IT WAS in March 2007, at the world track cycling championships in Palma, when it became clear that something big was in the air. Led by Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton, the British team dominated, winning seven gold medals, and, in the words of the
Australian coach Martin Barras, giving the rest of the world "a righteous kick in the arse."
In the Palma Arena I asked Dave Brailsford, the performance director, for a review of the championships. He avoided the question, instead saying: "Tomorrow, I will be at my desk in Manchester, relentlessly planning our pursuit of medals in Beijing."
It would be quite a story, I thought, if that pursuit proved successful. Seven gold medals at the Olympics was unthinkable – but then so, ten years ago, was the crazy idea that Britain could become a cycling superpower.
Two weeks after Palma I met Hoy in a bar in Edinburgh and proposed the idea of a book that would tell the story of the revolution of the sport in Britain, with him as the principal character. Hoy is one of the few to have been involved since the start, in late 1997, when lottery millions began flooding into the sport, and Peter Keen established what seemed then the almost laughably ambitious 'World Class Performance Plan.'
Hoy – who I knew from the 1998 Commonwealth Games, when he competed and I made up the numbers in the Scotland team – seemed enthusiastic. "Send me an outline," he said. So I did, and the response was immediate: "Nice one! I was always going to say yes anyway, I just wanted to keep you in suspense."
I began meeting people and speaking to them about Hoy.
What was most striking was that no one had anything even remotely negative to say about him (and I didn't just meet people suggested by Chris). The man who ran his BMX club said that even at seven what shone through was his analytical brain and his calmness under pressure; as a mountain biker in his teens – and not a very good one, given the endurance nature of these events – what struck his father, David, was his determination to become half-decent, in defiance, almost, of the physiological facts; and what struck his coach was his calm and polite reaction to "a typical Edinburgh woman in green wellies, plaid skirt and Barbour jacket, trying to jab her walking pole in his front wheel while we were riding in the Pentlands."
What everyone remarked on was his decency. Ray Harris, an Emmett Brown type character who ran the Dunedin Cycling Club, says that while others have "grown up, moved on, and I never hear from them," Hoy always replies promptly to his emails. Harris was an early sports scientist, a subject that so appealed to his young protégé that he ended up with a degree in it from Edinburgh University. "Chris has got an interest in anything that makes sense," said Harris. "If he can see there's a logic and an end result to it, then he becomes very interested.
"A lot of competitive athletes are prima donnas when it comes to performance testing," Harris continued.
"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."
Hoy himself explained: "I remember loving the measurability of Ray's tests. 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. I wasn't good at racket sports, which required hand-eye co-ordination. I did alright at rugby, but I was never that great. But I loved the science behind training for cycling."
For somebody writing a book about him, it became something of a challenge, this. It was all very well him being so nice, well-mannered and making such a wonderful impression on everyone, but where were the rough edges? Where was the ruthlessness, the killer instinct that all great champions are supposed to have?
Last October I travelled with Hoy and the British sprint squad to a training camp in Cottbus in the east of Germany.
During a training race I sat in the stand talking to their head coach, Shane Sutton, a straight talking, fast-living, larger than life Aussie – "a bit of a wild man," according to Brailsford. Sutton, I knew, would offer an alternative view.
"Chris is a nice guy," he said, "but he has that c*** element. You gotta have it. Need it. He believes in himself 100 per cent. Bottom line, he's selfish. He'll tell you that. It's all about Chris. But he needs to be like that, and when you take him away from the arena, you wouldn't get a nicer guy. He's not a show off.
"He's not an extrovert. He's a gentle giant who gets on with his business."
Midway through the Manchester world championships in March, where they would eventually win nine gold medals, Barras proved just as quotable as he'd been in Palma twelve months earlier. "It's like the house is on fire," said the Australian coach, "and we're just trying to save the furniture." In Beijing the house has been burned to the ground.
• Heroes, Villains & Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain's Track Cycling Revolution By Richard Moore (HarperSport, £15.99)
The full article contains 944 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
