Читать книгу Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution - Richard Moore - Страница 11
ОглавлениеChris Hoy’s flat, Manchester, October 2007
‘I’ve never talked about it with Craig but it must have been hard for him. He was the one breaking new ground, pushing the boundaries. He did the hard work. He was like a climber, he’d make the next foothold, and I’d follow. When someone else has forged ahead it’s easy to follow because you see it’s doable. But when you’re the one taking the first step, that’s a hard thing to do.’
Chris Hoy is sitting in his flat in Manchester, talking about Craig MacLean. It is fifteen years since the two first met – or met officially. Back then, they were finding their feet, both trying their hand at mountain biking, road cycling, a bit of track riding, both in the garish red-and-yellow of the Dunedin Cycling Club, both under the enthusiastic guidance of Ray Harris.
Like Hoy, MacLean’s background was in BMX, though because they were in different age categories, their paths didn’t cross. MacLean was five years older, born in 1971, hailing from the Highland town of Grantown-on-Spey, which nestles in the picturesque Spey Valley. Again like Hoy, MacLean retired from BMX-ing – a sport with a retirement age younger than female gymnastics – in his teens. He was fifteen when he stopped, having enjoyed some success, though not as much as Hoy. ‘My age group was more competitive than Chris’s,’ says MacLean with a wry smile. ‘But he’ll contest that.’
MacLean didn’t cycle for several years after that. He got into music – he plays guitar and drums – grew his hair long and dressed in AC/DC and Metallica T-shirts with the sleeves cut off. But after starting college in Edinburgh in 1990 he began using a bike for transport. ‘Just to go back and forth to college,’ he says. ‘I was quite prone to putting on weight in the winter, so I wanted to keep myself fit. My dad had always cycled so there were always bikes around the house, but I was more into my skiing and snowboarding at that time. And music, of course.’
On taking up cycling again MacLean visited George Swanson’s bike shop in Edinburgh – no longer known as Scotia, but in premises near the original shop – and the two of them chatted. ‘Chris was working in the shop part time,’ says MacLean, ‘but I didn’t really know Chris. I knew his name from my BMX days. I told George I’d got back into doing a bit of cycling and he told me about the velodrome at Meadowbank, and the track league on a Tuesday night. I started going down there for that, just to watch, cycling from one side of Edinburgh to Meadowbank. But that was the extent of my cycling, because once I got there I just sat and watched from the stand, then cycled home.
‘I didn’t know anyone there and, you know … I was from Grantown-on-Spey – you’re scared to speak to people,’ says MacLean with another smile. As he points out, he was still into his heavy rock phase, noting, deadpan, that ‘I had long blond ringlets.’ And, despite his wild man of rock look, he imagined he could sit in the stand at the velodrome and blend anonymously into the background? ‘Well, yeah … I just used to sit in the stand in my cycling kit and keep out the way.’
One week, as he was making his usual journey to the velodrome, he was overtaken by a motorbike, which slowed as it passed him and then pulled in. ‘This motorcyclist stopped, watched me pass, rode past me again, then stopped again – he kept doing that,’ says MacLean. ‘It was pretty strange.’
The motorcyclist was the father of Stewart Brydon, then Britain’s top sprinter. Brydon senior rode to Edinburgh from the west of Scotland on his motorbike every Tuesday evening to help with the track league. He had spotted MacLean sitting in the stand and recognized him. The blond ringlets probably helped. That evening, when he arrived at the velodrome, and took his usual seat in the stand, MacLean was approached by Brydon. ‘He talked to me and said I should come and have a go,’ says MacLean. ‘He encouraged me to turn up on a Friday for the Dunedin club night. So I went down on a Friday night, introduced myself, and they said, “Okay, if you want to join then you’ll have to prove your worth.” You had to be nominated and seconded at the monthly committee meeting. So the following month, after four weeks of me going on club runs and going to circuit training, my fate was decided.’
MacLean’s recollection of the club’s recruitment policy seems at odds with Ray Harris’s description of the inclusive Dunedin club, though it might have something to do with MacLean’s perception of himself as an outsider – as evidenced by his reluctance to get involved in the track league, other than as an observer. But he insists: ‘I remember sitting in this club meeting in a Portakabin and having to go out the room while they talked about me, and assessed whether I was suitable for the club or not.’ He qualifies this, though, by adding that: ‘I don’t think they ever rejected anyone.’ And in his case, he adds, ‘I think Dave Hoy put in a good word for me.’
In fact, David Hoy was a Craig MacLean admirer from the moment, at around the same time, that he first took him away to a race – a mountain bike race in the north of England. ‘I remember we were travelling to a race and we had a spare seat in the car, so we asked Craig. I was really impressed. Chris and one or two of the others were just kids, but we went out for a meal on the Friday night and Craig had salad and rice, no meat. He was very particular about it. I thought, here’s someone who’s thinking about what he’s doing; he’s really thought it through. He had a very strict regime for looking after himself, and I was impressed that at that age – and that stage in his cycling career, because he was just starting out – he was so serious.’
When David Hoy’s praise is put to him, MacLean winces a little, because his close attention to diet, though it might have been interpreted as a sign of his commitment to his sport, actually masked a serious problem. ‘Partly because I got into cycling to lose weight, my diet was something I was into,’ explains MacLean. ‘But it became quite detrimental. It developed into an eating disorder. I was kind of reluctant to specialize in track cycling, to be honest – road racing was my main thing, mountain biking as well, because weight was a key thing to me. But I was fighting genetics, because I was never particularly light and I struggled to keep the weight off. It just turned into a bit of an issue for me.’
Within sport eating disorders might not be uncommon – even, or especially, at elite level. Chris Boardman has written about the subject in his book. ‘Instead of the weight loss becoming a means to an end,’ he wrote, ‘it became the end itself. I was losing weight in order to enhance my chances in the Tour [de France], but – and those close to me will sigh heavily at this point – it became obsessive.’
Boardman is unusual, because the subject of eating disorders is rarely openly discussed. And there is a difficulty of definition, since there is an extremely fine line – some might argue no line at all – between a strict, almost obsessive diet, and what most people would interpret as an eating disorder. Certainly ‘strict’ or ‘close to obsessive’ is how you’d describe the eating habits of perhaps a majority of elite sports people; it would be difficult to find any world-class athlete who is not preoccupied by what he or she puts in their body. Perhaps, as Boardman says, the line is crossed when the primary goal becomes weight loss, or weight management, rather than sporting performance; again, though, there are problems in determining where that line is.
But MacLean, with a refreshing unwillingness to become bogged down in issues of definition, says that his problem went beyond that. ‘It was a form of bulimia,’ he says. ‘It was never diagnosed, and it’s not something I’ve ever talked about; I just know myself that’s what it was. I would starve myself for two or three days, not having any food whatsoever, and train at the same time. When I eventually admitted it to myself I got control of it. But it took about a year and a half.
‘It was about 1993, and it was probably the worst season of my life. I was doing a little bit on the track by then. But my performance suffered. I would starve, binge eat, starve, binge eat. My form fluctuated and my weight actually increased as well. There was a point in 1994 when I realized I had a problem. I was at the British track championships, which were a week long, and because I had to cook, buying in the food I needed, I got to grips with it. I had to set myself some rules and targets, telling myself what I can and can’t do. It still took a long time. I think there are always going to be some body-image issues there as well.’
One of the main problems – as MacLean recognizes – was the fact that his heart, at that time, was set on road racing and mountain biking. Athletes in these disciplines are, almost without exception, lean and lithe, or – if you prefer – just plain skinny. It must have been demoralizing and dispiriting to realize that your build might effectively disqualify you from ever succeeding in these disciplines, especially if you were putting so much into them.
The answer was staring MacLean in the face, however. At the opposite end of the scale to the whippet-like road racers were the track sprinters, who were all big, bulky and muscular: the colossuses of cycling. Not only did MacLean have the build for sprinting, he also had the physiology – the fast-twitch muscles necessary for lightning bursts of acceleration, as well as the power to sustain the effort. He was, in short, a natural. And, more or less as soon as he made the decision to focus on sprinting, he demonstrated that natural ability. He rode with the Dunedin club from 1993 to 1994, when, on finishing his studies, he moved back home to Grantown-on-Spey and joined a Highland club, Moray Firth Racing Team. The following season, 1995, was, he says, the first when he focused purely on the track. He was twenty-four that year, making him a late developer.
But he was enterprising, even entrepreneurial. In Grantown-on-Spey he managed, early in his career, to eke out a modest income from cycling. The Highland Games circuit is a big deal in the north of Scotland, and most of the summer meetings include grass track cycling, with significant cash prizes. The grass track circuit has traditionally been the most obscure yet also, paradoxically, the most lucrative form of cycle racing in the UK and for a while those that took part were deemed ‘professionals’, and therefore barred from more conventional forms of cycle racing. MacLean rode events sanctioned by the Scottish Cyclists’ Union – that is, amateur events – but still made reasonable prize money. ‘It was my summer job,’ he claims.
Some of his training at the time was done in the company of a near neighbour and friend, Alain Baxter, who would go on to become Britain’s greatest ever skier. Baxter, who, unfortunately, is more famous for a doping scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympics, when he lost his bronze medal after inadvertently using an American-made inhaler that contained a banned substance, was also a talented cyclist. He was a good training partner, though MacLean says that neither was as dedicated to sport in those days, and that much of their training was instigated by their respective fathers, who had competed against each other years earlier, in skiing and cycling. ‘We had pushy parents,’ jokes MacLean. ‘I think they were using us to carry on their rivalry. Alain and I would meet up and have a bit of a blether, then tell our dads we’d been training hard.’
There is a strong possibility that MacLean is exaggerating his lack of commitment – and he is certainly joking about he and Baxter having pushy parents. In fact, both athletes went on to develop training regimes bordering on fanatical; and both became supreme athletes – as demonstrated by Baxter winning the BBC’s Superstars series – as they reached the pinnacle of their respective sports.
Another influence at the time, adds MacLean, was Euan Mackenzie, an Olympic biathlete and ‘formidable cyclist’. ‘He really dragged me out on the bike until I was fit enough to enjoy it,’ says MacLean.
MacLean also had a short stint working in a family business with his uncle, who was an undertaker. He once made the mistake of mentioning this to a journalist, prompting the description of him as the ‘cycling undertaker’. Another quirky fact about MacLean that was – for journalists – irresistible was that he studied piano tuning at college. Thus he has repeatedly been labelled ‘the piano-tuning-undertaker-cyclist’, or a variation on this. All he can do now is roll his eyes whenever he is asked about piano tuning, or undertaking, or both – which means a lot of eye rolling. His undertaking, or piano tuning, or both, tend to be raised every time he is interviewed.
Although MacLean was able to make some money on the grass tracks of the Highlands, it was obvious his cycling income would never be enough to live on. More conventional track racing offered few career possibilities. For both MacLean and Hoy, in fact, the opportunities to make any kind of living through cycling appeared, at that time, to be minimal to non-existent. Track cycling was the poor relation of international cycling – the big money was in road racing, with, apart from in those countries that put money into their track programmes, only crumbs available, and to only a very few of the top performers. It didn’t really matter how ambitious Hoy or MacLean were; like Eddie Alexander before them, they would in all probability have to fit cycling around jobs, and they would, as a consequence, be unlikely ever to realize their potential.
This was the reality faced by both, and so when Hoy left school, in 1994, he went to university. He says it didn’t occur to him not to follow the traditional path of getting a degree and then a job. And so, only a couple of months after his breakthrough at the British track championships, when he claimed a silver medal in the junior sprint, he began a four-year honours degree in maths and physics at St Andrews University, forty miles north of Edinburgh.
He threw himself into university life. ‘It was great,’ says Hoy, ‘a whole new experience, feeling independent even though you’re living in halls, getting all your meals cooked and forty-five minutes from home … But I was going out all the time, partying, enjoying a good social life. I relished it. And I didn’t touch my bike.
‘Then towards the end of the first term I got a call from my dad. He said he had invitations to two races. He asked me, “Do you fancy the Tour of the North in Ireland …” and I said, “Great! That would be brilliant.” Then he added, “… or a track meeting in Trinidad?”
‘I said, “Fantastic! Where’s Trinidad?”’
The promise of two weeks in the sun at Easter 1995 gave Hoy some motivation to get back out on his bike. ‘I pretty much hadn’t touched my bike the entire first term. But at Christmas, when I went home, I started training again. I’d eaten a lot of junk food that term, drunk a lot, gained some weight, swapping fat for muscle. It was so hard getting back into it.’
The trip to Trinidad kick-started Hoy’s first season as a student-cyclist – also his first season in the senior ranks – and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, it brought some success. At the national championships he was a member of the City of Edinburgh team that won gold in the team sprint; he was also still competing in the odd endurance event, and was a member of the quartet that claimed silver in the team pursuit.
And in the Scottish championships there was a snapshot of the future when, in the men’s sprint, the two riders who made it to the final were Hoy and MacLean. It was a thrilling contest, going to three rounds; MacLean winning match A, Hoy winning match B, and then, according to his harshest critic – Brian Annable – ‘going to sleep in the decider and getting jumped with 250 m to go’. The title thus went to MacLean.
But towards the end of the first term of his second year at St Andrews University, Hoy phoned home. ‘He just said he was absolutely miserable,’ says David Hoy. ‘“Give it another few weeks,” I said. But he said: “I can’t do this.”’ Then he corrects himself: ‘What he actually said was, “I can do this, but I don’t see any point in doing it.”’
‘I just thought, “What am I doing?”’ says Hoy. ‘I enjoyed St Andrews, liked the place, had a good group of friends, a great social life, but I didn’t enjoy the course and I wanted to be doing something that was gong to help me. I had developed my interest in sports science. At the training camp I’d been to in Majorca, the previous year, there was a guest coach, Louis Passfield. Louis wasn’t a sprint specialist but he had enough knowledge to answer the questions I had, and he was quite scientific. It gave me a taste for sports science. I had this hunger for knowledge in terms of physiology and wanting to know the best way to train – all these questions that I hoped sports science could answer for me.’
Hoy returned to Edinburgh from St Andrews in October 1995, contacted Moray House – the scene of Ray Harris’s Kingcycle tests – and enquired about enrolling there to study sports science. His application was accepted, and he went straight into second year the following autumn. In the meantime, and to teach him something of ‘the real world’, his parents insisted that he either get a job or sign on the dole. He opted initially for the latter, though returned from the local dole office asking ‘What was that all about?’ and decided to get a job instead, working in the Edinburgh bookshop Thin’s.
It was in 1996 that he was joined in the City of Edinburgh Racing Club by MacLean. In fact, it was a case of second time lucky for MacLean – his written application had been rejected the previous year. But he proved a more than useful signing: in the kilo at the British championships he won a bronze medal, while Hoy was fifth – having this time managed not to pull his foot out the pedal with his starting effort. But another significant episode that summer was a dreadful accident at the Meadowbank Velodrome, involving Hoy and, more seriously, another of Britain’s up-and-coming riders – Jason Queally.
As Ray Harris has noted, the constant exposure of the wooden boards to the elements was making the velodrome increasingly dangerous and prone to splinter. This was borne out, horrifically, by Queally, who needed hospital treatment after coming off worst in a pile-up in the closing stages of the Meadowbank Mile. In crashing he was impaled by an eighteen-inch-long, one-and-a-half-inch-wide piece of wood. That was as much a ‘splinter’ as a whale is a minnow. The resulting wound needed seventy stitches, with the doctors telling Queally that the thickness of his chest muscles – developed during his earlier career as a swimmer and international water polo player – possibly saved his life. Had the splinter pierced his chest cavity, it would probably have killed him.
Hoy had a ringside seat, being the first rider to go down. ‘It was the last corner, there had been a train of four or five City riders on the front, then Craig had done the big push and I was on his wheel; so we’re rounding the last corner, I’m coming up on his back wheel, and Craig flicked slightly to the side. It wasn’t intentional, but I caught his wheel, came crashing down, and took Jason, and everyone else, down with me. Craig was the only one who stayed upright. Jason hit me, went over the top and landed on his back, then slid down the track. He was screaming, shouting: “I’ve got half the fucking track in my back!” And I was lying there, pretty sore, thinking, “Aw, shut up, will you? I don’t know who you are but you’re making a lot of noise … it can’t be that bad.” Then I looked across, saw this bit of wood sticking into him, with the other end sticking out the other side, and I thought, “Okay, you can have the ambulance first …”’
It was Hoy’s mother, Carol, a nurse, who was on first-aid duty at Meadowbank that day. She took Queally to hospital. ‘I’d never met Jason, but it was absolutely devastating,’ she says with a shudder. ‘It was very obvious he was badly injured, and it was very worrying. Horrible, and scary. I always worry about Chris crashing but on that occasion I must admit I didn’t even look at Chris, though he had lost half his skin in the crash.’
After a week in intensive care, and with a scar in his back that made it look ‘as though he’d been attacked by a shark’, Queally resolved never again to ride in a group race, shifting his focus to individual efforts against the clock. It was a decision, albeit an enforced one, that would later reap spectacular rewards – and provide some crucial inspiration for Hoy. But it was perhaps just as well that he wasn’t a member of the City of Edinburgh Racing Club; accident or no accident, Annable would probably have told him to buck up his ideas and take part in a ‘real race’, not individual efforts against the clock.
Hoy and MacLean, meanwhile, confirmed their emerging talent with selection for that year’s world championships – the first to be held at the Manchester Velodrome. The twenty-year-old Hoy was selected for the team sprint, while MacLean rode the individual sprint, the kilo and the team sprint, finishing twelfth in the kilo – though he was second fastest over the opening lap – and fourteenth in the sprint.
The team sprint proved a bitter experience, however. Queally, by now recovered from his crash, pulled his foot out at the start – and yes, he was using new clipless pedals (Ray Harris would not have been impressed). MacLean was angry with the British selectors, saying that it should have been the City of Edinburgh team – in other words, with Peter Jacques instead of Queally – that contested the worlds. ‘We proved our point,’ he told reporters afterwards, with the team not having been allowed a restart, and therefore posting no result. ‘It should have been the club team in the worlds, but it wasn’t our decision.’
By now MacLean was thinking that cycling could, somehow, become a career. How, he didn’t exactly know. But ambition – or wishful thinking – overrode common sense. ‘I was living back up north and it came to a point where I was forced to take one route or the other,’ he says. ‘Cycling wasn’t a career path. There was no possibility of making it a career really, not at that point. But I was quite confident I could make a living. I don’t know why I thought that, or how I thought I’d make a living. I was possibly a bit naive.
‘The other option for me at that point was to join the armed forces. Once you were in there, and had passed the initial training, you could do well at sport. But it would have involved ten months’ training. I didn’t want to lose that time, so I had to make a choice. Then I heard about this new “Developing Excellence” programme being started by Edinburgh University – it was a forerunner to the Scottish Institute of Sport. It didn’t give you money, but it did give you access to the university gym, to lectures on sports performance, that kind of thing. Chris and I were invited to be the representatives from cycling. That was enough of a spur for me to move back to Edinburgh.’
Around this period, from 1995 to 1997, MacLean, as Hoy says at the start of this chapter, was the one who was forging on ahead, while others, most obviously Hoy himself, followed. David Hoy also favours the climbing metaphor: ‘Craig was like a climber with Chris hanging on the rope behind.’
Was MacLean aware of this? ‘I was desperately aware of it,’ he says with feeling. ‘But Chris was a significant driving force for me as well, because he was constantly nipping at my heels. I think without each other, pushing each other on, then things would have panned out very differently for both of us.’
They were way ahead of the pack – and ahead not only of their peers but of previous generations as well. ‘There was nobody else, really, and we’d gone faster, already, than the guys who’d gone before us,’ says MacLean. ‘So there was a void. The old generation – the likes of Eddie Alexander and Stewart Brydon – had moved on, we were coming up pretty fast, and there was no one there to help us; there wasn’t the coaching structure in place at the British Cycling Federation; there was no money in it; there was nowhere to turn to get your ideas or information. You had to go by instinct and do a lot of reading and second guessing.’
In which circumstances, he adds, you make a lot of mistakes. Hoy refers to sprinting as a ‘black art’ and this was at the heart of the problem for MacLean. With no great tradition of sprinting in Britain – or huge gaps between Reg Harris and Eddie Alexander, whose career was always heavily compromised and whose potential was ultimately unfulfilled – there was no bank of knowledge, no ready mentors or sources of useful information. MacLean was keen to learn all he could – hence his enthusiasm for Edinburgh University’s ‘Developing Excellence’ initiative.
But it was specialized advice he really needed – so where did MacLean turn? ‘You heard snippets from people – what the Germans did, what the French did, bits and pieces. But it was hard to get that information. Even the people in Britain who did have a bit of experience, there seemed to be a reluctance to pass it on … it was like they didn’t want us to be better than them. I remember asking one of our top sprinters, way back at the 1992 national championships, “What’s the difference between us and the top German guys?” And he said: “Weights.” That was it. “Weights.” That was the extent of the advice. And it wasn’t as if I posed any threat to him at the time.
‘I remember overhearing conversations between Stewart Brydon and Graeme Obree,’ continues MacLean. ‘I was just listening in while they were discussing training. I took on some of Obree’s ideas about using big gears for specific strength development. Some of his ideas were a bit too off-the-wall in practical terms but I absorbed some of them. But I think we wasted so much time and effort doing rubbish training, basically. We didn’t know what worked so we did masses of volume, which probably stood us in good stead in the long term, but in the short term it meant we didn’t progress. We were just tired a lot of the time.’
Hoy echoes this. ‘Some of the training we did at the time was absolute nonsense. It was a case of taking two steps forward, one back. We trained very hard but a lot of it was counterproductive.’ Among the ‘nonsense’ training, perhaps, were some highly experimental techniques tried out by MacLean. ‘Like filling his bike with lead shot,’ recalls Hoy. ‘He had unusual ideas, mad ideas.’
MacLean says that at this time he and Hoy developed ‘in tandem’. Hoy is generous in his assessment of MacLean’s influence on him, even describing him as ‘my coach – certainly the closest I had to a coach at that time’. If they were on a tandem then MacLean, clearly, was the one piloting it.
But following the 1996 world championships, Hoy could look forward to his first major overseas assignment – given that the worlds had been held in Manchester – at the European Under-23 championships in Moscow, in October. It was to be a strange trip. The British Cycling Federation could only afford to send three people, and they opted not to ‘waste’ a space on an official or mechanic, so three riders – Hoy, Alwyn McMath and Angela Hunter – were selected and told to fend for themselves.
Hoy viewed Moscow as a massive opportunity: he would ride an individual event, the kilometre time trial. It would thus be his first opportunity to lay down a marker as a rider in his own right, and to step out from MacLean’s shadow. ‘Training was going really well,’ he recalls, ‘I kept progressing after the world championships, improving all the time. It was all going well.’
Then he and a couple of others were ‘roped in’ to starring in a short film. A promotional video was being made to try and sell the sport of track cycling to television. ‘They were trying to do something arty,’ says Hoy. The velodrome was shrouded in darkness, with the only light coming from a spotlight trained on the finish line, the idea being that Hoy and his fellow riders emerge from the darkness, like ghosts, riding into the light.
‘It went on for ages and ages,’ says Hoy. ‘It was my first experience of doing something for TV and finding out how it always drags on.’ The track had been booked for two hours, from 9–11 p.m. At 1 a.m. they were still filming. In the midst of it, Hoy, on his bike, rolled down the ramp that leads from the track centre into the tunnel that emerges at the foot of a flight of stairs, which climb up to the main reception.
Unfortunately, as Hoy rolled down, a man pushing a large trolley – packed with cameras – appeared in front of him. Hoy – on his track bike, with a fixed wheel instead of brakes – pushed back hard on the pedals. At a slow speed that can be as effective as braking – you stop immediately. But on this occasion he pushed too hard: his effort stripped the rear sprocket. And so now, with his feet strapped tightly into the pedals, he was careering down the ramp, picking up speed, with no way of slowing down, far less stopping.
He squeezed past the trolley, and, like something from Benny Hill, carried on straight past him, gathering speed, out of control, and with, eventually, only the steps leading up to reception in his path. The only thought in his brain, he says, was ‘Shit, what am I going to do here?’ But there was no flash of inspiration and he carried on, ‘going very fast by now’, until he collided with the stairs, sticking his arm out to try and protect his face. The bike was a mess – it concertinaed. So was his arm – it was broken.
Initially the national track coach, Marshall Thomas, reassured him that his arm wasn’t broken. ‘Wait and see how it is in the morning,’ he told him. But in the morning it was ‘massive – like an old lady’s leg’, says Hoy. ‘Really swollen, straight up and down. I went to the hospital, had it x-rayed and had a cast put on it. And this was two-and-a-half weeks before Moscow. I was gutted.’
But he was still ‘determined to go. I thought, “What if I modify my handlebars?” I just couldn’t face the idea of not going.’ Neither could the BCF, who had paid for his travel and arranged a non-transferable visa. So it was agreed that Hoy would go anyway. ‘If you can ride, then ride,’ he was told, ‘and if you can’t, then help the others.’
He was determined to ride. So when he got to Moscow he visited the Dutch team’s mechanic – ‘because we had no tools with us’, Hoy points out – and asked for a large set of clippers. With these he went to work adapting his plaster cast, removing the bit that covered his hand. That allowed him to grip the bars, though it was sore to do so. But, gingerly, he took the start line for the kilo, managed a personal best by ‘four or five tenths of a second’, recording 1 minute, 6 seconds, and placing twelfth of the twenty-five starters. ‘I was over the moon with that,’ he says. In first place, meanwhile, was an eighteen-year-old prodigy from France – Arnaud Tournant – who went three seconds faster than Hoy. When he returned, Hoy faced some awkward questions. His doctor asked, ‘What on earth have you done to your plaster cast?’ Hoy told him his hand had swollen up so badly that he had needed to modify it.
