didn’t sleep for long. Within an hour the chalet, with its paper-thin walls, reverberated to the unmistakable sound of Voucher Man’s bowels emptying, in a hurried fashion; it sounded like a flock of pigeons were taking off in there. He spent the night shitting into a bucket, while the rest of us pissed ourselves laughing.
The other thing about Slagharen, which hosted the European championships, was that it had a freestyle area, with two half-pipes. I was desperate to play on these ramps, but Dad advised me not to. ‘You’re here to race,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to tire yourself out on those things; they’re dangerous, and you’re not a freestyler …’
I wasn’t an especially rebellious child, but on this occasion I ignored him. Well, all my mates were having a go. And it did look like good fun. As long as you knew what you were doing, and had the skills to pull off such stunts …
Which, as it happens, I didn’t. But up the ramp I went, before swooping down, and back up, preparing for an aerial manoeuvre; into the air I soared, turning my bike and preparing to re-enter the ramp … or not. I overshot it, missing the ramp altogether and finding myself briefly suspended in midair – a bit like the moment when Wile E. Coyote, in the Roadrunner cartoons, realizes he has run straight off the edge of the cliff, and, with his legs still going through the motions, waits for gravity to kick in.
I didn’t have the proper kit on for freestyling – I didn’t even have a helmet on. So when I hit the ground, with a thud, I … well, actually I felt nothing, because I was knocked out. As I came to, I realized that my face had taken the brunt of it, the left side covered in a livid red graze. But my main concern was what my dad was going to say.
To make matters worse, I had hardly any time to prepare for gate practice, as you were allocated only limited time to practise on the track ahead of the next day’s races. I met up again with my dad, whose reaction – apparently – was mild; taking one look at my damaged face, he probably figured that I’d learnt my lesson without him having to reinforce it. Meanwhile, I apologized profusely – much later he said that I had spent about half an hour ‘havering’, which is a Scottish expression for talking nonsense – and got on with my gate practice. I must still have been quite badly concussed at this point, though, because when I returned to the track the next day I couldn’t remember anything about the course. It was the strangest thing: I had no recollection at all of the previous day. Sitting in the gate, waiting for the start, I might as well have been looking at the surface of the moon for all that I could remember about the previous day’s practice session.
I have a picture of that race – there’s a great view of the scab forming on my face – which was won, as many were, by a Dutch rider known as ‘The Beast’. We were 11 at the time, but he was about six foot two and had a full moustache, having hit puberty when he was nine. I exaggerate, but only a little.
At 14, having committed seven years to BMX, I retired. The realization that I wasn’t really enjoying it any more crept up on me gradually, and had much to do, I suspect, with the fact that many of my peers were also drifting away. It was 1990, and the bottom was about to fall out of the sport, in Europe at least. There remained a healthy scene in the United States, and that continues to this day, but by my mid-teens BMXing seemed passé, a – ahem – young man’s game, and about as cool as Bucks Fizz.
It was time to get out. But I look back now with great fondness on my BMX days, even if the sport that provided my introduction to cycling would inadvertently, 15 years later, cause me great heartache.
These days, thanks to its inclusion in the Olympic programme, which came into effect in Beijing, BMX is enjoying something of a renaissance. The heartache I mentioned above owes to the fact that the inclusion of BMX in 2005 meant the axing of another discipline – my event, the kilometre. But there are no hard feelings: I maintain that it is the perfect sport for kids, and the perfect introduction to cycling, especially at a time when the roads are becoming more dangerous. It is also a great sport for adults – and the top BMXers are incredible athletes.
Former BMX riders now excel in all cycling disciplines, from my GB team-mate Jamie Staff on the track to Robbie McEwen, the Tour de France cyclist, on the road. What all of us former BMXers have in common is confidence in our ability to handle a bike – watch Robbie McEwen pull a wheelie, as he usually does at the top of the final mountain pass of the Tour, and you will see what I mean.
I’m pretty sure the boom days of the 1980s will never be repeated. But I am glad the BMX hasn’t gone the way of those other great inventions of the eighties, the ZX Spectrum and Sinclair C5, and disappeared without trace.
I started getting a bit of stick from my mates at school. Nothing malicious: just low-level, good-natured mickey-taking. I remember an art class in first year of secondary school where I was relentlessly slagged off for being a ‘BMX bandit’.
I like to think that things have changed a little now, with cycling more mainstream and not perceived as being too weird a pastime, but traditionally the sport has attracted a lot of individualistic characters. As a kid, you would generally follow your mates into team sports – football and rugby. I did these too, but the fact that I was a cyclist singled me out a little from many of my schoolmates. I remember Graeme Obree, the former world record holder and champion, talking in his autobiography about cycling as a form of escapism, because he was bullied at school. I think that for him cycling was a way of justifying why he wasn’t out kicking a ball with his mates, or hanging around a shopping mall. Saying ‘I’m going out on my bike’ is a bit like getting the first punch in; it’s a good excuse for being by yourself.
Fortunately I didn’t have the kind of negative experiences that Graeme had; I certainly wasn’t forced into cycling because of bullying, and I wasn’t bullied on account of the fact that I was a cyclist. All the same, by the time I got to secondary school, BMX had had its day. It was seen by most people as a kids’ sport – and there was nothing worse than that as you embarked on life in secondary school. One former classmate – Murdo, who is still a friend – has since claimed that any success I’ve had on a bike is all down to him, since he ‘convinced’ me to give up BMXing. He wasn’t the only one who applied peer pressure. The truth was, however, that it wasn’t anyone else’s opinions that mattered; I had just had enough of BMX racing and wasn’t enjoying it like I used to.
I still loved bikes, so I transferred my allegiance to the knobbly-tyred older brother of the BMX: the mountain bike. Mountain bikes were new, and although perhaps not ‘cool’ in the eyes of all my classmates, they were a bit cool, or at least grown up. And in Edinburgh we had a huge natural asset in the Pentland Hills, more or less on my doorstep. My first mountain bike outings – they felt more like expeditions at that age – were into those hills, and they have left me with some fabulous memories. In the early 1990s, when I first tried it, I would often head up there with my dad, who was quite fit, though I always managed to drop him on the climbs. It was part sport, part exploration, but what I loved most were the descents, which felt like the reward for all the hard work of climbing – it was as though you had to earn your fun. When I got home, there was another reward, which was eating. I developed a ravenous hunger when mountain biking, and devoured mountains of food after rides.
These days, when I’m travelling between Manchester and Edinburgh, as I frequently do, I pass the Pentlands as I drive into, or out of, my home city. It can prompt me to gaze a little dreamily at them (while keeping my eyes on the road, I should add, to reassure my mum, as well as any traffic police operating in the area). From the road they are just benign-looking lumps; the kind of rolling, rounded hills that
