Читать книгу Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution - Richard Moore - Страница 9
ОглавлениеPentland Hills, Edinburgh, winter 1992
‘One incident in the Pentlands has stuck in my mind forever,’ says Ray Harris, ‘and I’ve often wondered if the person concerned would ever realize that she almost killed a future Olympic champion.
‘It was winter,’ Harris continues, ‘and we were coming off the hills after a day’s mountain biking. We weren’t belting along, but the weather wasn’t particularly good, and there was an old dear with her green wellies, plaid skirt, Barbour jacket, and walking pole, a typical old Edinburgh woman. Chris got too close to her, so she made a jab at his front wheel, making some rather unladylike comments about cyclists being on her path. It was a steel walking pole and if she’d got him it would have been very serious. The image has stuck in my mind. But it didn’t faze Chris. A lot of youngsters of that age would have been shouting back at her, swearing and all sorts. But although I’ve seen Chris disappointed and cross, I’ve never seen him out of control.’
Harris is one of the great unsung heroes of British sport. In Edinburgh and beyond, for a period spanning three decades, he was to the sport of cycling what Dr Emmett Brown, the mad scientist from Back to the Future, was to time travel. Even if his ideas and methods sometimes seemed loopy or eccentric, Harris, like the good doctor, made things happen, with his enthusiasm if nothing else. He was certainly a scientist, but he was also a visionary. Though he might have seemed eccentric, he did things, or tried things, that would become commonplace a few years later.
Hoy met Harris when he felt he had outgrown the sport of BMX. ‘I stopped enjoying it and didn’t see myself progressing any further,’ he says now. Plus, as he told his old school magazine in 2004, ‘BMX was no longer trendy. It was losing me crucial streetcred being associated with an un-cool pastime.’
At the grand old age of 14, it was time for a new challenge. The mountain bike had emerged – it was like a BMX for adults. This new machine was the epitome of cool, to such an extent that in the early 1990s it seemed they would take over the world and render road bikes obsolete; and then they all but disappeared themselves, before staging a comeback in the late 1990s, with technological improvements such as suspension forks, rear suspension, and disc brakes.
Hoy got involved during the first, relatively short-lived wave of popularity. Would he have remained a mountain biker had that wave been sustained throughout the 1990s? No, probably not. And it’s just as well: because, as a mountain biker, Hoy was … distinctly mediocre.
He found that his cycling skills didn’t transfer seamlessly from the short BMX tracks, which rewarded sharp bursts of speed and acceleration, to the longer, more gruelling mountain biking trails, which provided a test of stamina. More particularly, the hills proved a problem.
David Hoy has joked of having to wait for hours for his son to finish endurance events. At least, I had assumed he was joking. ‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘The car park would be empty at these events and I’d be thinking about going and checking with First Aid. Then, finally, he would appear over the hill.’
Hoy, notes his father, ‘was just the wrong type of athlete’ for such events, ‘not that he knew it at the time. He enjoyed it. It started off with him heading into the Pentlands’ – the range of hills that sit on the southern boundary to Edinburgh, around six miles from the family home in Murrayfield – ‘and they’d be up there all day exploring the wee tracks and trails. There are miles of them; it’s a terrific place. Then he’d be back for his tea.’
Mountain biking could be dangerous, of course, not least on hidden paths in remote glens. Although the Pentland Hills are close to Edinburgh, they seem miles away when you are in the middle of them. While the hills are visible from every corner of the city, the same cannot be said in reverse: the city is invisible from the remoter parts, and there is no road access. So there were obvious dangers associated with riding in the hills – especially down them. ‘He told me he clocked 65 [mph] coming down one of the steep hills once,’ says David in conspiratorial tones, confirming that, although he officially disapproved, he was secretly quite proud. ‘We reached a compromise with him: we gave him a whistle and if he fell off he was to use it to attract attention.’
Hoy’s competitive debut on a mountain bike followed the appearance of a small advert in a mountain biking magazine, announcing the start of a new Scottish Cyclists’ Union (SCU) cross-country mountain bike series. David spotted the advert and called SCU headquarters – then and now a Portakabin parked beside the velodrome at Meadowbank – and spoke to their executive officer, ‘boring him stupid for half an hour’ about his son’s glittering BMX career. The best thing, he was told, was to join a club. He recommended the Dunedin Cycling Club, run by Ray Harris. ‘He’s a good coach,’ said the man from the SCU.
At the same time, at school, Hoy was playing rugby and also rowing. Rugby legend Gavin Hastings, a former pupil at Hoy’s school, was the teenager’s first sporting hero. The Scotland and British Lions captain came to the school one day to take training, though Hoy ‘was very cool about it, as teenage boys are’, recalls his mother, Carol. ‘But later, during dinner, he was full of it: it was “Gav this, Gav that …” as if they were best mates!’ (A decade later the roles were reversed. Interviewed at the official opening of the Scottish Parliament, Hastings was asked what the Parliament should do as a matter of priority. ‘It should build an indoor velodrome,’ urged Hastings, ‘for Chris Hoy and the Chris Hoys of the future.’)
Hoy showed promise as a rugby player. He captained his school team – no mean feat at a school as renowned for producing good rugby players as George Watson’s College – and he was also recognized at district level. On one occasion he even captained Edinburgh Schools against the North of Scotland at Under-15 level.
But he showed even more promise as a rower, going one better, competing for Scotland and, with his school, winning a silver medal at the British championship in the junior coxless pairs. His mother today expresses some regret that he finally opted for cycling instead of rowing, noting with a sigh, ‘I quite wanted him to do the rowing … I fancied myself at Henley, cheering him on – “Come on chaps!” – with a wee gin and tonic in my hand. The banks of the Thames seems more civilized than a sweaty velodrome. Ah well …’
But despite his involvement and interest in the sports offered by his school, cycling remained a big interest. It occupied most of Hoy’s spare time, though he continued to find the transition to mountain biking difficult. His easy superiority at BMX was forgotten as he struggled up the hills and through the mud of mountain bike courses – in fact, he seemed at the time to be showing more promise as a rugby player and rower than as a cyclist.
Yet Hoy was convinced it was just a matter of time before it clicked. It didn’t seem to occur to him that it might not. He was in it to win it, says his dad: ‘Oh yeah. He wanted to win; he didn’t just want to take part. He kept thinking, “I need to work harder. I’ve stepped up to a different sport so I need to learn.” If he finished five hours down one week then he’d try to finish four hours down the next! That was his attitude.’
Hoy himself gently disputes some of his father’s claims. ‘I realized fairly early on that I wasn’t an endurance athlete, but I persevered because I do have an element of aerobic potential. At school I enjoyed cross-country running and rowing, where you needed power and endurance. It was the power-to-weight ratio that was a problem. It meant that anything that involved going uphill was a struggle.’
Old school mates – and teachers – may dispute this claim, however. In the interview he gave to his school magazine, after returning from Athens as the Olympic champion in 2004, he recalled a third-year school cycling trip: ‘My lasting memory from those ten days of riding around the north of Scotland had to be the day I spent riding alongside Mrs Wylie, fifteen minutes behind the main group, as punishment for overtaking Mr Strachan on the hill the previous day.’
Road cycling became something he also pursued, especially as he became involved with the Dunedin Cycling Club, which was run by someone with the enthusiasm of a teenager: Ray Harris. A well-known figure in the Scottish cycling scene, Harris had greying hair, combed in a side-parting, and a strong English accent, betraying his Midlands roots. He wore small half-moon-shaped spectacles, perched halfway down his nose, giving him a professorial look. He always seemed to be peering down into them, in a ‘let-me-see-what-we’ve-got-here-then’ kind of way. But then, he always seemed to be timing, or testing, or officiating – doing something that required his concentration.
Harris talked a lot, and fast. Still does. Visiting him at his home in Coldstream, in the Scottish Borders, is like stepping into a time warp – he doesn’t seem to have aged at all since the late 1980s. Which only seems to confirm that he is indeed the Emmett Brown of Scottish cycling.
‘Chris’s dad came to see me,’ recalls Harris, ‘he was a schoolboy and he was keen to realize his potential beyond BMX, because BMX was limited at that stage. Chris had this conflict at the time, between rowing and rugby, and my first reaction was: if you really want to succeed in rowing or cycling, rugby has to go. Rugby was too risky, because of the free leg movement,’ and here Harris, with the agility of a gymnast, demonstrates what he means by free leg movement. ‘With no resistance, you can do tremendous damage. I’d witnessed at first hand, working as a masseur in other sports, the damage to knee joints in relatively young rugby and football players. Frightening.
‘In the Dunedin we had a membership of fifty or so, a great proportion of them youngsters,’ he continues, not pausing for breath. ‘We hadn’t entertained mountain biking’ – in fact, just like BMX, though not quite to the same extent, mountain biking tended in those days to be dismissed by the ‘connoisseurs’ of traditional cycling, which meant road and, to a lesser extent, track cyclists.
But Harris’s Dunedin Cycling Club, with its youthful membership, and, in Harris, its youthful leader, embraced the new discipline. ‘We organized some short course mountain biking events,’ says Harris, ‘mainly because it gave us an opportunity to get youngsters involved. Initially we ran them in an old mining area in East Lothian; it was just mud, really. And that’s where Chris got involved. He was dead keen. Soon after, we started our Pentlands races.’
Underpinning all of the Dunedin club’s activity – on the road, in the hills and on the track – was Harris’s fanatical interest in a subject that, at that time, few had heard of, and fewer still had any knowledge about: sports science. The term only entered the popular sporting lexicon some time in the 1980s. It referred, broadly speaking, to sophisticated methods of training and monitoring performance, using various ‘data’. Few knew anything about this mysterious ‘data’, never mind how to measure it or what to do with it; and even when heart rate monitors became ubiquitous among amateur cyclists, in the early 1990s, few really knew how to utilize them. They tended to be a source of interest and entertainment rather than a training tool – the ‘game’ being to go out and see how high you could get your heart rate.
Harris’s ‘scientific’ approach pre-dated pulse monitors; it also related to his methodology. As Hoy says: ‘The thing I remember most about Ray was his enthusiasm. As a kid you really respond to that; it was inspiring. But, unusually I think, he backed that up with a scientific approach to training and racing. Even the circuit training classes we did had a method to them; there was method behind everything he did. Not that it was always obvious …’
Many, perhaps most – especially among the young cyclists Harris coached – were not particularly interested in the method. Cycling – sport – is all about results; what matters is where you cross the line. But Hoy was different. Even as a fifteen year old, he was fascinated by the method, the theory behind the practice, even if he didn’t always understand the finer points. ‘Chris has got an interest in anything that makes sense,’ says Harris slowly. ‘If he can see there’s a logic and an end result to it, then he becomes very interested indeed.
‘A lot of competitive athletes are prima donnas when it comes to performance testing,’ he continues. ‘They don’t treat a test any differently to a race. If they fail, they don’t blame themselves or say they’ve had a bad day. They blame you, the equipment, the world at large … but Chris, unusually, never did that, even as a youngster.’
The performance testing he is referring to came thanks to his infamous ‘Kingcycle’ machine – Harris’s equivalent of the Back to the Future time machine. When he began using this, in the late 1980s, it quickly gained a reputation as the ultimate performance-testing device; it was the holy grail of testing, in the very vanguard of sports science.
The Kingcycle: even the name could provoke fear, awe and excitement, in equal measure. In fact, to some – as Harris suggests – it seemed to assume greater importance than race results. The ‘magic number’ given out by the Kingcycle – and, in those days, only the Kingcycle – could (or so it was believed) determine ability, potential, future prospects … everything. It could provide the key that would unlock the door to the cycling equivalent of Narnia or, alternatively, confirm that you might as well just hang up your wheels and take up art, music or reading instead.
And presiding over the Kingcycle was Harris. He was the man with the secret; he held your future in his hands, on a piece of A4 paper, containing an array of graphs and numbers, spewed out of a word processor at the end of a test that was close to torture. What the Kingcycle did, in short, was to reveal a measurement that was far more significant than speed or heart rate, both of which could be easily measured by a computer or heart rate monitor, but neither of which, crucially, necessarily revealed anything of actual significance. A fast speed could be achieved with the aid of a tailwind, or gravity; and a ‘good’ heart rate – well, what constituted a good heart rate?
But power: power was the key. The power that you could generate through the pedals could not be dismissed; whether you were going uphill or down, into the teeth of a gale or with the wind at your back – none of these variables affected the power you were able to transmit through the pedals. In short, what separates Lance Armstrong and Chris Hoy from mere mortals is not the speed they ride at but the power they generate.
Back then, though, ‘power output’ was a mystical, mythical concept. Measuring it was problematic, if not impossible. You couldn’t just go into a gym, lift some weights, and measure your power – it was cycling-specific, and the only way to gauge it was through the pedals. The question remained: how?
It was Harris who came up with a solution. He may even have been the first in the UK to do so. Without being remotely boastful, he seems to suggest as much: ‘I cobbled together something, a forerunner to the Kingcycle, and reprogrammed a little Spectrum 128 computer to work with it. But because it wasn’t very well engineered it was very hit-and-miss. We were getting better at it, but then the actual Kingcycle came along.
‘I spent a lot of time going to Manchester and Derby to attend coaching seminars organized by the British Cycling Federation, and it was at one of those that I learned about it. It had been developed by an electronic signalling company. It was a breakthrough: here was a machine that could give you the magic number – it could tell you the number of watts a cyclist was able to generate and sustain before collapsing, so to speak.
‘I think I had the highest number of tests for any one machine,’ he adds with obvious pride. ‘I bought it myself. It was terribly expensive; the set-up was well over £2,000. And it was very labour intensive: finding a lab to use it in, setting it up, packing it away. You had to know what you were doing and try not to kill anybody.’
He isn’t joking. And that phrase – ‘before collapsing, so to speak’ – only hints at the truth. The reason the Kingcycle provoked fear was that it was painful. Actually, painful doesn’t begin to cover it. What happens is this: your bike is fixed into a rig; the front wheel removed, handlebars held in place, back wheel sitting on a roller. As you climb on the soundtrack would be Prokofiev’s ‘Montagues and Capulets’, the ‘Dance of the Knights’. Just the thought of it could set your pulse racing.
You begin pedalling. It’s easy. Dum-dee-dum. There is little, if any resistance, for a minute, two minutes, three minutes. Then it starts to bite. Just a small bite – a nibble. You begin to feel a little resistance. The pedals aren’t quite turning themselves any more. Still, it isn’t hard. A rhythm comes easily. Seven minutes, eight minutes. Now you’re pushing more; and your breathing isn’t so regular. Sweat pricks at your brow, causing it to itch. You begin fidgeting, moving your hands around the handlebars, searching for a position that is comfortable. But comfort is a foreign land, a thing of the past. Now it’s really starting to hurt. The sweat is running down your arms, finding its way into the crevices of your hands. You wipe your hands on your shorts and replace them. No sooner have you done so than they’re soaking and uncomfortable again.
Nine minutes, ten minutes. Now you’re pushing the pedals, pulling them up, really aware that you’re not pedalling smoothly, but forcing them round; and it’s hurting your muscles, and you’re struggling to maintain the ninety revolutions a minute that the monitor attached to the Amstrad computer, perched in front of you, is telling you to maintain. If you fall below that then the game’s a bogey, it’s all over; and the worst thing is, you know you have at least another two minutes of this.
The seconds pass very slowly, v-e-r-y … s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y. Your heart feels like it might be close to some kind of explosion; your breathing accelerates to a point where it can accelerate no more. And, all the time, the resistance is increasing; it’s getting harder, and harder, and harder to just keep pedalling. Eleven minutes. You did thirteen last time.
And now, though you are edging ever closer to the point of total exhaustion, the mind games begin – horrible mind games. You make deals with yourself. If I make it to twelve, I’ll stop. I’ll alter the rhythm: that’ll make it easier. I’ll do fifteen seconds hard, fifteen easier, fifteen hard. Oh Christ, that’s not working. Maybe if I move my hands to the tops of the bars it’ll be easier. Maybe if I straighten my back it’ll be easier. Maybe if I straighten my arms it’ll help. Focus on your breathing; focus on your breathing. And stop that song, that brain worm, playing on a loop in your head – something really irritating. Hang on, maybe if I move my hands back to the drops of the bars it’ll be easier. Twelve minutes. Shit.
‘And stop!’
The voice of Ray Harris, standing by his monitor with a clipboard. You collapse into a puddle of your own sweat, panting like a dog, and await the whirring of the word processor, and the sheet of paper with the magic number: the number that could wipe away the pain of the previous few minutes, or increase it tenfold.
Like a sadist, Harris chuckles now at the pain endured by his subjects, or victims. ‘Oh, it was the holy grail alright! But you always got guys who thought they could beat the system. And you don’t beat the system! It always gets you in the end. It’s bloody painful; sheer purgatory towards the end. There’s no way around that. Doesn’t matter who you are: it’s going to hurt. But it does give you this number at the end that tells you the kind of power you are capable of generating. And that, ultimately, tells you how good you are.
‘I had Chris in for testing, like everyone else, and I must say, he was never one who wanted to steal the book to have a look at the figures. Some did. Some would blow their top when I told them the figure. They just wouldn’t believe it and they’d come out with all sorts: “Your machine’s rubbish! It doesn’t work!”
‘Chris was interested in his results to see if his training was working. And that’s where it was useful, really. I said to them: use it for making comparisons with yourself. Don’t ever say, “I’ve got to get 350 watts, or 500 watts.” Because, at the end of the day, someone who didn’t make 500 watts could still win the race. That’s one of the curious things about cycling. Power is bloody important but it isn’t the be-all and end-all. Having the power is one thing, employing it is another.’
Hoy, whose passion for training remains undimmed, remembers the Kingcycle tests with something approaching fondness – which could explain a lot. ‘Cycling is one of the most advanced sports in terms of scientific development,’ he says, ‘and the Kingcycle was an early example of a scientific way of looking at performance. I remember going for these tests in Ray’s lab at Moray House [the teacher training college in Edinburgh] and I remember just loving the measurability of it all. Getting that power read-out at the end of it, and looking at it thinking, “In April I was there; it’s July now, I’m here; by October I want to be there.” It appealed to my personality, this idea that if you did X it will result in Y happening to your performance.
‘As a kid I wasn’t the kind of person who did really well at sports that required a lot of intuition, skill, interpretation or subjectivity,’ he continues. ‘I wasn’t good at racket sports, which required good hand–eye coordination. I did alright at rugby but I was never that great. But I loved the science behind training for cycling.’
As well as his performance testing, Harris was particularly adept at working with young people; he was the adult who took your passion for cycling – and, by extension, you – seriously. Clearly he knew his stuff, and, through the likes of Graeme Obree and other leading Scottish cyclists, he did work with elite adult athletes. But what he was really interested in was helping aspiring young athletes, especially those just starting out, as Hoy was in the early 1990s.
It was unusual, in these circumstances, that he was taken seriously as a coach at all. As Harris explains: ‘You get your coaching credibility through coaching at the highest level. Your credibility comes from coaching someone who went to the Commonwealth Games or Olympics. But I resented this. I rebelled. I’m a bit of a reverse snob. This was really cherry picking, I thought.
‘The thing is, people think that you can coach children with a limited knowledge. But you can’t. You have to understand that children are not yet physically mature. You can push them too hard; I’ve seen this happen in swimming, with interval training for eight- and nine-year-olds. You can break them. So I thought I could really help young people.
‘A lot of my coaching has been with what I’d call minority groups – juveniles, juniors and women [Harris was the Scottish women’s team coach for a while]. I haven’t looked for the kudos of coaching elites. That was never my ambition. Plus, there was no shortage of people wanting to coach top riders. I could see where the gaps were, and I tried to fill those gaps.’
Apart from the coaching from Harris, there were other aspects of being in the Dunedin club that were different and progressive. ‘On Friday nights they did circuit training in the scout hut and then had a club meeting,’ says David. ‘So they were exposed to democracy, because they voted for what the club was going to do. It was good. Ray used to take the circuit training then he’d talk to the guys who really wanted to do something, and chat to them.’
Hoy says that it was Harris who taught him, early in his Dunedin career, the importance of keeping a training diary, and of setting goals. ‘He gave us these sheets and told us what information to put on them – heart rate, training, that kind of thing. I took my resting heart rate every morning and filled in my sheet. I didn’t really know at that age why I was doing it, but it was about getting into good habits, and learning – and I had a fascination with numbers anyway … He also taught me the importance of goal-setting – he was the first person who explained goal-setting to me. He told me there were three types of goals: long-term, medium-term, and short-term.’
In his Coldstream home, Harris digs out one of these goal-setting sheets for me to see. In fact, it’s pages: one for each of the goals. And it is with particular pride that Harris recalls what Hoy wrote on his. Beneath the heading ‘Long-Term Goal,’ he wrote: ‘Olympic champion.’
Harris says: ‘He said very early on, he wanted to be Olympic champion. Now, many kids say that, but I wasn’t going to mock him for it. Why should we try and limit what somebody wants to dream about? That dream might be achievable; let’s look at it, break it down.
‘Targets and goal-setting should never be the criteria for a coaching plan,’ he continues. ‘You don’t focus as a fifteen year old on being Olympic champion. The first thing to look at is, what can we do in the immediate future, to spur you on to stage two? If you can’t do stage one – the short-term goals – then you can forget the rest.
‘So with Chris we looked at the stages. Something that was – and still is – really important to Chris was the Commonwealth Games, because he could represent Scotland, and he’s very patriotic, without being anti-the other thing. So we looked at it: when can you go to the Commonwealth Games? Nineteen ninety-eight was realistic. If he did that, the Olympics in 2000 was realistic. If he did that, then becoming Olympic champion in 2004 was realistic. And it was spot-on. It’s almost a fairytale.’
David Hoy – who still, somewhere in the family home, has the goal-setting sheets, with their short-term goals: ‘Scottish champion’; medium-term ambitions: ‘go to the Commonwealth Games’; and long-term dreams: ‘become Olympic champion’ – believes that Harris’s role in this fairytale can hardly be exaggerated. ‘Dare to dream’ might have been his motto, founded on a solid bedrock of self-belief. ‘It was Ray who took away the inhibition,’ says David. ‘When they sat down and talked about goal-setting he let him know, “You can say whatever you like. I won’t laugh at you.”’
Of course, Hoy wasn’t going to be an Olympic champion on a mountain bike. For all his enthusiasm, even Harris would surely have discouraged that notion. But by the time he came to writing down his goals, he had swapped the muddy courses of the mountain bike races for the smooth boards of the velodrome.
