now MacLean was thinking that cycling could, somehow, become a career. How, he didn’t exactly know. But ambition – or wishful thinking – overrode common sense. ‘I was living back up north and it came to a point where I was forced to take one route or the other,’ he says. ‘Cycling wasn’t a career path. There was no possibility of making it a career really, not at that point. But I was quite confident I could make a living. I don’t know why I thought that, or how I thought I’d make a living. I was possibly a bit naive.
‘The other option for me at that point was to join the armed forces. Once you were in there, and had passed the initial training, you could do well at sport. But it would have involved ten months’ training. I didn’t want to lose that time, so I had to make a choice. Then I heard about this new “Developing Excellence” programme being started by Edinburgh University – it was a forerunner to the Scottish Institute of Sport. It didn’t give you money, but it did give you access to the university gym, to lectures on sports performance, that kind of thing. Chris and I were invited to be the representatives from cycling. That was enough of a spur for me to move back to Edinburgh.’
Around this period, from 1995 to 1997, MacLean, as Hoy says at the start of this chapter, was the one who was forging on ahead, while others, most obviously Hoy himself, followed. David Hoy also favours the climbing metaphor: ‘Craig was like a climber with Chris hanging on the rope behind.’
Was MacLean aware of this? ‘I was desperately aware of it,’ he says with feeling. ‘But Chris was a significant driving force for me as well, because he was constantly nipping at my heels. I think without each other, pushing each other on, then things would have panned out very differently for both of us.’
They were way ahead of the pack – and ahead not only of their peers but of previous generations as well. ‘There was nobody else, really, and we’d gone faster, already, than the guys who’d gone before us,’ says MacLean. ‘So there was a void. The old generation – the likes of Eddie Alexander and Stewart Brydon – had moved on, we were coming up pretty fast, and there was no one there to help us; there wasn’t the coaching structure in place at the British Cycling Federation; there was no money in it; there was nowhere to turn to get your ideas or information. You had to go by instinct and do a lot of reading and second guessing.’
In which circumstances, he adds, you make a lot of mistakes. Hoy refers to sprinting as a ‘black art’ and this was at the heart of the problem for MacLean. With no great tradition of sprinting in Britain – or huge gaps between Reg Harris and Eddie Alexander, whose career was always heavily compromised and whose potential was ultimately unfulfilled – there was no bank of knowledge, no ready mentors or sources of useful information. MacLean was keen to learn all he could – hence his enthusiasm for Edinburgh University’s ‘Developing Excellence’ initiative.
But it was specialized advice he really needed – so where did MacLean turn? ‘You heard snippets from people – what the Germans did, what the French did, bits and pieces. But it was hard to get that information. Even the people in Britain who did have a bit of experience, there seemed to be a reluctance to pass it on … it was like they didn’t want us to be better than them. I remember asking one of our top sprinters, way back at the 1992 national championships, “What’s the difference between us and the top German guys?” And he said: “Weights.” That was it. “Weights.” That was the extent of the advice. And it wasn’t as if I posed any threat to him at the time.
‘I remember overhearing conversations between Stewart Brydon and Graeme Obree,’ continues MacLean. ‘I was just listening in while they were discussing training. I took on some of Obree’s ideas about using big gears for specific strength development. Some of his ideas were a bit too off-the-wall in practical terms but I absorbed some of them. But I think we wasted so much time and effort doing rubbish training, basically. We didn’t know what worked so we did masses of volume, which probably stood us in good stead in the long term, but in the short term it meant we didn’t progress. We were just tired a lot of the time.’
Hoy echoes this. ‘Some of the training we did at the time was absolute nonsense. It was a case of taking two steps forward, one back. We trained very hard but a lot of it was counterproductive.’ Among the ‘nonsense’ training, perhaps, were some highly experimental techniques tried out by MacLean. ‘Like filling his bike with lead shot,’ recalls Hoy. ‘He had unusual ideas, mad ideas.’
MacLean says that at this time he and Hoy developed ‘in tandem’. Hoy is generous in his assessment of MacLean’s influence on him, even describing him as ‘my coach – certainly the closest I had to a coach at that time’. If they were on a tandem then MacLean, clearly, was the one piloting it.
But following the 1996 world championships, Hoy could look forward to his first major overseas assignment – given that the worlds had been held in Manchester – at the European Under-23 championships in Moscow, in October. It was to be a strange trip. The British Cycling Federation could only afford to send three people, and they opted not to ‘waste’ a space on an official or mechanic, so three riders – Hoy, Alwyn McMath and Angela Hunter – were selected and told to fend for themselves.
Hoy viewed Moscow as a massive opportunity: he would ride an individual event, the kilometre time trial. It would thus be his first opportunity to lay down a marker as a rider in his own right, and to step out from MacLean’s shadow. ‘Training was going really well,’ he recalls, ‘I kept progressing after the world championships, improving all the time. It was all going well.’
Then he and a couple of others were ‘roped in’ to starring in a short film. A promotional video was being made to try and sell the sport of track cycling to television. ‘They were trying to do something arty,’ says Hoy. The velodrome was shrouded in darkness, with the only light coming from a spotlight trained on the finish line, the idea being that Hoy and his fellow riders emerge from the darkness, like ghosts, riding into the light.
‘It went on for ages and ages,’ says Hoy. ‘It was my first experience of doing something for TV and finding out how it always drags on.’ The track had been booked for two hours, from 9–11 p.m. At 1 a.m. they were still filming. In the midst of it, Hoy, on his bike, rolled down the ramp that leads from the track centre into the tunnel that emerges at the foot of a flight of stairs, which climb up to the main reception.
Unfortunately, as Hoy rolled down, a man pushing a large trolley – packed with cameras – appeared in front of him. Hoy – on his track bike, with a fixed wheel instead of brakes – pushed back hard on the pedals. At a slow speed that can be as effective as braking – you stop immediately. But on this occasion he pushed too hard: his effort stripped the rear sprocket. And so now, with his feet strapped tightly into the pedals, he was careering down the ramp, picking up speed, with no way of slowing down, far less stopping.
He squeezed past the trolley, and, like something from Benny Hill, carried on straight past him, gathering speed, out of control, and with, eventually, only the steps leading up to reception in his path. The only thought in his brain, he says, was ‘Shit, what am I going to do here?’ But there was no flash of inspiration and he carried on, ‘going very fast by now’, until he collided with the stairs, sticking his arm out to try and protect his face. The bike was a mess – it concertinaed. So was his arm – it was broken.
Initially the national track coach, Marshall Thomas, reassured him that his arm wasn’t broken. ‘Wait and see how it is in the morning,’ he told him. But in the morning it was ‘massive – like an old lady’s leg’, says Hoy. ‘Really swollen, straight up and down. I went to the hospital, had it x-rayed and had a cast put on it. And this was two-and-a-half weeks before Moscow. I was gutted.’
But he was still ‘determined to go. I thought, “What if I modify my handlebars?” I just couldn’t face the idea of not going.’ Neither
