‘He said very early on, he wanted to be Olympic champion. Now, many kids say that, but I wasn’t going to mock him for it. Why should we try and limit what somebody wants to dream about? That dream might be achievable; let’s look at it, break it down.
‘Targets and goal-setting should never be the criteria for a coaching plan,’ he continues. ‘You don’t focus as a fifteen year old on being Olympic champion. The first thing to look at is, what can we do in the immediate future, to spur you on to stage two? If you can’t do stage one – the short-term goals – then you can forget the rest.
‘So with Chris we looked at the stages. Something that was – and still is – really important to Chris was the Commonwealth Games, because he could represent Scotland, and he’s very patriotic, without being anti-the other thing. So we looked at it: when can you go to the Commonwealth Games? Nineteen ninety-eight was realistic. If he did that, the Olympics in 2000 was realistic. If he did that, then becoming Olympic champion in 2004 was realistic. And it was spot-on. It’s almost a fairytale.’
David Hoy – who still, somewhere in the family home, has the goal-setting sheets, with their short-term goals: ‘Scottish champion’; medium-term ambitions: ‘go to the Commonwealth Games’; and long-term dreams: ‘become Olympic champion’ – believes that Harris’s role in this fairytale can hardly be exaggerated. ‘Dare to dream’ might have been his motto, founded on a solid bedrock of self-belief. ‘It was Ray who took away the inhibition,’ says David. ‘When they sat down and talked about goal-setting he let him know, “You can say whatever you like. I won’t laugh at you.”’
Of course, Hoy wasn’t going to be an Olympic champion on a mountain bike. For all his enthusiasm, even Harris would surely have discouraged that notion. But by the time he came to writing down his goals, he had swapped the muddy courses of the mountain bike races for the smooth boards of the velodrome.
Meadowbank velodrome, Edinburgh, 1994
Of all the ill-considered sporting arenas in the world – from the ski centre in Dubai, to the two football stadiums that back onto each other in Dundee – Edinburgh’s velodrome has to be up there with the very daftest.
Not that there is anything wrong with the track at Meadowbank, which is a good, internationally-renowned wooden oval that, in its day, has hosted top class competition, producing world championship medal-winning cyclists and one Olympic champion – Chris Hoy. But there is one glaring, not to mention fundamental, glitch: one oversight; one fatal flaw; one unforgivable omission. It has no roof.
We are talking here about a velodrome in Scotland, one of the wettest and most inclement countries in the world, which is rendered unusable every time it rains. A few drops are enough, in fact, to have them postponing the action and running for the covers, à la Wimbledon.
Even more remarkably, it is a state of affairs that has existed since 1970, when the velodrome was built for the first Edinburgh Commonwealth Games. Since then there have been numerous proposals to build a roof, but the roof – unlike the rain – has consistently failed to materialize, as a consequence of which the poor wooden boards have suffered, oh how they have suffered, through their constant exposure to the elements.
Still, that the track was built at all was something of a triumph for the sport in Scotland. The country had several concrete cycling tracks – longer than a wooden velodrome, with comparatively shallow banking – and there was a proposal, popular with the spendthrift council, to hold the track cycling events of the 1970 ‘Edinburgh’ Commonwealth Games at Grangemouth, twenty-five miles away. One man who led the fight for an Edinburgh velodrome was Arthur Campbell, then president of the Scottish Cyclists’ Union and a consummate sports politician, who went on to hold high-ranking positions in the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) and the Commonwealth Games organization. In the end Campbell won, and hundreds, if not thousands, of Scottish cyclists have since had cause to be grateful. The facility built at Meadowbank, adjacent to the main athletics stadium, was state-of-the-art. It remains state-of-the-art – by 1970 standards, that is.
Be that as it may. There is a nice link between Campbell, the man who drove through the plans for a velodrome in Edinburgh, and Hoy, who would go on to become its most successful ‘product’. Twenty-four years after its construction, and with Hoy having just made a tentative start to his track cycling career, the young cyclist attended a training camp in Majorca. It was his first overseas training camp, and it fell on his eighteenth birthday. One of the senior cyclists on the camp was Campbell, then in his mid-seventies, but still showing the youngsters a thing or two on the daily training rides. Hearing of Hoy’s birthday, Campbell pedalled off to a nearby village, several kilometres away. When he returned, he had something balanced precariously on his handlebars. ‘Many happy returns,’ he said to Hoy. It was a birthday cake.
Hoy had started riding on the track, thanks, again, to Ray Harris. The East of Scotland Cycling Association had a fleet of around a dozen track bikes stored at the velodrome, which could be used by members of the Dunedin Cycling Club at their weekly ‘track night’. It was at one of these track nights, in April 1991, that Hoy had his first outing on the boards of the Meadowbank Velodrome. ‘I remember being scared and intimidated by it,’ he says of the track. ‘Walking through the tunnel, under the track, and then out into the track centre and realizing how steep the banking was … it was daunting. And there was an etiquette about riding there that I didn’t understand.’ Here Hoy slightly contradicts Harris’s claim that Dunedin was a ‘youthful’ club. It was true that its membership was youthful as far as cycling clubs went, but it was, says Hoy, all relative. There weren’t many as young as he was, which was fifteen. ‘It wasn’t that they weren’t friendly to young riders,’ he says, ‘it was just that there weren’t many young riders.
‘I remember being given a track bike and starting riding on the track, then, eventually, being led round it by one of the older riders. We followed behind him in a string. It was really scary at first. It just didn’t look physically possible to stay upright on the steep banking; I thought you’d slip down unless you were going really fast. But when you rode around on the black line [near the bottom] and realized that it was just as steep there as it was at the top, then you realized that you could ride at the top as well. So you could start to move up the banking, and that was exciting.’
It was fortunate for Hoy that there was a velodrome – still the only one in Scotland and one of only a handful in Britain – in his home city. ‘Our club was officially based at the velodrome,’ explains Harris, ‘as much because we were trying to keep it open as anything else. The history of that track has been one of bumps along a very rocky road. After the 1970 Commonwealth Games it had quite a following, because it was such a good track. The only drawback was the everlasting weather problem. Events could be cancelled with a drop of rain. They still can, and regularly are. But it got to the stage where it was almost matchwood; there were splinters appearing of astronomic proportions; everything leaked.’
At that stage, on the brink of becoming matchwood, the velodrome was rebuilt for the 1986 Commonwealth Games, at a cost of £450,000, but still with no roof. And it rained a lot during those games, playing havoc with the cycling programme. Thus was the velodrome christened – by Prince Edward, apparently – the ‘Wellydrome’.
Although the Dunedin Cycling Club was based at the Wellydrome, track racing was merely one activity. They were very active in the other disciplines – road and now mountain biking, too – and they were all encouraged. Hoy, as a consequence, did a considerable amount of time trialling and road racing, even competing in the 1994 Junior
