up on their £500 bikes,’ says David. ‘Chris was still on his Raleigh Super Burner. He got hammered. He was really pissed off. I thought, well, if he’s going to be serious about this then he should be on a better bike. The Burner was a toy, really.’
With a serious bike – a ‘SilverFox’ – he decided to join a ‘serious’ team. David Hoy explains: ‘There was a shop in Edinburgh, Scotia BMX, which had a wee team which Chris joined, and they contested races all over the country – in England too. With Chris at first it was the case that the further he travelled the more he got beaten and the harder he worked.’
David says he wasn’t a pushy parent, just a supportive one. It would be difficult to imagine him as a pushy parent – his enthusiasm is tempered by a zen-like calm. ‘I learnt a lot about child psychology from travelling with him and seeing other kids and their parents,’ he muses. ‘The Italians were especially interesting. If their kids came over the line and they hadn’t won, they got beaten – literally. I didn’t think that was the way to get the best out of them.
‘I didn’t put any pressure on. BMX was just a wonderful sport for kids. He did the cycling bit and my hobby was to look after the bike. On a Wednesday night I’d have the bike on the kitchen table, stripped, bearings out, the works, and then rebuild it for the weekend. I always loved taking bikes to bits.’
Carol Hoy, a bubbly woman with a sparky sense of humour, was sanguine about the weekly transformation of the kitchen table into a workbench. ‘I just thought that it was a lovely thing for a father and son to do. They spent whole weekends together, travelling mainly, and I used to only get involved in the local races, when I did the catering. I made burgers – BMX burgers, I called them. I told them they’d make them go faster. They were very popular.’
George Swanson, whose son raced with Hoy, was the man in charge of the Scotia BMX team. ‘We must have been one of the most hated teams in the history of cycling,’ he laughs. ‘I mean, Christ, talk about parochial! We were accused of signing up all the good kids – cherry picking. We sponsored riders from all over Scotland – Craig MacLean was one of our riders – and we took them down south to race. But when they raced in Scotland they rode for their local track. The idea was not to concentrate on the Scottish scene but to venture further afield, set 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
