PART 1
Portrait of the Athlete as a Young Man
Ile de Ré, France, August 1992
Though he wasn’t to know it at the time, a seminal moment in Chris Hoy’s career occurred while he was on a family holiday on Ile de Ré, La Rochelle, western France, in August 1992. He was sixteen. And he had hired a bike for the holiday – a mountain bike.
At the same time, several hundred miles south of Ile de Ré, in the Spanish city of Barcelona, the Olympics were taking place, and a remarkable thing was happening there. It was remarkable if you were British, and a cyclist. Because a British cyclist by the name of Chris Boardman had reached the final of the men’s pursuit, and appeared to be on the verge of winning Britain’s first cycling gold medal in eighty-four years, when the quartet of Leonard Meredith, Ernest Payne, Charles Kingsbury and Benjamin Jones were victorious in the 1,810.5 metre team pursuit at the 1908 London Olympics. Boardman’s breakthrough was like Eddie the Eagle winning the ski jump – or seemed like it to many people.
And the British media responded accordingly – which is to say that, rather than focus on the athletic achievement, or any physical talent that Boardman may have possessed, they discovered a quirky angle: the fact that Boardman was riding a space-age Lotus bike, promptly christened ‘Superbike’. Superman, meanwhile, was all but ignored.
Boardman says now that he didn’t mind – that in fact it worked in his favour. ‘It was part of the package; it was a ploy if you like,’ he says, hinting that he was as devious – or clever – then as he is now, in his current role as the man who holds the keys to the Secret Squirrel Club. ‘That bike had actually been to more than one World Cup before the Olympics,’ reveals Boardman. ‘But I hadn’t ridden it – Bryan Steel had. But because Bryan only finished eighth on it, nobody really noticed. In the end, yes, the bike got lots of publicity, probably more than me, but people still remember it and talk about it today. So I don’t regret that at all.’
In Ile de Ré, meanwhile, the sixteen-year-old Hoy, fanatical about cycling, and by now becoming interested in track cycling, genuinely was interested in the fact that a British rider – and not just a space-age bike – was in the final. ‘I remember being so excited about the Olympics,’ recalls Hoy. ‘The final was in the evening. We didn’t have a television where we were staying so I’d been listening to Boardman’s progress on the radio thanks to the BBC World Service. I remember calling my dad to come, because the final was on. And I remember listening to the final, hearing Boardman win, and being so inspired that I went straight out on the mountain bike I’d hired. I did ten miles flat out on that bike every day, and I’d already been out earlier in the day. But I went out and did it again.
‘It’s funny, I’ve watched that Olympic pursuit final since then, and it bears no relation to my memory of it. The images don’t remind me of how I felt at the time.
‘After that holiday we went straight to the British track championships in Leicester. I’d just started riding the track. But Boardman was there with his Lotus bike. I rode round behind him for a few laps and sneaked into a photo. I remember being completely in awe.’
Boardman’s Barcelona success acted as the launch pad not only for Boardman, who was propelled into a professional career on the continent, but also for his coach, Peter Keen, and, ultimately, you could argue, for the sport in the UK. What Keen did with Boardman he eventually replicated, on a far bigger scale, with the British team. In 1997 he was appointed by the British Cycling Federation to devise a ‘World Class Performance Plan’, which – in a revolutionary development – would receive millions in National Lottery funding. For the sport of cycling, things were about to change, and Hoy would be one of the main beneficiaries – indeed, he would be integral to the programme that Keen established. But no one – perhaps not even Keen – could have foreseen how dramatic the change would be.
Back in 1992, although Hoy had only just started riding on the track, he had actually been a competitive cyclist since the age of seven. Like so many children of the Eighties – he was born on 23 March 1976 – it was BMX-ing that provided the introduction.
The BMX bike was a child of the 1980s, just as Wham! or Grange Hill were. (Indeed, to emphasize how closely associated with the Eighties it was, the first official BMX race in Britain was staged in August 1980, and the international body set up in 1981.) But the sport was also treated as a child by the sporting authorities, being so far outside the mainstream that you would have thought it was a different sport: a BMX might as well have been a horse as far as cycling organizations were concerned. While thousands of kids competed up and down the country, and millions were inspired by the film BMX Bandits, not to mention the BMX chase scene in E.T., the conservative bodies that ran cycling ignored it, and them.
It was E.T. that snared Hoy. As he told his school magazine in 2004: ‘I saw the film E.T. and became hooked on the BMX craze.’ The film’s famous BMX scene, with Elliot and friends smuggling E.T., wrapped in a blanket and sitting in a handlebar-mounted basket, epitomized the appeal of the BMX. The scene, in which the kids evade their adult pursuers, summed up what the BMX represented: namely, freedom and escape – escape from adults, that is.
The adults are made to look silly, relegated as they are to the role of car-imprisoned spectators while the kids flee over what looks suspiciously like a purpose-built BMX race track. And then, of course, comes the serious ‘air’ – they take off. It provides the most famous image from the film: BMXs being ridden by a gang of kids (accompanied by an extraterrestrial creature) into the night, silhouetted against the moon. ‘This video makes me wanna’ ride my BMX again,’ is one comment below ‘E.T. the chase scene’, which inevitably features on YouTube. ‘Anybody who says they don’t hum the theme [to E.T.] while riding their bike is lying,’ says another. Absolutely.
But for Hoy it wasn’t all fun and games. The BMX racing scene was deadly serious and furiously competitive. So was he. ‘My first bike was one I got at a jumble sale,’ says Hoy, though his mother, Carol, corrects this. ‘I got him his first BMX at a jumble sale,’ she says. ‘I’d gone on the bus, so I couldn’t take it home – I had to get a friend to put it in her boot. It cost £5, I think.’ Hoy remembers that the first bike was ‘stripped down by my dad, who sprayed it black and put BMX stickers and handlebars on it. I snapped the frame after a month or so, doing jumps off planks of wood on bricks. I then got another bike, which was a neighbour’s daughter’s old bike. My dad gave it the same spray treatment and put on the same bars. But I bent the frame of that one.’
When he started racing – ‘I was second in my first race,’ says Hoy – a better bike became a priority. He spotted the machine he wanted in the window of an Edinburgh bike shop: a black and gold Raleigh Super Burner. It cost £99. ‘Too much,’ said his mother. She explains: ‘I said, “When you’ve saved up half the money, your dad and I will pay the rest.” He did it in no time. He was very clever. If we had people round for dinner, then Christopher would come in to show face, and then he’d talk about his BMX-ing, and how well he was doing, and he’d say, “There’s a bike I want but I have to pay half myself …” and the uncles and aunts would feel sympathetic and slip him a fiver.’
‘I waited until they’d had a drink or two,’ reveals Hoy, with evident pride.
Hoy’s
