Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore
our sights a wee bit higher. We had a yellow Bedford minibus and every weekend we had them away racing: Preston, Crewe, Bristol, you name it.’
‘People used to say, “You’re mad, how can you possibly take a kid 1000 miles at the weekend?”’ says David Hoy. ‘But actually Chris used to get more sleep on a race weekend. If I was taking him, we had a big Citroen estate car. I had a bit of foam cut out, and we laid that in the back of the car. What happened then was that he’d go to bed at 8 p.m., just like normal, then I’d wake him at 1 a.m., and carry him into the car. He’d go back to sleep and sleep all the way, while I drove. The furthest we went in a day was Bristol. We’d get there about 6 o’clock on the Sunday morning and he’d go out and practise for a couple of hours – the other kids would have been practising on the track on the Saturday. He would race all day. Then we’d leave about five; stop for a meal; he’d get in the back and go to sleep – and when we got home I’d carry him up to bed. So he used to get two twelve-hour sleeps.’
‘I didn’t get any. I was usually pretty tired on a Monday,’ David adds.
Swanson is interesting on the young Hoy-as-competitor. ‘The Chris you see now is nothing like the Chris we saw back then,’ he says, smiling. ‘He seems very calm now, totally in control and great in the high-pressure situations, but back then there was a kid from Musselburgh [near Edinburgh] who put the fear of God into him.
‘His name was Steven McNeil. McNeil always beat Chris in Scotland, though he never went south of the border. But I remember on one occasion we turned up at Chorley, after leaving about three in the morning. Chris and my son Neil went to register and Chris came back almost in tears. “Dad, Dad, Dad!” he said. “What?” says David. “He’s here.” “Who’s here?” “Steven McNeil’s here!”’
Swanson laughs: ‘He’d seen a red helmet – McNeil always wore a red helmet. But we went and checked – it wasn’t McNeil. It was strange, because Chris didn’t get involved in the mind games or worrying about his other competitors – apart from one: Steven McNeil. He was his nemesis. If he was there he cracked up. That time at Chorley, Chris didn’t want to race. But as soon as we told him he wasn’t there he was okay.
‘I saw Steven McNeil a couple of years ago,’ continues Swanson, ‘and I said to him: “If you ever run into Chris, tell him you’re thinking about making a comeback and taking up track racing, and watch his face go white.”’
Swanson had first spotted Hoy on a BMX when he was seven, and still on his Raleigh Burner. ‘He was out of place; everyone else was on proper BMXs, but you’re looking at this kid, and he stood out because he was actually keeping up with kids older than him. I went over and spoke to Dave and said, “Do you mind if we try him on a proper BMX bike?”’ He became a regular member of the Scotia party that travelled down south. ‘They were long weekends,’ says Swanson, ‘but bloody enjoyable.’
Hoy’s competitiveness was apparent to Swanson, which didn’t make him unique, but Hoy did stand out in one respect. ‘He was a ferocious competitor,’ says Swanson, ‘they all were. There were lots of tears, tantrums, but what made it worse was you had a van load of kids aged from about seven to ten, and it was fine and dandy if they all won, but if only one or two of them won, then you had a problem. You’re trying to be happy for the ones that have won and at the same time not go overboard because of the poor buggers who are sitting there with their noses out of joint. It was a difficult balance.
‘Chris’s reaction to defeats was interesting, though, because he was different to the others. If my son won, he was hyper. If he was beaten, he wouldn’t talk to anybody, especially not me, and he wouldn’t be in a mood to listen. Like most kids, it was one extreme or the other. But if Chris was beaten he would have a discussion with his dad about why he was beaten: whether he’d made a mistake in the start gate, or Dave geared him wrongly, or he got the line wrong going into the corner – whatever it was, there was always a rational conversation with his dad on the way back up the road, even at eight or nine years old, about why he was beaten. I remember being struck by it at the time. His reaction to getting beaten, or indeed winning, wasn’t the reaction you’d get out of other kids of that age. I think some of it was down to Dave. He’s not your pushy parent. You’d see a lot of parents getting torn into their kids, shouting, “What happened? I’ve driven 200 miles to bring you here and you made a complete arse of it!” Dave was always very calm and rational. He’s quite technical and logical. He’s also one of these great theorists, which could be more a hindrance than a help – sometimes he got carried away with his theories about gear ratios and so on.’
Swanson can only recall one occasion when Hoy became upset and emotional. On the occasion in question they were returning to Scotland following a triumph: Hoy had won, and the handsome gold trophy sat in pride of place on the dashboard of the van. Slowly, though, as they travelled north, the trophy’s shape became distorted – it melted. ‘The heater was on,’ explains Swanson. ‘It was plastic, of course, with a BMX rider on top. Chris was crestfallen when he saw this piece of molten plastic. He was eight and it was like the bottom had dropped out of his world.’
While in Scotland Hoy was ‘head and shoulders above everyone’ – apart from McNeil – in England it was a different story. There was another nemesis there: Matt Boyle, British champion an incredible twelve years in a row, European champion, and a silver medallist in the world championships. Younger still, and an even bigger player in the BMX scene, was the prodigious David Maw.
Everyone I talked to about BMX-ing mentioned Maw. He was a big star, and a three-time world champion, with an eight-year-old ego – it seems – to match. ‘In one race they were all at the start gate, up on the pedals, ready to go, when David Maw sticks his hand up,’ recalls Swanson. ‘So all the riders have to come down off their pedals, and David Maw starts doing stretching exercises! He was eight years old! The other kids were looking at him, rattled – which was his intention, of course. But he knew how good he was, and it worked. He was unbeatable, huge – there was a BBC documentary made about him.’
Tragically, Maw was killed in a car crash in 2000. And it seems he wasn’t the only one – a remarkable number of former BMX prodigies have met untimely deaths. ‘It’s quite an eerie world,’ says Hoy’s former rival, Matt Boyle, who continued to race BMX as a professional in America until 1999, when he was twenty-three. ‘A lot of people have been and gone.’
Another top rider of the 1980s, who like Boyle went across the Atlantic to continue racing into adulthood, was Jamie Staff. Staff reckons ‘you had kids who obviously liked speed, and a bit of danger, when they were young … a few of them certainly got into fast cars.’ Staff, like Hoy, persisted with bikes rather than cars and eventually transferred his talents to the velodrome, becoming a mainstay of the British team, alongside Hoy, from 2002.
But the vast majority of the BMX generation were lost to cycling. ‘It was booming,’ says Staff, ‘there were tonnes of tracks, especially in inner cities – Slough, Surbiton, Hounslow. It was a huge scene and anyone could do it. In the late Eighties the nationals at Hounslow would have thousands.’
And then, abruptly, the BMX boom ended. ‘It stopped dead,’ says Swanson. ‘My view is that it never recovered from the recession in the early Nineties,’ suggests Staff. ‘It was very much a sport that depended on volunteers and families. Everyone’s purse strings tightened in the early Nineties and it hit BMX-ing hard. In my age category there was so much talent. I didn’t win much – there were about ten guys as good as me, but most of that talent was lost. Only the die-hards remained.
‘It’s a shame,’ continues Staff, ‘because I’ll argue with anyone, all day long, about the merits of BMX. It’s the hardest bike to ride. If you can race a BMX then you can jump on any other bike, in any other discipline, and it’s dead easy. It’s ironic because we were seen as unprofessional, as kids, to the cycling establishment, but we were very professional. I trained four or five hours a day on my BMX.’
And not only was it good at honing bike-handling skills, for ‘it turned what were basically shy kids into fairly outgoing, confident kids,’ according to Swanson.
But