Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution. Richard Moore
while sales of new BMXs plummeted, the race scene survived into the early 1990s. Hoy raced until 1991, switching teams again, trading up, joining the GT Factory Team, and enjoying personal sponsorship from Slazenger and Edinburgh-based exhaust specialists Kwik-Fit.
His sponsorship deal from Kwik-Fit offers another illustration of Hoy’s entrepreneurial flair, following the successful fund-raising for his first bike. ‘He wrote to Tom Farmer, the Kwik-Fit owner, asking for sponsorship,’ says Carol Hoy. ‘The headquarters were just down the road from the house. He got a letter back, inviting him to come and meet Mr Farmer.
‘His dad went with him and they were ushered into the office. David started to speak, but Tom Farmer interrupted him with, “That’s lovely Mr Hoy, but Christopher, tell me why you want this money. Sell it to me.”’ He did, and was rewarded with a cheque for £1,000 to assist with equipment and travelling expenses. Sir Tom Farmer, as he is now known, has kept in touch since, writing letters of congratulation to Hoy after the 2002 Commonwealth Games and 2004 Olympics. The owner of one of Edinburgh’s two big football clubs – Hibernian – obviously doesn’t hold it against Hoy that he is a confessed supporter of the other one, Hearts.
In his new team, Hoy cut a dash in his yellow and blue outfit, emblazoned with GT, Slazenger and Kwik-Fit. But that wasn’t a universal opinion. ‘I remember Chris because he had dodgy race gear,’ says Boyle. ‘I was reminded of how bad it was when I looked at some old pictures the other day. There aren’t many with Chris in them, but he’s always behind me, which is nice.’
In the end, Hoy’s BMX career, which spanned 1984 to 1991, and took him from the age of seven to fourteen, saw him ranked number one in Scotland for five years; he was Scottish champion, British number two (to Boyle), European number five and world number nine. Holland, France, Germany, Denmark and Belgium were all race destinations, giving him an early taste of travel and international competition.
David Hoy believes this also helped his education, in the widest sense of the word. ‘I remember standing at the Berlin Wall with him before it came down,’ says David. ‘In some of the big races in Europe there were teams from behind the Iron Curtain, on rubbish bikes, dressed in rags, really, and Chris used to be quite affected by that. I remember him saying, “It’s a shame for them Dad, because they’re good riders and if they had decent bikes they’d be really good.”’
As well as BMX-ing, Hoy declares his other early interests as maths and chess. On his first day at school – George Watson’s College in Edinburgh – the head teacher asked whether he had any questions. ‘Do you have a chess club?’ was his response. He describes maths as ‘a hobby’ – albeit an unusual one for a five year old. ‘When we went to my auntie’s I’d ask her to give me sums to do,’ says Hoy. ‘She’d write down a whole page of them and I’d sit there quite happily doing them. Then I got the Star Wars figures, about 130 of them altogether, and each one had a number next to the figure on the back of the packaging. I memorized the numbers. If you said “Forty-seven” I’d say “Imperial Storm Trooper!” Or you could say “Obe Wan Kanobi” and I’d say “Twenty-three!” I was about five or six at the time. I had weird little autistic tendencies.’
But it could be argued that maths and chess were compatible with BMX-ing: it, too, represented a puzzle that needed to be solved. Chiefly this concerned the start. It was the area that could be improved with thought, analysis and practice – three things that Hoy, even as a youngster, seemed to love. ‘The start is what I was known for,’ says Boyle. ‘My dad taught me at a young age not to wait for the gate to drop – then you’re using your eyes. He taught me to look ahead and use my ears – to listen to the command of the starter. And I could tell Chris started doing the same, because he was very quick out of the gate.’
‘Chris went out to the track in Livingston, about twenty miles away, twice a week, just to practise his starts,’ says David Hoy. ‘He’d go over it again and again. It’s very similar to the kilo, really. But Chris has always been into the technical side, the minutiae of it. He was always like that, looking into every little thing.’
Hoy senior agrees that BMX racing couldn’t have offered a better introduction to sport, and to cycling, from ‘learning to ride and race a bike, how to win and how to lose,’ and so there are certainly no regrets in the Hoy family about the seven years spent driving up and down the motorways of Britain, often in the company of other kids of different ages and backgrounds, or with Chris sleeping on a piece of foam in the back of the car, while plastic trophies melted on dashboards, with a bike that would be dismantled and rebuilt by dad on the kitchen table in midweek, before the routine was repeated the next weekend.
They were good days, says David – good for Chris, good for Dad, certainly good for father–son bonding. The strength of their relationship now probably owes much to the old BMX-ing days, and their ability back then to calmly, and rationally, analyse the different aspects of performance together, and to be gracious in victory and in defeat. ‘That was the deal with his BMX-ing,’ states Carol Hoy unequivocally, ‘that if he got beaten he didn’t lie on the track and throw his bike away.’
In fact, his father admits that he has only one regret. ‘It’s a tough, tough life being a cyclist, for very little reward. I wish I’d given him a set of golf clubs when he was a baby.’
Pentland 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