that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a week-long safari. His video of the race was a bit shaky, but I sat and watched it again and again, thinking: maybe this time my foot won’t slip off the pedal. It was a source of huge regret for me. I had really, really, really wanted to make the final. Not just for the kudos of the single-number bib at the following year’s championships, but because each of the finalists was presented with a small trophy. And I loved getting trophies.
After the race I was in tears. My dad tried to console me, telling me I’d ridden a good race, that I’d been unlucky and would have lots more opportunities in the future. Dad came to all my races – despite, for quite some time, being in the midst of his Grand Designs project back home – and he couldn’t have been more supportive, which was in contrast to some of the parents you’d see at these races. While I was crying because I was disappointed, others cried because their parents put pressure on them and reacted badly when they didn’t live up to the expectations they had for them. I saw kids being smacked on the head, their parents shouting, ‘What did you do that for?’ Then you’d see the bottom lip begin to tremble, and the tears start.
As we drove home from Slough, my dad and I discussed the race, and I came to appreciate that it hadn’t all been down to bad luck; that I wasn’t necessarily a victim of outrageous misfortune. The main reason my foot had come off the pedal was because I could see the finishing line, and thought I was home and dry. I allowed myself to be distracted, my technique fell apart for a split second, and the error followed; a bit like dropping a pass in rugby due to taking your eye off the ball.
I was 10, so none of this offered too much consolation at the time – and it didn’t stop me torturing myself by repeatedly watching the video of the race once I got home. However, I can see now that my dad helped me to analyse things rationally and logically, rather than seeing myself as the victim of a terrible injustice. It was about taking responsibility, I suppose, which starts with taking responsibility for yourself, and not looking for someone or something else to blame – opponents, team-mates, the pitch, track, referee, ball, weather, misplacing your lucky socks – when things went wrong.
One of the other dads who helped run the team I was in, Scotia BMX, has said that I stood out from a lot of the other kids for being quite rational rather than emotional; and for analysing races in a rational way, rather than kicking and screaming and throwing my toys out of the pram. Well, yes and no. I would say I was – and still am – very emotional. But I also think that I appreciated fairly early in my sporting career that your own performance is all that counts, and that winning isn’t the be-all and end-all, because there’s sod all you can do about your opponent. If you do the best ride of your life and come fifth … there’s no point being unhappy with that, is there?
As well as being my (more than willing) mechanic, my dad and the other dad I’ve just mentioned, George Swanson, helped organize the Scotia club’s training sessions. My dad thought a lot about training, and about ways we could replicate race efforts in practice. He and George used to take us to the closest beach to Edinburgh, Portobello. It wasn’t exactly the Côte d’Azur, but it was fringed by a long, wide footpath, which was excellent for training. They would line us up, six abreast, and have us race each other for 200 metres, before handing over to someone else, like a relay race. You’d rest a bit and go again – flat out. We’d be on our knees by the end of it, thanks mainly to there being a serious competitive dimension to this training, but it was a great way of raising our pain threshold, making these maximum efforts with nothing at stake but childhood pride.
Yet perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from BMXing came from never being the best. Even as I progressed, there was always someone better than me – a target for me to aim at. I saw a lot of kids who would just sling their leg over a bike and win. Often it was because they had simply grown faster than the rest of us, but in some cases it was because they had outstanding natural talent, which owed nothing at all to training, or hours of hard work.
It was the same in rugby. I remember that one of the rival Edinburgh schools (who on one occasion beat us 54–0) had a winger with astonishing speed, and the ability to execute a deadly sidestep. This guy was the most naturally gifted player I ever shared a rugby pitch with … and I think he packed it in at 15. I had been convinced he’d be a Scotland star of the future, but he disappeared and I never heard of him again.
I imagine that he, like other prodigies I have come across, lost interest because it all came too easily. They had so much natural talent that there was never any correlation, for them, between hard work and achievement. Often, such talent is all you need as a youngster – but as you get older, and the competition gets stiffer, talent will only take you so far. At some point, you have to start working, and as people catch up, you have to work harder. Which can be hard to accept if you’ve never made the link between hard work and success.
For this reason I think that ‘talent’ is vastly overrated in sport. I am thinking especially of power and endurance sports, but the idea that even tennis players and golfers such as Roger Federer or Tiger Woods are the best in the world simply because they are the most talented is ludicrous; they have talent, of course, but they have maximized it by hard work. It’s why, particularly when it comes to young athletes, I think the term ‘potential’ has far greater relevance and value than ‘talent’. Talent, as far as I am concerned, can in some cases be a nebulous, even damaging, notion; it can be a hindrance rather than a help.
Winning – and I did win from time to time – is a buzz, no doubt about it. But I got almost the same buzz from imagining how hard work might translate into success in the future. Even back then, I saw sport as a process, with the rewards coming at the end of it. It was my potential, rather than my talent, that excited and inspired me, driving me on.
The year after Slough, 1987, was another big one for me. I was fifth in the European championships in Genk, Belgium – the best ride of my BMX career, I’d say. But I had a bit of a disaster at the world championships in Orlando, going out at the quarter-final stage in the under-12 age group.
* * *
Genk, Orlando … Slough – international travel was one of the aspects of BMXing that I most enjoyed; these trips could be eye-opening and even educational. Many of them were undertaken by car, sometimes just my dad and me in his old Citroen BX with its hydraulic suspension, and a mattress in the back of the car for me to sleep on.
We had some unforgettable experiences away from the BMX track. I remember driving to the World Games in Karlsruhe in Germany, and stopping en route at the Berlin Wall. My dad explained what it was, and what it stood for, and I stood and stared and struggled to comprehend that there were people on the other side who were trapped there, like animals in a cage, and shot dead if they tried to escape. The Berlin Wall came down about six months later, news which I could relate to and understand far better than if it had just been pictures on TV or in newspapers.
I also raced at Aalborg, in Denmark, at Perpignan, in France, and at an amusement park in Holland with the very Dutch-sounding name of Slagharen. Slagharen, which was like a Dutch Butlins, had an amazing track, probably the best in Europe. What I remember most about Slagharen, though, is the chalets we stayed in, which had paper-thin walls. And I remember this detail so vividly because of an incident involving a slightly older guy in our club, a 19-year-old student known to all of us as ‘Voucher Man’, because he seemed to have money-off vouchers for everything. He was a very nice guy, but I suppose you could say he was the archetypal stingy Scot; he was always dictating that we had to go to a certain place because he could get 2 per cent off, or a free medium drink if you bought four main courses, or something. You get the idea.
One night in Slagharen, Voucher Man announced he was going to eat in, while gently mocking us for choosing to waste our money in a costly restaurant. He had all the ingredients to make chilli,
