Eddie Alexander before them, they would in all probability have to fit cycling around jobs, and they would, as a consequence, be unlikely ever to realize their potential.
This was the reality faced by both, and so when Hoy left school, in 1994, he went to university. He says it didn’t occur to him not to follow the traditional path of getting a degree and then a job. And so, only a couple of months after his breakthrough at the British track championships, when he claimed a silver medal in the junior sprint, he began a four-year honours degree in maths and physics at St Andrews University, forty miles north of Edinburgh.
He threw himself into university life. ‘It was great,’ says Hoy, ‘a whole new experience, feeling independent even though you’re living in halls, getting all your meals cooked and forty-five minutes from home … But I was going out all the time, partying, enjoying a good social life. I relished it. And I didn’t touch my bike.
‘Then towards the end of the first term I got a call from my dad. He said he had invitations to two races. He asked me, “Do you fancy the Tour of the North in Ireland …” and I said, “Great! That would be brilliant.” Then he added, “… or a track meeting in Trinidad?”
‘I said, “Fantastic! Where’s Trinidad?”’
The promise of two weeks in the sun at Easter 1995 gave Hoy some motivation to get back out on his bike. ‘I pretty much hadn’t touched my bike the entire first term. But at Christmas, when I went home, I started training again. I’d eaten a lot of junk food that term, drunk a lot, gained some weight, swapping fat for muscle. It was so hard getting back into it.’
The trip to Trinidad kick-started Hoy’s first season as a student-cyclist – also his first season in the senior ranks – and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, it brought some success. At the national championships he was a member of the City of Edinburgh team that won gold in the team sprint; he was also still competing in the odd endurance event, and was a member of the quartet that claimed silver in the team pursuit.
And in the Scottish championships there was a snapshot of the future when, in the men’s sprint, the two riders who made it to the final were Hoy and MacLean. It was a thrilling contest, going to three rounds; MacLean winning match A, Hoy winning match B, and then, according to his harshest critic – Brian Annable – ‘going to sleep in the decider and getting jumped with 250 m to go’. The title thus went to MacLean.
But towards the end of the first term of his second year at St Andrews University, Hoy phoned home. ‘He just said he was absolutely miserable,’ says David Hoy. ‘“Give it another few weeks,” I said. But he said: “I can’t do this.”’ Then he corrects himself: ‘What he actually said was, “I can do this, but I don’t see any point in doing it.”’
‘I just thought, “What am I doing?”’ says Hoy. ‘I enjoyed St Andrews, liked the place, had a good group of friends, a great social life, but I didn’t enjoy the course and I wanted to be doing something that was gong to help me. I had developed my interest in sports science. At the training camp I’d been to in Majorca, the previous year, there was a guest coach, Louis Passfield. Louis wasn’t a sprint specialist but he had enough knowledge to answer the questions I had, and he was quite scientific. It gave me a taste for sports science. I had this hunger for knowledge in terms of physiology and wanting to know the best way to train – all these questions that I hoped sports science could answer for me.’
Hoy returned to Edinburgh from St Andrews in October 1995, contacted Moray House – the scene of Ray Harris’s Kingcycle tests – and enquired about enrolling there to study sports science. His application was accepted, and he went straight into second year the following autumn. In the meantime, and to teach him something of ‘the real world’, his parents insisted that he either get a job or sign on the dole. He opted initially for the latter, though returned from the local dole office asking ‘What was that all about?’ and decided to get a job instead, working in the Edinburgh bookshop Thin’s.
It was in 1996 that he was joined in the City of Edinburgh Racing Club by MacLean. In fact, it was a case of second time lucky for MacLean – his written application had been rejected the previous year. But he proved a more than useful signing: in the kilo at the British championships he won a bronze medal, while Hoy was fifth – having this time managed not to pull his foot out the pedal with his starting effort. But another significant episode that summer was a dreadful accident at the Meadowbank Velodrome, involving Hoy and, more seriously, another of Britain’s up-and-coming riders – Jason Queally.
As Ray Harris has noted, the constant exposure of the wooden boards to the elements was making the velodrome increasingly dangerous and prone to splinter. This was borne out, horrifically, by Queally, who needed hospital treatment after coming off worst in a pile-up in the closing stages of the Meadowbank Mile. In crashing he was impaled by an eighteen-inch-long, one-and-a-half-inch-wide piece of wood. That was as much a ‘splinter’ as a whale is a minnow. The resulting wound needed seventy stitches, with the doctors telling Queally that the thickness of his chest muscles – developed during his earlier career as a swimmer and international water polo player – possibly saved his life. Had the splinter pierced his chest cavity, it would probably have killed him.
Hoy had a ringside seat, being the first rider to go down. ‘It was the last corner, there had been a train of four or five City riders on the front, then Craig had done the big push and I was on his wheel; so we’re rounding the last corner, I’m coming up on his back wheel, and Craig flicked slightly to the side. It wasn’t intentional, but I caught his wheel, came crashing down, and took Jason, and everyone else, down with me. Craig was the only one who stayed upright. Jason hit me, went over the top and landed on his back, then slid down the track. He was screaming, shouting: “I’ve got half the fucking track in my back!” And I was lying there, pretty sore, thinking, “Aw, shut up, will you? I don’t know who you are but you’re making a lot of noise … it can’t be that bad.” Then I looked across, saw this bit of wood sticking into him, with the other end sticking out the other side, and I thought, “Okay, you can have the ambulance first …”’
It was Hoy’s mother, Carol, a nurse, who was on first-aid duty at Meadowbank that day. She took Queally to hospital. ‘I’d never met Jason, but it was absolutely devastating,’ she says with a shudder. ‘It was very obvious he was badly injured, and it was very worrying. Horrible, and scary. I always worry about Chris crashing but on that occasion I must admit I didn’t even look at Chris, though he had lost half his skin in the crash.’
After a week in intensive care, and with a scar in his back that made it look ‘as though he’d been attacked by a shark’, Queally resolved never again to ride in a group race, shifting his focus to individual efforts against the clock. It was a decision, albeit an enforced one, that would later reap spectacular rewards – and provide some crucial inspiration for Hoy. But it was perhaps just as well that he wasn’t a member of the City of Edinburgh Racing Club; accident or no accident, Annable would probably have told him to buck up his ideas and take part in a ‘real race’, not individual efforts against the clock.
Hoy and MacLean, meanwhile, confirmed their emerging talent with selection for that year’s world championships – the first to be held at the Manchester Velodrome. The twenty-year-old Hoy was selected for the team sprint, while MacLean rode the individual sprint, the kilo and the team sprint, finishing twelfth in the kilo – though he was second fastest over the opening lap – and fourteenth in the sprint.
The team sprint proved a bitter experience, however. Queally, by now recovered from his crash, pulled his foot out at the start – and yes, he was using new clipless pedals (Ray Harris would not have been impressed). MacLean was angry with the British selectors, saying that it should have been the City of Edinburgh team – in other words, with Peter Jacques instead of Queally – that contested the worlds. ‘We proved
