in the sleep department at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, which meant she left at eight in the evening and got home at seven in the morning. She’d sleep during the day, and, when I came in from school at about four I’d put the kettle on, make her a cup of tea and wake her up. If that makes me sound like a model child, I should confess that, lurking towards the forefront of my mind, was the thought of dinner. I don’t know how Mum did it, but she would get up, do the housework, make our dinner, and then go back to work: that was her life, really. Carrie was good at helping around the house, but it makes me a bit embarrassed to think of my contribution, given how hard my mum and dad worked. If I picked my scattered clothes up off my bedroom floor, that was me mucking in and doing my bit.
I know that I had a privileged upbringing – not financially, but in a far more important way, with my family providing the most stable foundation. We weren’t exactly the Waltons – more like the Simpsons – and there’d be nagging and arguments, but they would blow over, and it was a happy home; or, for the first eight years of my life, two homes, each as happy as the other, and one considerably hotter.
* * *
It was around the time of my grandparents’ death that I began to get really serious about BMXing. Though I was serious about football and rugby, my commitment to BMX was on another level. It had to be, because what started as a bit of fun on my pimped-up old bike from the church jumble sale soon developed to the point where I was no longer just riding local tracks, and competing against riders from the Edinburgh area, but joining sponsored teams, riding fancier bikes, and travelling first to England, then to Europe, in search of ever more serious competition.
The race that sticks most firmly in the memory is the 1986 world championships in Slough, near London. Glamorous, eh? Slough these days stands almost as a euphemism for dreary and boring, a suburban town where nothing much happens, thanks to it being the setting for The Office, Ricky Gervais’s satirical comedy, though the town had an image problem long before that, the poet John Betjeman writing: ‘Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now …’
Well, Slough will always evoke entirely different emotions, and more colourful memories, in me. As far as I was concerned, Slough in 1986 was the height of glamour, and the centre of the universe, because it hosted the biggest BMX world championships in the sport’s young history. Around 1,600 riders – many of them having travelled over from America – descended on Slough for the meeting; there were 64 in my under-11 age group alone, which is a figure worth reflecting on. Could any other sport attract such a large field for an international event in such a young age category? But these were the glory days of BMX. If the E.T. chase scene had reflected this latest craze, then it had also acted as a catalyst, because BMX grew hugely in popularity from the mid to the late 1980s, before hitting a sharp decline.
For me, those 1986 championships were a defining moment. They gave me a glimpse of what might be possible and shaped my desire to carry on; to up the ante and see how far I could go. I’d been racing for two years, and doing quite well, but Slough was my first international race. I was going well; I could feel it, and I felt confident as I lined up, alongside seven fellow ten-year-olds in my heat. I won, qualifying for the eighth-finals (the stage before the quarter-finals), and then won again, going through to the quarters. And I breezed through them, finishing second – with the top four going through.
I was in the semi-finals of the world championships. Now it was really serious, because to make the final was the big thing. And here’s one reason why: all the finalists would have single-digit number-plates (i.e. 1–8, as opposed to some messy double- or triple-digit number) at the following year’s championships. There was huge kudos in that.
Let me describe a BMX race. Or, rather, let the eight-year-old me describe a BMX race (copyright: my school jotter from p4M, mistakes as original):
My Weekend
I enjoy doing BMX. BMX stands for Bicycle Motocross. I race on my bike, there are jumps you go over and the corners are banked. Scotia is my favourite BMX shop [and also my sponsors, so I already understood that it was a good idea to namedrop my sponsors at every opportunity]. Yesterday I went racing at Glasgow. Gate two seemed to be putting me into third place (the gate is a thing at the start wich you put your front wheel against and somone says ‘Riders Ready, Pedels Ready, Go’ and pushes the gate down). You pick a card and it will have a number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. So I got third. Scotia are taking me training on Thursdays. I have done a picture of a track on the next page.
Just for the record, this got a big red tick and ‘very good’.
Giving another flavour of the sport, a few pages later, under the heading ‘My Favourite Place’, I find another tenuous excuse to shoe-horn my obsession into my school work (see also ‘My Holiday’, and numerous other ‘My Weekends’):
My favourite place is at the Derby BMX track. You get to watch the famous riders and get their autographs. There is a commentator who tells you who is in the lead over a microphone. When you are on the start you feel very nervous! Once you are racing you can not really hear the people cheering because you are concentrating so much on the race. There is a smell of sandwiches and Mars bars [do these actually smell? I think I meant burgers and hot dogs, which, when I smell them now, evoke the BMX races of my childhood]. When I crash, if I fall on my mouth I have a mouth guard but dirt can get in your mouth. It tastes horrible! Especially when the ground is wet!
Only a tick and ‘good’ this time. Obviously not my best work.
A BMX track is ridiculously short (this is me writing as a 33year-old again, in case you weren’t sure) – only around 400 metres long, sometimes shorter. It’s over within 30 seconds. You line up eight abreast, behind the start gate, feeling unbelievably nervous. It’s intense. Before you are traffic lights, which give the signal to start.
When the gate drops, you’re away. ‘On the “B” of the bang’, as Linford Christie would say; or, perhaps more accurately in this instance, the ‘G’ of the green light. You start in lanes, but as soon as the gate drops it’s a free-for-all and you’re into the first bend after around 30 metres. Often this will be a ninety-degree bend, with a U-bend after that, and three or four jumps located in between. It can be physical – it’s not officially a contact sport, but in fact it is, so you’re jostling with your rivals to hold position, and fighting for the best line into the corner.
But the start determines so much, which is why I used to travel the 15 miles to Livingston one evening a week, to practise on the only track in the Edinburgh area with a proper start gate. That wasn’t all: I would also practise on the street outside our home every evening. A bit like the goal-kicking for rugby, it was something I could practise on my own, honing my reflexes, experimenting with different pedal start positions, and working on accelerating my bike up to speed as quickly as possible, using lampposts on the street as markers for distance. And all that practice seemed to pay off: starts became my strength, my killer weapon.
So, back to Slough – where, incidentally, the other riders included Iwan Thomas, the future 400-metre runner, and, in my age group, a young German called Jan van Eijden, who, 20 years later, would become my sprint coach (see chapter one), as well as numerous other future track cycling champions, among them Australian Darryn Hill, the 1995 world sprint champion, and my future friend and team-mate, Craig MacLean. By the semi-final stage Jan had been knocked out – he only made it to the quarters, which shows the depth of talent there was in BMXing, given the career he went on to have as a cyclist. But I was still in the competition, preparing for my biggest moment – and with confidence, because I had progressed pretty smoothly to this point.
Bang! The start gate dropped and the race started in the usual frantic fashion. Four from the semi would qualify for the final, and I made a reasonable start, lying third going around the second U-bend. Coming out of that last corner, still in third, and, with a place in the final in my sights, we negotiated the final jump. Get over that OK and I’m there: in the final. But disaster struck. Hitting the ground after the jump, my foot slipped off the pedal, and I crashed onto the crossbar – which hurt, but wasn’t as painful as it would have been had I been a little older than 10.
But it was incredibly bad timing, and there followed one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever had in a bike race. I was still moving, but somehow couldn’t reconnect my foot and pedal; despite my desperate attempts, the pedal remained empty. And the more I panicked, the less likely I was to rectify this situation. It’s a bit like when you’re really late and in a hurry, trying to unlock your door – that’s when you’re most likely to fumble and drop your keys.
Paradoxically, time seemed both to stand still and speed up. As I tried to focus on getting my foot back on the pedal, one rider came past me on my left. Then, around 10 metres from the line, a second passed me on my right. My slip of the foot had cost me two places. It had also cost me my place in the final. I crossed the line fifth, just out of the qualification places.
I was inconsolable. And I couldn’t get the race out of my head, re-running it over and over again – not only in my head, but on TV. One of the dads had recorded it on an early video camera, which was about the size of an outside broadcast unit, with the battery in a backpack that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a week-long safari. His video of the race was a bit shaky, but I sat and watched it again and again, thinking: maybe this time my foot won’t slip off the pedal. It was a source of huge regret for me. I had really, really, really wanted to make the final. Not just for the kudos of the single-number bib at the following year’s championships, but because each of the finalists was presented with a small trophy. And I loved getting trophies.
After the race I was in tears. My dad tried to console me, telling me I’d ridden a good race, that I’d been unlucky and would have lots more opportunities in the future. Dad came to all my races – despite, for quite some time, being in the midst of his Grand Designs project back home – and he couldn’t have been more supportive, which was in contrast to some of the parents you’d see at these races. While I was crying because I was disappointed, others cried because their parents put pressure on them and reacted badly when they didn’t live up to the expectations they had for them. I saw kids being smacked on the head, their parents shouting, ‘What did you do that for?’ Then you’d see the bottom lip begin to tremble, and the tears start.
As we drove home from Slough, my dad and I discussed the race, and I came to appreciate that it hadn’t all been down to bad luck; that I wasn’t necessarily a victim of outrageous misfortune. The main reason my foot had come off the pedal was because I could see the finishing line, and thought I was home and dry. I allowed myself to be distracted, my technique fell apart for a split second, and the error followed; a bit like dropping a pass in rugby due to taking your eye off the ball.
I was 10, so none of this offered too much consolation at the time – and it didn’t stop me torturing myself by repeatedly watching the video of the race once I got home. However, I can see now that my dad helped me to analyse things rationally and logically, rather than seeing myself as the victim of a terrible injustice. It was about taking responsibility, I suppose, which starts with taking responsibility for yourself, and not looking for someone or something else to blame – opponents, team-mates, the pitch, track, referee, ball, weather, misplacing your lucky socks – when things went wrong.
One of the other dads who helped run the team I was in, Scotia BMX, has said that I stood out from a lot of the other kids for being quite rational rather than emotional; and for analysing races in a rational way, rather than kicking and screaming and throwing my toys out of the pram. Well, yes and no. I would say I was – and still am – very emotional. But I also think that I appreciated fairly early in my sporting career that your own performance is all that counts, and that winning isn’t the be-all and end-all, because there’s sod all you can do about your opponent. If you do the best ride of your life and come fifth … there’s no point being unhappy with that, is there?
As well as being my (more than willing) mechanic, my dad and the other dad I’ve just mentioned, George Swanson, helped organize the Scotia club’s training sessions. My dad thought a lot about training, and about ways we could replicate race efforts in practice. He and George used to take us to the closest beach to Edinburgh, Portobello. It wasn’t exactly the Côte d’Azur, but it was fringed by a long, wide footpath, which was excellent for training. They would line us up, six abreast, and have us race each other for 200 metres, before handing over to someone else, like a relay race. You’d rest a bit and go again – flat out. We’d be on our knees by the end of it, thanks mainly to there being a serious competitive dimension to this training, but it was a great way of raising our pain threshold, making these maximum efforts with nothing at stake but childhood pride.
Yet perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from BMXing came from never being the best. Even as I progressed, there was always someone better than me – a target for me to aim at. I saw a lot of kids who would just sling their leg over a bike and win. Often it was because they had simply grown faster than the rest of us, but in some cases it was because they had outstanding natural talent, which owed nothing at all to training, or hours of hard work.
It was the same in rugby. I remember that one of the rival Edinburgh schools (who on one occasion beat us 54–0) had a winger with astonishing speed, and the ability to execute a deadly sidestep. This guy was the most naturally gifted player I ever shared a rugby pitch with … and I think he packed it in at 15. I had been convinced he’d be a Scotland star of the future, but he disappeared and I never heard of him again.
I imagine that he, like other prodigies I have come across, lost interest because it all came too easily. They had so much natural talent that there was never any correlation, for them, between hard work and achievement. Often, such talent is all you need as a youngster – but as you get older, and the competition gets stiffer, talent will only take you so far. At some point, you have to start working, and as people catch up, you have to work harder. Which can be hard to accept if you’ve never made the link between hard work and success.
For this reason I think that ‘talent’ is vastly overrated in sport. I am thinking especially of power and endurance sports, but the idea that even tennis players and golfers such as Roger Federer or Tiger Woods are the best in the world simply because they are the most talented is ludicrous; they have talent, of course, but they have maximized it by hard work. It’s why, particularly when it comes to young athletes, I think the term ‘potential’ has far greater relevance and value than ‘talent’. Talent, as far as I am concerned, can in some cases be a nebulous, even damaging, notion; it can be a hindrance rather than a help.
Winning – and I did win from time to time – is a buzz, no doubt about it. But I got almost the same buzz from imagining how hard work might translate into success in the future. Even back then, I saw sport as a process, with the rewards coming at the end of it. It was my potential, rather than my talent, that excited and inspired me, driving me on.
The year after Slough, 1987, was another big one for me. I was fifth in the European championships in Genk, Belgium – the best ride of my BMX career, I’d say. But I had a bit of a disaster at the world championships in Orlando, going out at the quarter-final stage in the under-12 age group.
* * *
Genk, Orlando … Slough – international travel was one of the aspects of BMXing that I most enjoyed; these trips could be eye-opening and even educational. Many of them were undertaken by car, sometimes just my dad and me in his old Citroen BX with its hydraulic suspension, and a mattress in the back of the car for me to sleep on.
We had some unforgettable experiences away from the BMX track. I remember driving to the World Games in Karlsruhe in Germany, and stopping en route at the Berlin Wall. My dad explained what it was, and what it stood for, and I stood and stared and struggled to comprehend that there were people on the other side who were trapped there, like animals in a cage, and shot dead if they tried to escape. The Berlin Wall came down about six months later, news which I could relate to and understand far better than if it had just been pictures on TV or in newspapers.
I also raced at Aalborg, in Denmark, at Perpignan, in France, and at an amusement park in Holland with the very Dutch-sounding name of Slagharen. Slagharen, which was like a Dutch Butlins, had an amazing track, probably the best in Europe. What I remember most about Slagharen, though, is the chalets we stayed in, which had paper-thin walls. And I remember this detail so vividly because of an incident involving a slightly older guy in our club, a 19-year-old student known to all of us as ‘Voucher Man’, because he seemed to have money-off vouchers for everything. He was a very nice guy, but I suppose you could say he was the archetypal stingy Scot; he was always dictating that we had to go to a certain place because he could get 2 per cent off, or a free medium drink if you bought four main courses, or something. You get the idea.
One night in Slagharen, Voucher Man announced he was going to eat in, while gently mocking us for choosing to waste our money in a costly restaurant. He had all the ingredients to make chilli, he said. So we went out and left him to it, returning a couple of hours later to retire to our beds and go to sleep.
We didn’t sleep for long. Within an hour the chalet, with its paper-thin walls, reverberated to the unmistakable sound of Voucher Man’s bowels emptying, in a hurried fashion; it sounded like a flock of pigeons were taking off in there. He spent the night shitting into a bucket, while the rest of us pissed ourselves laughing.
The other thing about Slagharen, which hosted the European championships, was that it had a freestyle area, with two half-pipes. I was desperate to play on these ramps, but Dad advised me not to. ‘You’re here to race,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to tire yourself out on those things; they’re dangerous, and you’re not a freestyler …’
I wasn’t an especially rebellious child, but on this occasion I ignored him. Well, all my mates were having a go. And it did look like good fun. As long as you knew what you were doing, and had the skills to pull off such stunts …
Which, as it happens, I didn’t. But up the ramp I went, before swooping down, and back up, preparing for an aerial manoeuvre; into the air I soared, turning my bike and preparing to re-enter the ramp … or not. I overshot it, missing the ramp altogether and finding myself briefly suspended in midair – a bit like the moment when Wile E. Coyote, in the Roadrunner cartoons, realizes he has run straight off the edge of the cliff, and, with his legs still going through the motions, waits for gravity to kick in.
I didn’t have the proper kit on for freestyling – I didn’t even have a helmet on. So when I hit the ground, with a thud, I … well, actually I felt nothing, because I was knocked out. As I came to, I realized that my face had taken the brunt of it, the left side covered in a livid red graze. But my main concern was what my dad was going to say.
To make matters worse, I had hardly any time to prepare for gate practice, as you were allocated only limited time to practise on the track ahead of the next day’s races. I met up again with my dad, whose reaction – apparently – was mild; taking one look at my damaged face, he probably figured that I’d learnt my lesson without him having to reinforce it. Meanwhile, I apologized profusely – much later he said that I had spent about half an hour ‘havering’, which is a Scottish expression for talking nonsense – and got on with my gate practice. I must still have been quite badly concussed at this point, though, because when I returned to the track the next day I couldn’t remember anything about the course. It was the strangest thing: I had no recollection at all of the previous day. Sitting in the gate, waiting for the start, I might as well have been looking at the surface of the moon for all that I could remember about the previous day’s practice session.
I have a picture of that race – there’s a great view of the scab forming on my face – which was won, as many were, by a Dutch rider known as ‘The Beast’. We were 11 at the time, but he was about six foot two and had a full moustache, having hit puberty when he was nine. I exaggerate, but only a little.
At 14, having committed seven years to BMX, I retired. The realization that I wasn’t really enjoying it any more crept up on me gradually, and had much to do, I suspect, with the fact that many of my peers were also drifting away. It was 1990, and the bottom was about to fall out of the sport, in Europe at least. There remained a healthy scene in the United States, and that continues to this day, but by my mid-teens BMXing seemed passé, a – ahem – young man’s game, and about as cool as Bucks Fizz.
It was time to get out. But I look back now with great fondness on my BMX days, even if the sport that provided my introduction to cycling would inadvertently, 15 years later, cause me great heartache.
These days, thanks to its inclusion in the Olympic programme, which came into effect in Beijing, BMX is enjoying something of a renaissance. The heartache I mentioned above owes to the fact that the inclusion of BMX in 2005 meant the axing of another discipline – my event, the kilometre. But there are no hard feelings: I maintain that it is the perfect sport for kids, and the perfect introduction to cycling, especially at a time when the roads are becoming more dangerous. It is also a great sport for adults – and the top BMXers are incredible athletes.
Former BMX riders now excel in all cycling disciplines, from my GB team-mate Jamie Staff on the track to Robbie McEwen, the Tour de France cyclist, on the road. What all of us former BMXers have in common is confidence in our ability to handle a bike – watch Robbie McEwen pull a wheelie, as he usually does at the top of the final mountain pass of the Tour, and you will see what I mean.
I’m pretty sure the boom days of the 1980s will never be repeated. But I am glad the BMX hasn’t gone the way of those other great inventions of the eighties, the ZX Spectrum and Sinclair C5, and disappeared without trace.
