Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore
and hundreds, if not thousands, of Scottish cyclists have since had cause to be grateful. The facility built at Meadowbank, adjacent to the main athletics stadium, was state-of-the-art. It remains state-of-the-art – by 1970 standards, that is.
Be that as it may. There is a nice link between Campbell, the man who drove through the plans for a velodrome in Edinburgh, and Hoy, who would go on to become its most successful ‘product’. Twenty-four years after its construction, and with Hoy having just made a tentative start to his track cycling career, the young cyclist attended a training camp in Majorca. It was his first overseas training camp, and it fell on his eighteenth birthday. One of the senior cyclists on the camp was Campbell, then in his mid-seventies, but still showing the youngsters a thing or two on the daily training rides. Hearing of Hoy’s birthday, Campbell pedalled off to a nearby village, several kilometres away. When he returned, he had something balanced precariously on his handlebars. ‘Many happy returns,’ he said to Hoy. It was a birthday cake.
Hoy had started riding on the track, thanks, again, to Ray Harris. The East of Scotland Cycling Association had a fleet of around a dozen track bikes stored at the velodrome, which could be used by members of the Dunedin Cycling Club at their weekly ‘track night’. It was at one of these track nights, in April 1991, that Hoy had his first outing on the boards of the Meadowbank Velodrome. ‘I remember being scared and intimidated by it,’ he says of the track. ‘Walking through the tunnel, under the track, and then out into the track centre and realizing how steep the banking was … it was daunting. And there was an etiquette about riding there that I didn’t understand.’ Here Hoy slightly contradicts Harris’s claim that Dunedin was a ‘youthful’ club. It was true that its membership was youthful as far as cycling clubs went, but it was, says Hoy, all relative. There weren’t many as young as he was, which was fifteen. ‘It wasn’t that they weren’t friendly to young riders,’ he says, ‘it was just that there weren’t many young riders.
‘I remember being given a track bike and starting riding on the track, then, eventually, being led round it by one of the older riders. We followed behind him in a string. It was really scary at first. It just didn’t look physically possible to stay upright on the steep banking; I thought you’d slip down unless you were going really fast. But when you rode around on the black line [near the bottom] and realized that it was just as steep there as it was at the top, then you realized that you could ride at the top as well. So you could start to move up the banking, and that was exciting.’
It was fortunate for Hoy that there was a velodrome – still the only one in Scotland and one of only a handful in Britain – in his home city. ‘Our club was officially based at the velodrome,’ explains Harris, ‘as much because we were trying to keep it open as anything else. The history of that track has been one of bumps along a very rocky road. After the 1970 Commonwealth Games it had quite a following, because it was such a good track. The only drawback was the everlasting weather problem. Events could be cancelled with a drop of rain. They still can, and regularly are. But it got to the stage where it was almost matchwood; there were splinters appearing of astronomic proportions; everything leaked.’
At that stage, on the brink of becoming matchwood, the velodrome was rebuilt for the 1986 Commonwealth Games, at a cost of £450,000, but still with no roof. And it rained a lot during those games, playing havoc with the cycling programme. Thus was the velodrome christened – by Prince Edward, apparently – the ‘Wellydrome’.
Although the Dunedin Cycling Club was based at the Wellydrome, track racing was merely one activity. They were very active in the other disciplines – road and now mountain biking, too – and they were all encouraged. Hoy, as a consequence, did a considerable amount of time trialling and road racing, even competing in the 1994 Junior Tour of Ireland, a mini-Tour de France-style stage race and a major event for juniors, held over nine days, with stages of sixty to seventy miles a day. For juniors this was a gruelling, demanding event, in many cases providing their first experience of a proper stage race, and Hoy did reasonably well. As he says, he was never going to be a climbing specialist – though he wasn’t big at the time; ‘he was a wee sparrow,’ says his father, David – but on the fast, flat stages he could remain safely in the ‘peloton’ and even get near the front in the hectic sprint finishes. He managed two top-ten finishes on road stages.
Earlier road race outings hadn’t been so successful. Having travelled to the north of Scotland for a weekend of racing in and around the town of Forres, Hoy was unfortunate to puncture as the first road race was starting, within metres of having left the neutralized zone. He stopped to get a wheel change from the following ‘service’ car, then began to chase and appeared to be successful. But when he got within thirty metres of the rear of the peloton – almost touching distance – they began to speed up; he dropped back and never got close to them again.
He seemed to take to the track, though – or take to it as well as anyone when confronted by the steep wall-of-death-style banking, which, as Hoy says, was a daunting prospect. But he enjoyed it from the start. ‘You enjoy what you’re good at,’ he says. ‘I found that I did okay on the track and enjoyed it from day one. I started doing the weekly track league, on a Tuesday evening, and really enjoyed the 500 m handicaps. Being so young I’d start with about a lap-advantage over the big boys. I’d only be racing about half the distance they were, so it’d be flat out and I enjoyed that kind of effort – it was a bit like the start of a BMX race.
‘Every week I’d hear the older riders coming up behind me – whooom! – and then sweeping past, but I found I could hold them off for a bit longer each time. I could see I was improving, which felt good. I remember the first time I won one of those races – it was a great feeling. Though it did mean that my handicap got smaller. The better I did the harder it was to win.’
But to say that Hoy took to track cycling like a duck to water would be stretching it. He did suffer teething troubles. Even at the 1994 national track championships – immediately prior to the Junior Tour of Ireland – there was an incident that Ray Harris puts down to ‘inexperience’. Harris was there helping – though Hoy had joined a new club, the City of Edinburgh Racing Club, at the start of that year – and he was horrified when his protégé took to the start line of the junior kilometre with a spanking new pedal-and-shoe ensemble. He had got himself a clipless system, whereby shoes snapped into pedals, and were held there, rather than being attached by old-fashioned toe-clips and straps, which were still overwhelmingly the choice of track riders for whom reliability was the most important consideration.
‘You don’t try new tricks on the day of the competition!’ exclaims Harris. ‘Of course, he starts his effort, and in the strain of starting, he pulls his foot out of the pedal. My god! In the kilo there’s a rule that if you have a mechanical problem in the first lap, or fall off, then you can start again. But a pulled foot doesn’t count as a mechanical, so the commissaire [referee] is looking at me, saying “Push him over!” It’s an old trick, that, the trick of falling off your bike if your foot comes out. But Chris didn’t realize. It’s a learning experience, but it can be costly if it’s the one chance you’ve got as a junior. However, I think the least perturbed by all that was Chris himself. He seemed very calm. I was having kittens.’
To make matters worse, Hoy had ‘previous’ in this regard. At the 1992 British championship – his first, where he had the experience of riding around, awestruck, behind the new Olympic champion Chris Boardman – he had also pulled his foot out of his toe-clips and straps during his starting effort, riding the entire race with his foot resting limply on top of the pedal. Two years later, when he caused Harris to have kittens by pulling his foot out of his new pedals, he at least managed to clip his foot back in, and placed fifth in the junior kilo. But it could and should have been so much better, says Hoy, who feels that the 1994 championships – about which more later – were significant for being ‘the first time I realized I had potential. I probably would have won the kilo if I hadn’t pulled my foot out.’
It had been at the end of the 1993 season that Hoy felt it time to leave the club environment of the Dunedin, and the mentorship of Harris, to join a more specialist and more serious club, whose overriding focus was track racing. But he didn’t forget Harris, who explains: ‘I’ve had lots of lads come through the club and