in many cases providing their first experience of a proper stage race, and Hoy did reasonably well. As he says, he was never going to be a climbing specialist – though he wasn’t big at the time; ‘he was a wee sparrow,’ says his father, David – but on the fast, flat stages he could remain safely in the ‘peloton’ and even get near the front in the hectic sprint finishes. He managed two top-ten finishes on road stages.
Earlier road race outings hadn’t been so successful. Having travelled to the north of Scotland for a weekend of racing in and around the town of Forres, Hoy was unfortunate to puncture as the first road race was starting, within metres of having left the neutralized zone. He stopped to get a wheel change from the following ‘service’ car, then began to chase and appeared to be successful. But when he got within thirty metres of the rear of the peloton – almost touching distance – they began to speed up; he dropped back and never got close to them again.
He seemed to take to the track, though – or take to it as well as anyone when confronted by the steep wall-of-death-style banking, which, as Hoy says, was a daunting prospect. But he enjoyed it from the start. ‘You enjoy what you’re good at,’ he says. ‘I found that I did okay on the track and enjoyed it from day one. I started doing the weekly track league, on a Tuesday evening, and really enjoyed the 500 m handicaps. Being so young I’d start with about a lap-advantage over the big boys. I’d only be racing about half the distance they were, so it’d be flat out and I enjoyed that kind of effort – it was a bit like the start of a BMX race.
‘Every week I’d hear the older riders coming up behind me – whooom! – and then sweeping past, but I found I could hold them off for a bit longer each time. I could see I was improving, which felt good. I remember the first time I won one of those races – it was a great feeling. Though it did mean that my handicap got smaller. The better I did the harder it was to win.’
But to say that Hoy took to track cycling like a duck to water would be stretching it. He did suffer teething troubles. Even at the 1994 national track championships – immediately prior to the Junior Tour of Ireland – there was an incident that Ray Harris puts down to ‘inexperience’. Harris was there helping – though Hoy had joined a new club, the City of Edinburgh Racing Club, at the start of that year – and he was horrified when his protégé took to the start line of the junior kilometre with a spanking new pedal-and-shoe ensemble. He had got himself a clipless system, whereby shoes snapped into pedals, and were held there, rather than being attached by old-fashioned toe-clips and straps, which were still overwhelmingly the choice of track riders for whom reliability was the most important consideration.
‘You don’t try new tricks on the day of the competition!’ exclaims Harris. ‘Of course, he starts his effort, and in the strain of starting, he pulls his foot out of the pedal. My god! In the kilo there’s a rule that if you have a mechanical problem in the first lap, or fall off, then you can start again. But a pulled foot doesn’t count as a mechanical, so the commissaire [referee] is looking at me, saying “Push him over!” It’s an old trick, that, the trick of falling off your bike if your foot comes out. But Chris didn’t realize. It’s a learning experience, but it can be costly if it’s the one chance you’ve got as a junior. However, I think the least perturbed by all that was Chris himself. He seemed very calm. I was having kittens.’
To make matters worse, Hoy had ‘previous’ in this regard. At the 1992 British championship – his first, where he had the experience of riding around, awestruck, behind the new Olympic champion Chris Boardman – he had also pulled his foot out of his toe-clips and straps during his starting effort, riding the entire race with his foot resting limply on top of the pedal. Two years later, when he caused Harris to have kittens by pulling his foot out of his new pedals, he at least managed to clip his foot back in, and placed fifth in the junior kilo. But it could and should have been so much better, says Hoy, who feels that the 1994 championships – about which more later – were significant for being ‘the first time I realized I had potential. I probably would have won the kilo if I hadn’t pulled my foot out.’
It had been at the end of the 1993 season that Hoy felt it time to leave the club environment of the Dunedin, and the mentorship of Harris, to join a more specialist and more serious club, whose overriding focus was track racing. But he didn’t forget Harris, who explains: ‘I’ve had lots of lads come through the club and most of them move on to the next stage of their life and you never hear from them again, or see them; they become adults, get married, have kids, move on, though they probably keep a memory of it. But if I send Chris an email he always replies. It’s one of the endearing things about the lad. He keeps in touch, in quite regular contact really.’
Stepping into Harris’s shoes as mentor was Brian Annable: the inimitable, irascible Brian Annable – the Brian Clough of Scottish cycling. Annable ran his team – the City of Edinburgh Racing Club – with all the obsessive zeal, and occasional bursts of bad temper, of Clough. And the truly remarkable thing is that, twenty-five years on, he is still doing it. Since November 1982, when the City of Edinburgh Racing Club was established, Annable has been at the helm, skippering the good ship through some choppy waters, but invariably to success – which, in his book, means medals in British championships. Sitting in his large house in Edinburgh, behind a pile of immaculately blue-bound City of Edinburgh Racing Club annual reports – all twenty-five of them, in order – the well-spoken Annable spells it out, like an army major listing battles won: ‘By 2006, seventy-six championships and two-hundred and forty-eight medals, won by club members in British championships.’
Annable has been the driving force behind those seventy-six national titles and two-hundred and forty-eight medals. He was a competitive cyclist himself, and in the British team pursuit squad for the 1952 Olympics, but his training, as an architect, got in the way of his cycling ambitions. A peripatetic career took him to Coventry, then to Manchester, ‘to clear the slums of England in five years’, and finally to Edinburgh, in 1970, just in time for the Commonwealth Games. ‘I had been out of bike racing activity for several years,’ he says, ‘but I was appointed as deputy chief executive of the national building agency, based in Edinburgh.
‘I went to Jenners [Edinburgh’s big department store] on the first morning of the Commonwealth Games; down in the basement, where I was told I’d get tickets. But they had no plan of the track or anything,’ he says with disgust and disdain. ‘They didn’t know where the finish line was!’ Clearly this offended Annable on two fundamental levels – it showed an ignorance of sport, and an ignorance of the architecture of the arena. ‘If you’re in the left-hand end, where the track goes up, you can’t see the finish. And I ended up with tickets there, because they didn’t have a bloody clue.
‘The problem,’ he continues, now on a roll, ‘is that the track was not done properly. For some reason the city engineer’s department was involved in designing a cycle track, though they had no knowledge.’ He discusses some complicated-sounding facts pertaining to cycle tracks, mentioning German designers and UCI manuals, longitudinal expansion, roof trusses, metal angle irons, and slotted holes.
So, is he saying that there were no velodrome specialists involved in the building of the Edinburgh velodrome? ‘No! That’s what amazes me,’ he replies. ‘It was a bunch of amateurs. But somebody must have known something; if someone contacted Schuermann [the renowned German architects, reputed to have built 125 velodromes worldwide] then I wouldn’t be surprised.’
After the 1970 games Annable found himself down at the velodrome on an increasingly regular basis. A Scot, Brian Temple, from Edinburgh, had, surprisingly, won a medal at the games – silver in the ten-mile scratch race – and it provided evidence that Scottish cyclists could compete on such a stage, after all. There was also much in the ‘build it and they will come’ mantra of Field of Dreams, the baseball movie. The state-of-the-art Meadowbank velodrome proved quite a draw for cyclists from throughout Scotland during the 1970s.
But there was little organization to it.
