made, and repeated ad nauseam.
In 1982 another talent emerged: Brian Annable’s son, Tom. With Eddie Alexander – a Highlander based in Edinburgh – he enjoyed some success at that year’s British championships, winning bronze in the junior points race. Two days later Alexander won bronze in the junior sprint. Incredibly, says Annable, these were the first two medals ever won by Scots in the British championships. ‘And they were getting no support in Scotland!’ he adds in characteristically bombastic fashion.
That winter Annable sat down with Alan Nisbet, ‘Mr Track Cycling in Scotland’, and discussed forming a specialist track club whose remit would be to ‘bypass Scotland and target success at British level’. They talked to Arthur Campbell, who agreed that the track cyclists needed more support but felt they should do it within an existing club. Annable was having none of that. ‘I got so fed up with the Scottish approach, still am, because it’s more concerned with the importance of people who are office bearers than with talented young riders. Bunch of blithering idiots! They were stuck in the past, obsessed with time trialling and with no advertising, sponsorship or money. They didn’t want to support people. Arthur was different, he was progressive, but he was keen we be part of a bigger club. In the end we said, “We’re going to do our own thing, we’ve got two youngsters here [Tom Annable and Eddie Alexander] with enough talent to start it, and others who are being ignored.”’
Annable wrote the constitution for a new track club, which remains, word-for-word, to this day, and appears on the first page in all twenty-five of those annual reports:
Cycle racing at the international level, including the World Championships, the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, and the British Championships, recognise champions in two road events and seven to nine track events.
In 1982 two Scottish junior riders won bronze medals on the track at the British championships. Eddie Alexander from Inverness in the Sprint and Tom Annable from Edinburgh in the Points race championship. It was clear to them and some other young Scottish track riders that they would have to concentrate their efforts and seek out specialized training and coaching and travel to competitions outside Scotland, if they were to have a chance of winning championships at the British and international levels. It also became obvious that an organisation devoted to this purpose was a prerequisite to success and that there was no such organisation in Scotland. Talks were held with an objective of winning medals at the British level, concentrating mainly, but not exclusively, on track racing and composed of young riders who were prepared to train, travel and race as necessary to reach that objective. It would be necessary to recruit expert coaching and team management and financial support.
The City of Edinburgh Racing Club was formed in November 1982. The country’s top track riders were recruited, and in 1985 the club could boast its first British champions. ‘Scotland has never had a British champion in track racing,’ read that year’s annual report. ‘It now has two: 1km Eddie Alexander; 20km Steve Paulding.’
The club was not wealthy. Sponsorship was modest and numbers were kept low. ‘I got sponsorship from the council, but I only asked for £1,000,’ says Annable, ‘because my experience, and advice, was to never go for a big team. Keep it simple and small. We’ve got nineteen members now [in 2007]. It’s always been a low number.’ Membership was – and is – restricted. ‘In terms of criteria for joining … well, I don’t think we’ve ever had anybody we didn’t know,’ says Annable. ‘It’s a small part of a small sport, so we know the riders. And we’ve always gone for riders who were talented and keen to travel – ambitious.’
Other individuals and companies put money into the club. In the early days they included Joe McCann, who gave £1,000. He described himself as ‘an enthusiastic optimist’. This was the kind of sponsor that clubs such as the City of Edinburgh RC tend to attract and upon whom they depend.
Within a few years, the club, by now known – and feared – as ‘The City’, was achieving its objectives. In fact, it was wiping the board. The City was so dominant in British track racing that in 1988 it was likened to the mafia by Kenny Pryde, a reporter for Cycling Weekly magazine. ‘The City of Edinburgh “mafia” were to be seen sitting at trackside cheerfully exhorting their team-mates to greater efforts,’ read Pryde’s report, which prompted a response, published in the magazine the following week. It was a letter that appeared beneath the headline ‘Message from the Edinburgh Godfather’:
Maybe your reporter Mr Pryde had little joke about the enthusiasm of members of the family encouraging the boys in the team. He calls them a ‘Mafia’, but the boys don’t understand what this means. I have arranged for one of the boys to drop in on him one night in Glasgow to discuss the matter, and to make him a little offer I know he won’t refuse.
Brian Annable, Edinburgh
Eddie Alexander was the club’s star in its early years and in 1986, at the second Edinburgh Commonwealth Games, he won a bronze medal in the men’s sprint, beating England’s Paul McHugh in the ride for third. That and other successes earned him selection for the world championships in Colorado Springs, from where he sent Annable a postcard, which he still has. On one side there is a picture of the majestic San Juan mountains, and on the other, beneath the date (19 August 1986), the scrawled message: ‘Dear Club. Very hot and sunny out here. Having a real good time – these BCF [British Cycling Federation] holidays sure are good value. I think we’re going to fit in some racing next week at the velodrome. Wish you were here. Eddie.’
He was joking about it being a holiday but it might as well have been, because men’s sprinting, the blue riband track discipline, was a closed shop. Alexander, the only British rider, had about as much chance of making an impression as Eddie the Eagle had of not embarrassing himself in a ski jump. Check the four semi-finalists: Michael Huebner, Lutz Hesslich, Ralf-Guido Kischy and Bill Huck. They had one rather significant thing in common, these four semi-finalists. They were all East German.
Now, you can speculate all you like about why the East Germans were so dominant. They were certainly awesome physical specimens – extraordinary physical specimens. There is a clip of a Huebner sprint, from 1990, that has proved popular on YouTube. Type in the words ‘pumped up Huebner’ and you will find it: Claudio Golinelli, the Italian, against Michael Huebner, in the final of the world sprint championship in 1990. Huebner, resembling the Incredible Hulk, is majestic, utterly impervious, while the words of the American commentator are unintentionally humorous. ‘With that show of upper-body strength [from Huebner] I think Golinelli will be heading for the health club,’ he muses, before suggesting: ‘He is on the podium today, perhaps starring in Rocky VI next.’
Not to suggest that Huebner – nor indeed Hesslich, Kischy or Huck –did anything illegal. But East Germany, a country of fewer than 17 million people, was, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the dominant Olympic force, in particular in sports such as swimming, athletics and cycling, for reasons that are now a matter of public record. Thousands of East German athletes were given performance-enhancing drugs during that time; many didn’t know what they were taking – some thought they were vitamins. Numerous ex-athletes have since suffered terrible health problems, including liver cancer, organ damage, psychological trauma, hormonal changes, and infertility. Eventually the German government set up a fund for doped athletes to pay medical bills arising from their years of being doped. By the March 2003 deadline 197 athletes had applied for the compensation of $10,000 each.
In 1987, Alexander’s second world championship, he qualified thirteenth but, once again, all four semi-finalists were East German. But by now there was also another Scot – and a City of Edinburgh club-mate – at the championships in the form of Stewart Brydon. Brydon qualified twenty-first and told Cycling Weekly: ‘The worlds have been an experience and it’s made me realize how much work needs to be done. The Eastern Bloc countries are in front, but not by that much, and it’s done me good to see them. You think they
