Mrs Wylie, fifteen minutes behind the main group, as punishment for overtaking Mr Strachan on the hill the previous day.’
Road cycling became something he also pursued, especially as he became involved with the Dunedin Cycling Club, which was run by someone with the enthusiasm of a teenager: Ray Harris. A well-known figure in the Scottish cycling scene, Harris had greying hair, combed in a side-parting, and a strong English accent, betraying his Midlands roots. He wore small half-moon-shaped spectacles, perched halfway down his nose, giving him a professorial look. He always seemed to be peering down into them, in a ‘let-me-see-what-we’ve-got-here-then’ kind of way. But then, he always seemed to be timing, or testing, or officiating – doing something that required his concentration.
Harris talked a lot, and fast. Still does. Visiting him at his home in Coldstream, in the Scottish Borders, is like stepping into a time warp – he doesn’t seem to have aged at all since the late 1980s. Which only seems to confirm that he is indeed the Emmett Brown of Scottish cycling.
‘Chris’s dad came to see me,’ recalls Harris, ‘he was a schoolboy and he was keen to realize his potential beyond BMX, because BMX was limited at that stage. Chris had this conflict at the time, between rowing and rugby, and my first reaction was: if you really want to succeed in rowing or cycling, rugby has to go. Rugby was too risky, because of the free leg movement,’ and here Harris, with the agility of a gymnast, demonstrates what he means by free leg movement. ‘With no resistance, you can do tremendous damage. I’d witnessed at first hand, working as a masseur in other sports, the damage to knee joints in relatively young rugby and football players. Frightening.
‘In the Dunedin we had a membership of fifty or so, a great proportion of them youngsters,’ he continues, not pausing for breath. ‘We hadn’t entertained mountain biking’ – in fact, just like BMX, though not quite to the same extent, mountain biking tended in those days to be dismissed by the ‘connoisseurs’ of traditional cycling, which meant road and, to a lesser extent, track cyclists.
But Harris’s Dunedin Cycling Club, with its youthful membership, and, in Harris, its youthful leader, embraced the new discipline. ‘We organized some short course mountain biking events,’ says Harris, ‘mainly because it gave us an opportunity to get youngsters involved. Initially we ran them in an old mining area in East Lothian; it was just mud, really. And that’s where Chris got involved. He was dead keen. Soon after, we started our Pentlands races.’
Underpinning all of the Dunedin club’s activity – on the road, in the hills and on the track – was Harris’s fanatical interest in a subject that, at that time, few had heard of, and fewer still had any knowledge about: sports science. The term only entered the popular sporting lexicon some time in the 1980s. It referred, broadly speaking, to sophisticated methods of training and monitoring performance, using various ‘data’. Few knew anything about this mysterious ‘data’, never mind how to measure it or what to do with it; and even when heart rate monitors became ubiquitous among amateur cyclists, in the early 1990s, few really knew how to utilize them. They tended to be a source of interest and entertainment rather than a training tool – the ‘game’ being to go out and see how high you could get your heart rate.
Harris’s ‘scientific’ approach pre-dated pulse monitors; it also related to his methodology. As Hoy says: ‘The thing I remember most about Ray was his enthusiasm. As a kid you really respond to that; it was inspiring. But, unusually I think, he backed that up with a scientific approach to training and racing. Even the circuit training classes we did had a method to them; there was method behind everything he did. Not that it was always obvious …’
Many, perhaps most – especially among the young cyclists Harris coached – were not particularly interested in the method. Cycling – sport – is all about results; what matters is where you cross the line. But Hoy was different. Even as a fifteen year old, he was fascinated by the method, the theory behind the practice, even if he didn’t always understand the finer points. ‘Chris has got an interest in anything that makes sense,’ says Harris slowly. ‘If he can see there’s a logic and an end result to it, then he becomes very interested indeed.
‘A lot of competitive athletes are prima donnas when it comes to performance testing,’ he continues. ‘They don’t treat a test any differently to a race. If they fail, they don’t blame themselves or say they’ve had a bad day. They blame you, the equipment, the world at large … but Chris, unusually, never did that, even as a youngster.’
The performance testing he is referring to came thanks to his infamous ‘Kingcycle’ machine – Harris’s equivalent of the Back to the Future time machine. When he began using this, in the late 1980s, it quickly gained a reputation as the ultimate performance-testing device; it was the holy grail of testing, in the very vanguard of sports science.
The Kingcycle: even the name could provoke fear, awe and excitement, in equal measure. In fact, to some – as Harris suggests – it seemed to assume greater importance than race results. The ‘magic number’ given out by the Kingcycle – and, in those days, only the Kingcycle – could (or so it was believed) determine ability, potential, future prospects … everything. It could provide the key that would unlock the door to the cycling equivalent of Narnia or, alternatively, confirm that you might as well just hang up your wheels and take up art, music or reading instead.
And presiding over the Kingcycle was Harris. He was the man with the secret; he held your future in his hands, on a piece of A4 paper, containing an array of graphs and numbers, spewed out of a word processor at the end of a test that was close to torture. What the Kingcycle did, in short, was to reveal a measurement that was far more significant than speed or heart rate, both of which could be easily measured by a computer or heart rate monitor, but neither of which, crucially, necessarily revealed anything of actual significance. A fast speed could be achieved with the aid of a tailwind, or gravity; and a ‘good’ heart rate – well, what constituted a good heart rate?
But power: power was the key. The power that you could generate through the pedals could not be dismissed; whether you were going uphill or down, into the teeth of a gale or with the wind at your back – none of these variables affected the power you were able to transmit through the pedals. In short, what separates Lance Armstrong and Chris Hoy from mere mortals is not the speed they ride at but the power they generate.
Back then, though, ‘power output’ was a mystical, mythical concept. Measuring it was problematic, if not impossible. You couldn’t just go into a gym, lift some weights, and measure your power – it was cycling-specific, and the only way to gauge it was through the pedals. The question remained: how?
It was Harris who came up with a solution. He may even have been the first in the UK to do so. Without being remotely boastful, he seems to suggest as much: ‘I cobbled together something, a forerunner to the Kingcycle, and reprogrammed a little Spectrum 128 computer to work with it. But because it wasn’t very well engineered it was very hit-and-miss. We were getting better at it, but then the actual Kingcycle came along.
‘I spent a lot of time going to Manchester and Derby to attend coaching seminars organized by the British Cycling Federation, and it was at one of those that I learned about it. It had been developed by an electronic signalling company. It was a breakthrough: here was a machine that could give you the magic number – it could tell you the number of watts a cyclist was able to generate and sustain before collapsing, so to speak.
‘I think I had the highest number of tests for any one machine,’ he adds with obvious pride. ‘I bought it myself. It was terribly expensive; the set-up was well over £2,000. And it was very labour intensive: finding a lab to use it in, setting it up, packing it away. You had to know what you were doing and try not to kill anybody.’
He isn’t joking. And that phrase – ‘before collapsing, so
