Читать книгу Chris Hoy: The Autobiography - Chris Hoy - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI started getting a bit of stick from my mates at school. Nothing malicious: just low-level, good-natured mickey-taking. I remember an art class in first year of secondary school where I was relentlessly slagged off for being a ‘BMX bandit’.
I like to think that things have changed a little now, with cycling more mainstream and not perceived as being too weird a pastime, but traditionally the sport has attracted a lot of individualistic characters. As a kid, you would generally follow your mates into team sports – football and rugby. I did these too, but the fact that I was a cyclist singled me out a little from many of my schoolmates. I remember Graeme Obree, the former world record holder and champion, talking in his autobiography about cycling as a form of escapism, because he was bullied at school. I think that for him cycling was a way of justifying why he wasn’t out kicking a ball with his mates, or hanging around a shopping mall. Saying ‘I’m going out on my bike’ is a bit like getting the first punch in; it’s a good excuse for being by yourself.
Fortunately I didn’t have the kind of negative experiences that Graeme had; I certainly wasn’t forced into cycling because of bullying, and I wasn’t bullied on account of the fact that I was a cyclist. All the same, by the time I got to secondary school, BMX had had its day. It was seen by most people as a kids’ sport – and there was nothing worse than that as you embarked on life in secondary school. One former classmate – Murdo, who is still a friend – has since claimed that any success I’ve had on a bike is all down to him, since he ‘convinced’ me to give up BMXing. He wasn’t the only one who applied peer pressure. The truth was, however, that it wasn’t anyone else’s opinions that mattered; I had just had enough of BMX racing and wasn’t enjoying it like I used to.
I still loved bikes, so I transferred my allegiance to the knobbly-tyred older brother of the BMX: the mountain bike. Mountain bikes were new, and although perhaps not ‘cool’ in the eyes of all my classmates, they were a bit cool, or at least grown up. And in Edinburgh we had a huge natural asset in the Pentland Hills, more or less on my doorstep. My first mountain bike outings – they felt more like expeditions at that age – were into those hills, and they have left me with some fabulous memories. In the early 1990s, when I first tried it, I would often head up there with my dad, who was quite fit, though I always managed to drop him on the climbs. It was part sport, part exploration, but what I loved most were the descents, which felt like the reward for all the hard work of climbing – it was as though you had to earn your fun. When I got home, there was another reward, which was eating. I developed a ravenous hunger when mountain biking, and devoured mountains of food after rides.
These days, when I’m travelling between Manchester and Edinburgh, as I frequently do, I pass the Pentlands as I drive into, or out of, my home city. It can prompt me to gaze a little dreamily at them (while keeping my eyes on the road, I should add, to reassure my mum, as well as any traffic police operating in the area). From the road they are just benign-looking lumps; the kind of rolling, rounded hills that are typical of southern Scotland. Further to the north, especially in the Highlands, the mountains are more rocky and jagged, often looking like mini-Alps. But don’t let the apparently gentle slopes of the Pentlands fool you: they are steep and rugged in places, and contain a labyrinth of hidden glens, meandering and often quite gnarly paths, and trickling burns (Scottish for small rivers).
It’s a paradise for mountain biking, and I loved it. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty incompatible with my career in track cycling, because of the risk of injury. On a mountain bike, if you don’t crash on a fairly regular basis then you have to ask yourself if you’re trying hard enough … so it’s difficult to do now, though it is something I intend taking up again when I retire from track cycling. But I won’t be racing. Definitely not racing.
When I was getting into mountain biking, in my early to mid teens, a series of cross-country races were staged in the Pentlands. They were gruelling tests of endurance and strength on courses that often got churned up; you’d finish looking as though you’d been down a coal mine. They were tough races, and they pushed me to levels I didn’t know I could reach. The contrast to BMX races, those 30-second blasts, could hardly have been greater.
I think I realized, pretty early on in my mountain bike career, that I’d never be brilliant at this sport. But I did win one race. And it was an uphill race, bizarrely enough. It was at Innerleithen, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh: a mass-start event that went straight up a hill like a ramp and seemed to get steeper and steeper. Clearly organized by sadists.
Not surprisingly, the front group was rapidly whittled down. This was the kind of race where the action is at the back rather than the front, with people hanging on for dear life, until they can hang on no more. The mental battle is a big part of it – when your legs are screaming, your lungs burning, your brain telling you to stop, and you have to dig deeper and deeper. With such efforts, the physical limits lie somewhere beyond the mental limits.
Eventually there were only five of us left, at which point one guy attacked, jumping clear as though going for the finish. Nobody was mad enough to try to match his pace, preferring instead to watch him gradually slowing down in the distance and then ‘blowing up’ altogether. The words they use in cycling to denote that moment when you hit the wall – ‘blow up’ and ‘die’ being the most common – say it all, really. There is no return, especially on a hill. When this guy ran out of gas on the hill he became almost stationary – we had to avoid him as we went past, as if he was a bollard in the road.
Then I attacked. I attacked! And nobody came with me. As ever, the effort started to really hurt after about 15 seconds, but I managed to keep a bit in reserve and avoid the fate of the earlier attacker. I won on my own, which, looking back now, seems hard to believe. Let me write that again: I won a hill climb. This, appropriately enough, represented the summit of my achievements as a mountain biker. I’d rather not dwell on other races, typically longer races, following which – as my dad likes to tell everyone – he would be waiting in the car park, thinking I must have suffered some mechanical or other disaster, only to see me finally haul my exhausted body to the finish, well after everyone else had packed up and gone home.
At around the same time, there was another sport that was beginning to exercise me, in every sense of the word. Rowing. I still enjoyed rugby, but the increasing number of injuries I was suffering persuaded me eventually to give it up, and rowing was the sport that replaced it at school – cycling, unfortunately, not being part of the curriculum.
One of my best mates at school, Grant Florence, had started rowing, but there weren’t many guys who did it. For some reason it was seen at my school as a girls’ sport; male crews weren’t really encouraged. Obviously, for us male rowers, this wasn’t an entirely undesirable situation. But that isn’t why I was attracted to it, honest.
Seriously, it isn’t. If it had simply been a ruse to spend time splashing about on the water with the girls, then I wouldn’t have lasted very long, because this was a brutal sport. It was rowing rather than cycling, in fact, that opened my eyes to how hard it is possible to work at something. There was also a bit of family history in rowing. My uncle, John Poole, who’s married to my dad’s elder sister Joan, rowed in the ‘B’ crew for Oxford in the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race in the 1950s. At 6ft 8in he’s a good build for it.
Where we trained, the Union Canal, is a seriously thin strip of water. In places it is not much wider – or less narrow – than the boat. A fractional misjudgement can cause the oar to hit the towpath, perhaps taking a runner’s legs from under him, or swiping an unsuspecting cyclist from their bike. Not that this has ever happened, to the best of my knowledge, but you feel it might. The Union Canal runs through the centre of Edinburgh and is a popular spot most days with crews of rowers.
In terms of location the canal was ideal for us, the boathouse being just a stone’s throw from the school. There were other advantages, too. Apart from when it iced over, the canal wasn’t much affected by the weather. Whereas the big rivers might arguably have offered more in the way of ‘proper’ rowing, and more room to manoeuvre, they were too choppy to row on when it was wild and windy, as it often can be in Scotland. Plus, on those big tidal rivers there were only certain times when you could row, and I heard, without feeling any envy, stories of other crews having to be out on the river as early as 6 a.m. At least we could row at any time.
We were out on the canal in all conditions. And I loved the whole scene, the social aspect, the camaraderie and the sense of being part of a committed team. You’d go down to the boat club before training and hang around, chatting to the boat manager, who happened to be Grant, the friend who got me into rowing in the first place. That was another thing: you were given responsibilities and jobs; I became club treasurer. George, who was in overall charge of the boathouse, tried to suss you out, I think, and if you passed the test you were trusted with the keys, given jobs to do, that kind of thing. Boat club treasurer was ‘a thankless task’, as was noted in a school report card at the time by one of my teachers, who added: ‘So I thank him now – on paper!’
The teachers were less impressed by one incident, for which I must hold my hands up. We were driving back to Edinburgh after a day’s training at Strathclyde Park when I found myself in possession of a super-soaker pump-action water machine-gun; a real beast of a weapon, which could fire jets of water up to about 30 feet. It was a hot summer’s day, we were hanging out of the windows of our minibus, and as we approached Edinburgh, and slowed down for a roundabout, we began to draw alongside a sports car with its roof down. It was irresistible.
My weapon was loaded and I gave it both barrels: not just a squirt of water, but a proper skoosh. OK, it was immature and it can’t have been pleasant for the driver, but all I can offer in my defence is that there is something in the Scottish psyche that disapproves of ostentatious displays of wealth, or flashiness. Soft-top cars fall into that category.
Monday morning came, however, and there was a letter waiting for me in registration. The head teacher was away, but I was to go and see his deputy, Mr Cowan. I knew it was about the water pistol incident. I had had a phone call the previous evening from George, the rowing man, who’d heard that the driver had complained to the school – well, we weren’t exactly hard to identify, given that the minibus was emblazoned with our school’s name. ‘I’m so disappointed,’ George had said. ‘I don’t know who it was.’
‘It was me, George,’ I said.
‘I’m so disappointed, Chris. I don’t know why you did it – you’ll have to face the music.’
So on Monday morning I faced the music. ‘I’ve had this letter,’ said Mr Cowan. ‘It seems that someone has used a water pistol on a member of the public. This is clearly a serious offence,’ and as he said this, I thought I could detect a little smile. Still, he sentenced me to half an hour of picking up litter. On balance, I think it was worth it.
The training for rowing was more serious – and perhaps explains this frivolous diversion. In fact, thinking about the training we did back then can still induce a cold sweat – it really was brutal. At the end of my first year as a fully-fledged rower I was in the ‘A’ crew. Our coach was a student from Edinburgh University. He had some interesting ideas, this guy. Somehow he’d got his hands on some old East German Olympic rowing squad training programmes from the 1980s. He modified them very slightly for us. But only very slightly.
He was certainly committed. We had to be, too, or we’d be out. We trained before and after school, often five or six days a week, and through the summer holidays. It was highly structured, regimented even, but he put a lot into it, and so did we.
Our coach had some good ideas, but he was inflexible. His training ethos could be summed up in three words: push, push and push. To elaborate: keep working harder, don’t listen to your body. We were pushing ourselves to the limit and beyond, and at least one of us was always ill with a cold, a chest infection, or run down. I remember one session when two of us were throwing up over the side of the boat, not through exertion but because we were ill. From the towpath, we heard our coach shout: ‘OK, you back to normal now? Off you go again.’ And it was about three degrees Celsius. As I say, brutal.
Now, you may well be putting the words ‘East’, ‘German’, ‘Olympic’ and ‘1980s’ together, and coming to some fairly alarming conclusions. And yes, as we would all subsequently find out, many East German Olympic athletes were subject to state-organized doping programmes. While not wishing to condemn the East German rowers of the 1980s as doping cheats – I don’t know if they were; and many of them, in any case, were apparently oblivious to what they were given – this information could possibly shed some interesting new light on the training programme we were attempting to follow in our rowing days. Quite apart from the fact that they might or might not have been on drugs, they were grown men. We were 16-year-old boys. But the real problem for me was not so much the rowing training programme; it was doing the rowing training plus my cycling training; plus the fact that we all still had seven hours’ school, five days a week. I remember one Sunday when I took part in an 80-mile road race in the morning, then went, still in my cycling kit, straight to rowing training. Since rowing was a team sport, the schedule was sacrosanct – if you couldn’t make the session, you weren’t in the team.
Despite my misgivings about the severity of the programme – on top of my cycling training – the discipline of doing this training, of being part of such a committed team (rowers and coach alike), and the routine and suffering, were all, I think, good for me in the long run. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that. And there were certainly times when I felt that it might kill me.
It was as a pair with Grant, my best mate, that I enjoyed the highlight of my rowing career: winning a silver medal in the British schools’ championship, held in Strathclyde Park, near Glasgow. In 1993 I also won two Scottish gold medals, in the coxless pairs and coxed fours, and I represented Scotland in the Home Countries International.
But in some ways a more memorable race saw me form part of an eight, when we took on our rival Edinburgh school, Heriot’s. The eight was made up of our top four (our only four, in fact), plus their ‘C’ crew, who were happy to join us. They felt they were as good if not better than their peers in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews, and were only too delighted to have a chance to prove it. Their ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews joined forces, meanwhile, to make up the other eight. There were a lot of personal niggles, little battles to be decided and scores to be settled on that day, partly because our boat clubs sat side by side on the Union Canal, and partly because of the historic rivalry between the two schools. I was pretty oblivious to this, to be honest, but there were some guys who virtually lived at the boathouse, with lots of time, and ample opportunity, for feuds to form and fester. It all gave the contest an unmistakable edge.
As the race got under way they immediately, and with worrying ease, pulled a length ahead. They had been heavily fancied, not least by themselves … but then, with about 750 metres to go, we began pulling them back. In rowing you find that crews can build up incredible momentum; or hit reverse gear. When the tide turned, so to speak, we kept pulling them back, pulling them back, pulling them back, and eventually rowed through them – as the rowing parlance goes – as we came to the finish. We celebrated as if it had been the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. That was in 1994, and it proved to be my final outing in a boat. But what a way to bow out!
I rowed for about three years, finally packing it in because my cycling was getting more serious. Having also moved on from mountain biking, I had now ‘retired’ from five sports, which is not bad for an 18-year-old. It either shows my versatility and willingness to try new things, or suggests that I was very fickle. I loved sport, but I suppose I was still playing the field, looking for ‘the one’ I would be happy to settle down with … but enough of the romantic analogies.
I loved keeping busy, always being on the go – it had been a way of life from when I was seven, and riding BMX races – although some of my teachers were concerned about how my out-of-school interests would fit in with my work, and exams. One report card from 1993 says: ‘I hope he will heed his tutor’s comments and not neglect academic work in favour of all the other demands on his time.’ One of my teachers had said: ‘It is important that Chris does not spread himself too thin, i.e. that he balances the demands of his extracurricular interests with the academic demands of his school subjects.’
By now, my cycling ‘career’ had taken me away from the hills of the Pentlands and down two more conventional paths, one covered in tarmac, the other in wood: road racing – encompassing time trials and mass-start road races – and track racing.
I was a member of the Dunedin Cycling Club, a longestablished Edinburgh club whose colours were (I thought at the time) a stylish, eye-catching combination of bright red and garish yellow. It was a club that catered for everyone, from dedicated club cyclists to aspiring racers. At the helm was Ray Harris, the club coach, and his wife Doreen, who did as much as Ray to help the club run smoothly. Together they would officiate at club 10- and 25-mile time trials, their stopwatches around their necks, clipboards in hand, but Ray’s speciality was coaching, in which he was way ahead of his time. Ray was into ‘numbers’ and tests, whereas many others were decidedly old school, still basing all their thoughts on tried and tested principles.
On the road – which was by far the biggest area of the sport – that meant miles, miles and more miles. Typically, winters would be spent doing ‘club runs’ on a Saturday and Sunday; maybe 50 miles with a group of anything from a few to 20-plus on the Saturday, then around 70 miles on the Sunday, traditionally with a café stop. These rides would maybe average around 18–20mph, interspersed with a couple of sprints using 30mph road signs as imaginary finish lines. Midweek, club riders would do what they could, fitting their training around work, university or school. Most would do sessions on a ‘turbo trainer’, a contraption to which you attached your bike, having first removed the front wheel. The back wheel sits on a roller connected to a flywheel, meaning that as you pedal harder, the resistance increases. These lent themselves to shorter, more intense training – mainly because of the boredom of not going anywhere. To alleviate that, I used to listen to music. There were stories of others setting their turbo trainers up in front of a TV, and watching old videos of the Tour de France, or something similarly inspirational, as they pedalled away, going nowhere.
It could have been my winter turbo sessions that did as much as anything to convey to my family how serious I was becoming about my cycling training. Though my dad understood it, having accompanied me to BMX and mountain bike races for the best part of 10 years, my mum, though always very supportive, appeared quite bemused by it at times. As I have said, she was a nurse at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, working night shifts in the world-renowned sleep medicine department, and she would frequently pass me on her way out in the evenings. Invariably I’d be sweating and wheezing, and in a generally pretty horrendous state.
The reason for these encounters was that I would set my turbo trainer up in the stairwell, the half-way point between our flat, on the first floor of the house, and the freezing cold outside. I’d have the window open, an attempt to cool myself down, and Mum would have to squeeze past me and my turbo trainer on her way to work. I’d be between sets of intervals (short, sprint-like efforts), and I remember her looking at me with an expression that combined bemusement, affectionate amusement and mild concern.
‘That can’t be good for you,’ she’d say.
To which I’d reply: ‘ ’.
In other words, I’d be slumped over my handlebars in between sprint efforts, gasping for air, and incapable of conversation. Not that my silence ever stopped her shaking her head and remarking, on the way out of the door, ‘That can’t be good for you.’
Had I been able to reply, I might have said: ‘Well, actually, Mum, it is good for me. That’s the point.’ Because this kind of high-intensity interval training, which really only came more widely into vogue in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was considered essential for any racing cyclist, even if it ran against the grain of the old ‘miles, miles and more miles’ school of training.
You didn’t really need to be a genius to work this out. In fact, the ‘old school’ methods of training made no sense at all. What would happen was that the bedrock of the amateur cyclist’s winter training would be the weekend club run. And in March he would start racing. The trouble is that races don’t tend to be run off at 18mph. And they don’t include a café stop. The saving grace, for many, might have been that most of their competitors were spending their winters doing exactly the same, accumulating lots of steady (a euphemism for slow) miles. As the season progressed everyone would get fitter – and faster – simply by racing.
Ray was different. He ran tests on his fabled ‘Kingcycle’ machine, which resembled a modified turbo trainer. This measured power output, a measurement cyclists were hardly even aware of until about 1990, which is strange, given that it is arguably the single most important factor in performance. However, until the Kingcycle, and later ‘power cranks’, there was no accurate way of measuring the watts you were generating through the pedals.
Incidentally, I say power is only ‘arguably’ the most important factor because there are others, such as pain threshold and mental toughness, and also because some riders who’ve gone on to have successful careers – the Tour de France cyclist Mark Cavendish being one example – have ‘failed’ lab tests intended to determine their potential based on their power output. As Mark, whose lab tests weren’t exceptional, has shown, there are other significant factors, in his case ambition, determination, guts, doggedness, a healthy level of cockiness and self-belief … and a loathing of lab tests. The converse is also true: you get ‘lab rats’ who perform outstandingly in tests, and less well in actual races.
When I joined the Dunedin, my introduction to mainstream cycling – as opposed to BMX and mountain biking, both of which were regarded with some suspicion, or outright disdain, by cycling purists – consisted mainly of road cycling. But the club was more progressive and open-minded than some traditional clubs, embracing mountain biking, going on rides in the Pentlands and organizing races. This can be explained, I think, by two things – the fact that the membership was quite young, and that in our coach, Ray, we had someone who, though in his fifties, was young at heart and in his ideas. Now in his seventies, Ray still has his youthful enthusiasm – he is always one of the first people I hear from whenever I have any success, usually in email form, and with an exuberant message that is unmistakably Ray.
Despite our mountain bike outings – on which we were usually joined by Ray – the bulk of the club’s activity centred on the road, and it was inevitable that I’d gravitate there as I moved away from mountain biking. Road cycling is quite diverse – time trials over any distance or duration from 10 miles to 24 hours; road races of up to 65 miles for juniors, 100-plus for seniors; hour-long criteriums, or circuit races. Theoretically there is something for everyone, and my early road career suggested my strengths lay in sprint finishes and short-distance time trials – I won the short ‘prologue’ time trial to the Forres Two-Day race, a race for seniors, though I was still a junior, then punctured, wearing the yellow jersey of leader, about 50 metres after the start of the first road stage.
By 1990 I had started riding on the track – I’ll come to that in the next chapter – but I was persisting with the road, too, and in August I was selected to represent Scotland in the biggest event I’d ever ride on the road, the nine-day Junior Tour of Ireland. It was an eye-opening, and in many ways a chastening, experience. And, as with my rowing training, it can be summed up in one word. Brutal.
Before the Ireland trip I had a busy summer, with a bit of rowing thrown into the mix, and a job as well. I had moved on from my shifts at the local garage – scene of my encounter with my childhood hero, the footballer John Robertson – to a famous Edinburgh bookshop, James Thin’s, before landing the plum job: in a bike shop.
In fact, there was nothing very ‘plum’ about the work I did in Recycling, a shop located on a side street off Leith Walk, the well-known thoroughfare that runs for about two miles from Edinburgh city centre to the neighbouring port of Leith. Now I think about it, the name Leith Walk conjures up an image of an idyllic, meandering path, which couldn’t be more at odds with reality. Leith Walk is big, bustling, frenetic and fairly manic, and it’s no accident that it and some of its pubs provide the backdrop to much of the action in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, the novel that exposes a different Edinburgh to the one you might see in the tourist brochures. I always liked Leith Walk, though, and ended up living in a flat there from 2000 to 2002.
My job in the bike shop was pretty unglamorous and definitely belonged more to the Edinburgh of Trainspotting than the posh Edinburgh. As the name of the shop suggests, its main business was recycling old bikes, scrubbing them up and making them roadworthy, then selling them on. There were some crappy jobs, and, as the most junior member of the team, I was given the crappiest ones. I’d get the real rust buckets, and have to go at them with the steel wool and TCut, scrubbing all the muck off, or as much as I could, then sticking on new tyres, and making sure the gears and brakes worked. I loved it, absolutely loved it – the banter, the oily smell of the place, being surrounded all day by bikes – but it was hard work. And, given my fondness at school for maths and other logical subjects, I had moments when I contemplated the economics of it. The owner of the shop paid about £20 for the old bikes, then sold them on – sometimes just a few hours later, after I’d worn my knuckles to the bone – for about £50. For my labour I was paid £2 an hour. It didn’t really add up. And to make it worse, and on account of my considerable appetite, I spent approximately half my day’s earnings in the ‘deli’ around the corner.
I loved working there, because I was mad about bikes. But I wasn’t daft. I didn’t like the idea of being taken advantage of, and so I decided that if I went back the following summer, I would ask for a raise. When the call came, I was ready. Sort of.
‘I might have a vacancy in the summer,’ said Mr Recycling when he phoned in the spring, ‘if you’re looking for a job.’
‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘Great,’ he said, ‘you’ll still be on £2 an hour.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, ‘and get back to you.’
There was another bike shop on the other side of town, called The New Bike Shop, owned by Chris Hill, who had been helping me out with a little bit of sponsorship. I knew Chris, but I didn’t speak to him about a job. Yet for some unfathomable reason, when I called Recycling back, I said: ‘I’ve been offered a job in a different bike shop at £3 an hour. Could you maybe match that?’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Mr Recycling. ‘Who’s that with?’
‘Er … it’s The New Bike Shop,’ I said, mentioning the first bike shop that came to mind.
It was his turn now to say he’d have a think about it and get back to me. Our game of poker was reaching its final stages, but I had just played a duff hand. When he phoned me back, he said: ‘It’s strange, Chris, because I spoke to the owner of The New Bike Shop, and he said he didn’t know anything about the job he’s offered you …’
The only consolation was that this conversation was taking place over the phone, because my face turned bright red. I spluttered something in response, but Mr Recycling just laughed and said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you £3 an hour.’ I think he was quite impressed that I was sticking up for myself, even if my negotiating technique had been a little dubious.
I didn’t waste a minute of that summer in 1994. I would work all day at the bike shop, and in the evenings I would be picked up to go rowing, or else went training on my bike, either on the road or at the nearby Meadowbank Velodrome. At the end of the summer I travelled to Leicester for the national track championships, and from there went straight to Ireland for the Junior Tour.
Leaving Leicester, with my dad at the wheel, we were late getting to Holyhead for the ferry, which meant catching a later one and arriving at the race HQ, a school hall in a village, at around four in the morning. It wasn’t a disaster – I slept in the car, which is something I’d got down to a fine art 10 years previously on our travels through Europe for the BMX races – but the race started at 9 a.m. the next morning, which was far from ideal.
The Junior Tour of Ireland is one of the most famous, and toughest, stage races for juniors, and it has proved a breeding ground for some top road riders, including the great Irishmen Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche. Not only did it last nine days, with stages as long as 65 miles each day, but the roads in Ireland were renowned for being tough – they were rarely flat, always undulating, and the surfaces in many places left much to be desired. I had never attempted anything like it before, but I felt reasonably confident I could hang on during the flat stages and then have a chance whenever a stage was decided by a mass bunch sprint.
As we got under way, though, I remember feeling great relief. The peloton of around 120 eager juniors showed very little urgency, and ambled along. True, the roads were a little bit rougher than the wooden boards I’d been riding all week at the velodrome in Leicester – and in places bore a closer resemblance to the tracks I’d tackled on my mountain bike – but I could handle the pace. It was as if the riders had agreed a pact; that the race was so long, and so hard, that it would start in civilized fashion.
I’d overlooked one thing: the race hadn’t started. Here I was, riding along thinking, ‘Phew, this is OK; I think I can handle this,’ totally oblivious to the fact that the flag hadn’t yet dropped.
To my surprise, after about an hour we stopped en masse. Most riders peeled off to the side of the road to answer the call of nature, while I wondered what was going on, and how everyone except me seemed to be in the know. I soon found out. When the calls of nature had all been answered, we lined up again. This time a flag appeared, and someone shouted ‘Go!’ The race was on.
And it really was on: it was flat out from there to the finish, 65 miles away. That first hour, I discovered, had been the neutralized zone, which would be another less than welcome feature of the Junior Tour of Ireland. In order to get around the rule that juniors could only race for a maximum of 65 miles in a day, they had these huge ‘neutralized zones’ – sometimes as long as 25 miles – taking the total distance for the day up to around 90 miles.
When the stages started, the entire field would be strung out in a long line for most of the day, a sign that the bunch was going flat out. It was aggressive racing, too, with the Irish riders the main protagonists, and all eager to leave their mark on their national tour. It was a struggle to hold your place in the field, not least because of another rule that applied to juniors – the fact we were only allowed a maximum gear of 93 inches, which corresponded to a 52-tooth chainring at the front, and a 15-tooth sprocket at the back.
The purpose of this rule was to encourage younger riders to spin small gears rather than push big ones; it was designed to protect joints and improve suppleness. A fine principle, and it shouldn’t have been a handicap in Ireland – after all, we were all using the same gear, so we were all in the same boat …
Weren’t we?
I started to wonder. Especially when I saw some of the Irish riders driving on the front all day, their legs seemingly turning a lot slower than mine, which were almost spinning off just trying to keep up. There were gear checks at the end of each stage, and at one of the gear checks the Irish got pulled over. A couple of guys had blocked off their gears, meaning that they had bigger gears on their bike, but couldn’t access them. That wasn’t allowed, but they weren’t disqualified – they were relegated to last on the stage, and allowed to carry on.
After a few days of the Junior Tour I was on my knees. I was the Scotland team’s sprinter, expected to be up there at the finish, but I woke up each morning wondering how I’d make the start, never mind the finish. There were other challenges, too. The diet was decidedly ‘old school’, with our team manager insisting that we start each day with an enormous plate of pasta and beans. ‘Get it down you, boys,’ he would say, and it was interpreted as a sign of weakness if you couldn’t manage it all. Loss of appetite is one of the signs, on a stage race, that someone has gone beyond their limit. But the reality was that the pasta and beans combination was so disgusting, especially first thing in the morning, that it was a struggle to eat it no matter how hungry you were.
The Junior Tour of Ireland exposed me to other aspects of cycling culture. Put a team of 17-year-old boys together in a stage race and there will inevitably be some shenanigans, even if they are focused on what they’re doing. One evening, about half-way through the race, our manager, who was also acting as soigneur (masseur), and whom we secretly christened ‘Wee Nutter,’ was addressed by one of the riders by this moniker. He flipped and it prompted a semi-light-hearted wrestling match between the two, which ended with our manager/soigneur hurting his thumb quite seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he couldn’t give us massages for the remainder of the race, which was quite a drawback in terms of helping our recovery for the next day. Another feature of the Junior Tour – which we riders didn’t experience – was the legendary ‘night stages.’ For many of the managers and mechanics these seemed more of a priority than the day stages – i.e. the races – and acted as an excuse for them to drain Ireland of its supplies of Guinness.
As for the racing, it was like groundhog day. The painful legs when you woke up; the ordeal of breakfast; the long neutralized section; and then balls to the wall racing for three hours. I remember one stage in particular – 60 miles long, and covered in not much more than two hours. Our average that day was 29.6mph – you don’t get many stages of the Tour de France run off at that speed.
Despite all that, I did manage to force my way into the top 10 on three stages, my best placing being fifth in one bunch sprint. But on stages where there were hills I had no chance – having had a growth spurt in my late teens, I was bigger than most other road cyclists, who tended to be small and wiry – and it turned into a massive test of endurance and willpower just to finish. By the end there were three of us left in the Scottish team – the other two having abandoned – but I did finish, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. The 1994 Junior Tour of Ireland also gave me the answer to one question that had lurked at the back of my mind, as it does with any young cyclist.
Would I ever ride the world’s most famous race, the Tour de France?
No. Definitely not.
