such relief at seeing that first one sail through the posts. He was a big guy.
And I, by contrast, was small for my age. I had been big for my year in primary school, but found myself being overtaken by a lot of the others in high school. By third year, my last year in the rugby team, I was the second smallest in the team, which put me at a serious disadvantage. By the time I was 15 everyone had been growing and I hadn’t really started – I was a little shrimp, a Smurf. Only the scrum-half was smaller than me, and I used to take a real pasting in games.
I loved going to rugby matches as well, and attended virtually all of Scotland’s Five Nations home games, sitting in the schoolboy enclosure and then running on to the pitch at the end of the match. After one game against Ireland, which Scotland won, I was the first on to the pitch – a sign of my promise as a sprinter, possibly – and ran up to Damian Cronin, the big second row, as he was filmed leaving the pitch. I ended up on TV, very visible in my yellow anorak, with my mop of almost matching hair, patting Cronin on the back.
One of the greatest games in Scotland’s history – and arguably my greatest sporting memory – was the 1990 Five Nations decider against England at Murrayfield, the national stadium that was a stone’s throw from my house. It was the Grand Slam decider, with both teams in contention, but England almost certain to win. Or so they thought.
Scotland, led out by David Sole, set the tone by entering the field at a slow, almost funereal, pace. England, led by Will Carling, had looked super confident, but – as crazy as it sounds – the way that Scotland walked on to the pitch seemed to say: we’re in charge. It gave them the impetus, and they sustained that in the game itself; you could see and almost feel how pumped up the Scotland team was as they got stuck into their opponents, and they won 13–7 to give Scotland the Calcutta Cup, Triple Crown and Grand Slam. All in all, it was a pretty good afternoon – one of the proudest in Scotland’s sporting history.
Watching Sole’s slow march gives me goosebumps, even now, but the irony was that, having attended so many games at Murrayfield, I missed that one. I had a ticket, but I had faced a huge dilemma: go to the game or compete in a BMX race in Paris. I opted to travel to France, but I watched the video of the game when I got home the next day, and watched it again and again, until the tape wore out.
Eighteen years later, I had the honour, and the unforgettable experience, of making my own appearance at Murrayfield for a Scotland international. It was the 2008 Autumn Test against the mighty All Blacks, who had just finished their haka when I was expected to perform the daunting task of delivering the match ball.
My only hope was that it would prove more successful than my previous ‘guest’ appearance on a rugby pitch, during the half-time break of an Edinburgh Gunners match in 2002, following my gold medal at the Manchester Commonwealth Games.
On that occasion, having been introduced and interviewed in the middle of the pitch, I was asked if I was a big rugby fan.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I played at school, went to Murrayfield a lot – I love it.’
‘OK, Chris, a final question,’ said the MC. ‘Who are you supporting today?’
‘Well, no surprises there, I’m an Edinburgh boy, so I’m backing THE REIVERS!’
I was hoping to get a big cheer from the 5,000 in the crowd. Instead, and much to my surprise, there was a stunned silence, then a chorus of boos. Unbeknown to me, six months earlier, the city’s professional rugby club had changed its name from the Edinburgh Reivers to the Gunners. Which might sound innocuous enough, but in the highly politicized and heavily factionalized world of Scottish rugby, it was significant – they had only been the Reivers after an amalgamation, of sorts, with the Borders regional team. And now the name had been reassigned to the Borders; so ‘the Reivers’ referred not to Edinburgh, but to their bitterest rivals. What I had done was a bit like shouting ‘Come on, City!’ at Old Trafford – though fortunately rugby supporters are a little less partisan, and a lot more forgiving.
There was no such faux pas at Murrayfield in November 2008. Wearing a Scotland shirt with ‘3’ and ‘Hoy’ on the back, and with my three Olympic gold medals hanging from my neck, I was introduced to the crowd and walked into a wall of noise, plonking the ball down in the middle, then turning to the Scotland team and making what I hoped would be a series of rousing, fist-clenched gestures. I may even have shouted ‘Go onnnnnnnn!’ or something similarly encouraging. There was nothing planned or rehearsed about it; it was completely spontaneous, inspired by the noise of the crowd and the exhilarating sense of anticipation, expectation and sheer drama inside Murrayfield Stadium. It didn’t work, unfortunately – Scotland lost, after a decent performance – but the response from the crowd had a similar effect on me to that of David Sole’s famous slow march: the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was stunned. In all my previous visits to Murrayfield, most of them in the schoolboy enclosure, I could never have imagined that one day a cyclist would receive such a reception.
My souvenir Scotland shirt now hangs in a frame in my house, a memento of an unforgettable experience, and a reminder of my boyhood dream of one day playing for my country.
The time has probably come to admit that it is the closest I’ll ever get to fulfilling it.
Smells of Sandwiches and Mars Bars
Yes, my childhood revolved around sport – so far, adulthood hasn’t been much different – and bikes were the dominant theme. My BMX career, which started when I was seven, ran along parallel lines to my football, then rugby, and almost outlasted both. I retired from BMX when I was 14, and stopped playing rugby the following year.
But my burgeoning interest in BMX coincided with a very difficult time for my family, following the deaths, within two weeks of each other, of my grandma and grandpa – my dad’s parents. To appreciate how profound an effect this had on me, not to mention my dad, mum and sister Carrie, I should describe our living arrangements, which were fairly unusual. We lived in the top-floor flat of a townhouse in Murrayfield, a nice suburb of Edinburgh, and, in the style of a big Italian family (not that we have a drop of Italian blood, as far as I know), we shared the house with my grandparents, who lived downstairs in a separate flat with a shared entrance. In other words, to enter our house I had to go through my grandparents’ front door, which meant I saw them all the time.
It was the type of house, in the kind of setting, that presented myriad opportunities for boys’ own-style adventures. There was a decent-sized garden at the back, with a disused railway line over the wall at the end; a place that was, inevitably, out of bounds. I was always warned not to play on the railway line, that it was ‘dangerous,’ which naturally heightened my curiosity. Back in those days it was little more than a stretch of wasteland, overgrown and quite wild, though the platform from the old railway station, which was right behind our house, remained. These days, it has been tarmaced and is a popular cycle track, though I’m sure 8-year-old kids are still told to stay away. When I wanted to get round this rule, I didn’t clamber over the wall at the end of the garden – that was too obvious – instead, I sneaked around the side of the house, entering by the old platform, with my sister sometimes a partner-in-crime and willing accomplice in the illicit adventure.
Poor Carrie. She is two years older than me, and could be a little bit bossy, as elder sisters are prone to be towards baby brothers; and I could be a little brat, as baby brothers are prone to be towards elder sisters. We always got on well and still do, but I could be a bit sneaky as a young kid and I would frequently land her in trouble. If she was being bossy, and I was winding her up by resisting her commands,
