in this club meeting in a Portakabin and having to go out the room while they talked about me, and assessed whether I was suitable for the club or not.’ He qualifies this, though, by adding that: ‘I don’t think they ever rejected anyone.’ And in his case, he adds, ‘I think Dave Hoy put in a good word for me.’
In fact, David Hoy was a Craig MacLean admirer from the moment, at around the same time, that he first took him away to a race – a mountain bike race in the north of England. ‘I remember we were travelling to a race and we had a spare seat in the car, so we asked Craig. I was really impressed. Chris and one or two of the others were just kids, but we went out for a meal on the Friday night and Craig had salad and rice, no meat. He was very particular about it. I thought, here’s someone who’s thinking about what he’s doing; he’s really thought it through. He had a very strict regime for looking after himself, and I was impressed that at that age – and that stage in his cycling career, because he was just starting out – he was so serious.’
When David Hoy’s praise is put to him, MacLean winces a little, because his close attention to diet, though it might have been interpreted as a sign of his commitment to his sport, actually masked a serious problem. ‘Partly because I got into cycling to lose weight, my diet was something I was into,’ explains MacLean. ‘But it became quite detrimental. It developed into an eating disorder. I was kind of reluctant to specialize in track cycling, to be honest – road racing was my main thing, mountain biking as well, because weight was a key thing to me. But I was fighting genetics, because I was never particularly light and I struggled to keep the weight off. It just turned into a bit of an issue for me.’
Within sport eating disorders might not be uncommon – even, or especially, at elite level. Chris Boardman has written about the subject in his book. ‘Instead of the weight loss becoming a means to an end,’ he wrote, ‘it became the end itself. I was losing weight in order to enhance my chances in the Tour [de France], but – and those close to me will sigh heavily at this point – it became obsessive.’
Boardman is unusual, because the subject of eating disorders is rarely openly discussed. And there is a difficulty of definition, since there is an extremely fine line – some might argue no line at all – between a strict, almost obsessive diet, and what most people would interpret as an eating disorder. Certainly ‘strict’ or ‘close to obsessive’ is how you’d describe the eating habits of perhaps a majority of elite sports people; it would be difficult to find any world-class athlete who is not preoccupied by what he or she puts in their body. Perhaps, as Boardman says, the line is crossed when the primary goal becomes weight loss, or weight management, rather than sporting performance; again, though, there are problems in determining where that line is.
But MacLean, with a refreshing unwillingness to become bogged down in issues of definition, says that his problem went beyond that. ‘It was a form of bulimia,’ he says. ‘It was never diagnosed, and it’s not something I’ve ever talked about; I just know myself that’s what it was. I would starve myself for two or three days, not having any food whatsoever, and train at the same time. When I eventually admitted it to myself I got control of it. But it took about a year and a half.
‘It was about 1993, and it was probably the worst season of my life. I was doing a little bit on the track by then. But my performance suffered. I would starve, binge eat, starve, binge eat. My form fluctuated and my weight actually increased as well. There was a point in 1994 when I realized I had a problem. I was at the British track championships, which were a week long, and because I had to cook, buying in the food I needed, I got to grips with it. I had to set myself some rules and targets, telling myself what I can and can’t do. It still took a long time. I think there are always going to be some body-image issues there as well.’
One of the main problems – as MacLean recognizes – was the fact that his heart, at that time, was set on road racing and mountain biking. Athletes in these disciplines are, almost without exception, lean and lithe, or – if you prefer – just plain skinny. It must have been demoralizing and dispiriting to realize that your build might effectively disqualify you from ever succeeding in these disciplines, especially if you were putting so much into them.
The answer was staring MacLean in the face, however. At the opposite end of the scale to the whippet-like road racers were the track sprinters, who were all big, bulky and muscular: the colossuses of cycling. Not only did MacLean have the build for sprinting, he also had the physiology – the fast-twitch muscles necessary for lightning bursts of acceleration, as well as the power to sustain the effort. He was, in short, a natural. And, more or less as soon as he made the decision to focus on sprinting, he demonstrated that natural ability. He rode with the Dunedin club from 1993 to 1994, when, on finishing his studies, he moved back home to Grantown-on-Spey and joined a Highland club, Moray Firth Racing Team. The following season, 1995, was, he says, the first when he focused purely on the track. He was twenty-four that year, making him a late developer.
But he was enterprising, even entrepreneurial. In Grantown-on-Spey he managed, early in his career, to eke out a modest income from cycling. The Highland Games circuit is a big deal in the north of Scotland, and most of the summer meetings include grass track cycling, with significant cash prizes. The grass track circuit has traditionally been the most obscure yet also, paradoxically, the most lucrative form of cycle racing in the UK and for a while those that took part were deemed ‘professionals’, and therefore barred from more conventional forms of cycle racing. MacLean rode events sanctioned by the Scottish Cyclists’ Union – that is, amateur events – but still made reasonable prize money. ‘It was my summer job,’ he claims.
Some of his training at the time was done in the company of a near neighbour and friend, Alain Baxter, who would go on to become Britain’s greatest ever skier. Baxter, who, unfortunately, is more famous for a doping scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympics, when he lost his bronze medal after inadvertently using an American-made inhaler that contained a banned substance, was also a talented cyclist. He was a good training partner, though MacLean says that neither was as dedicated to sport in those days, and that much of their training was instigated by their respective fathers, who had competed against each other years earlier, in skiing and cycling. ‘We had pushy parents,’ jokes MacLean. ‘I think they were using us to carry on their rivalry. Alain and I would meet up and have a bit of a blether, then tell our dads we’d been training hard.’
There is a strong possibility that MacLean is exaggerating his lack of commitment – and he is certainly joking about he and Baxter having pushy parents. In fact, both athletes went on to develop training regimes bordering on fanatical; and both became supreme athletes – as demonstrated by Baxter winning the BBC’s Superstars series – as they reached the pinnacle of their respective sports.
Another influence at the time, adds MacLean, was Euan Mackenzie, an Olympic biathlete and ‘formidable cyclist’. ‘He really dragged me out on the bike until I was fit enough to enjoy it,’ says MacLean.
MacLean also had a short stint working in a family business with his uncle, who was an undertaker. He once made the mistake of mentioning this to a journalist, prompting the description of him as the ‘cycling undertaker’. Another quirky fact about MacLean that was – for journalists – irresistible was that he studied piano tuning at college. Thus he has repeatedly been labelled ‘the piano-tuning-undertaker-cyclist’, or a variation on this. All he can do now is roll his eyes whenever he is asked about piano tuning, or undertaking, or both – which means a lot of eye rolling. His undertaking, or piano tuning, or both, tend to be raised every time he is interviewed.
Although MacLean was able to make some money on the grass tracks of the Highlands, it was obvious his cycling income would never be enough to live on. More conventional track racing offered few career possibilities. For both MacLean and Hoy, in fact, the opportunities to make any kind of living through cycling appeared, at that time, to be minimal to non-existent. Track cycling was the poor relation of international cycling – the big money was in
