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Pentland Hills, Edinburgh, winter 1992
‘One incident in the Pentlands has stuck in my mind forever,’ says Ray Harris, ‘and I’ve often wondered if the person concerned would ever realize that she almost killed a future Olympic champion.
‘It was winter,’ Harris continues, ‘and we were coming off the hills after a day’s mountain biking. We weren’t belting along, but the weather wasn’t particularly good, and there was an old dear with her green wellies, plaid skirt, Barbour jacket, and walking pole, a typical old Edinburgh woman. Chris got too close to her, so she made a jab at his front wheel, making some rather unladylike comments about cyclists being on her path. It was a steel walking pole and if she’d got him it would have been very serious. The image has stuck in my mind. But it didn’t faze Chris. A lot of youngsters of that age would have been shouting back at her, swearing and all sorts. But although I’ve seen Chris disappointed and cross, I’ve never seen him out of control.’
Harris is one of the great unsung heroes of British sport. In Edinburgh and beyond, for a period spanning three decades, he was to the sport of cycling what Dr Emmett Brown, the mad scientist from Back to the Future, was to time travel. Even if his ideas and methods sometimes seemed loopy or eccentric, Harris, like the good doctor, made things happen, with his enthusiasm if nothing else. He was certainly a scientist, but he was also a visionary. Though he might have seemed eccentric, he did things, or tried things, that would become commonplace a few years later.
Hoy met Harris when he felt he had outgrown the sport of BMX. ‘I stopped enjoying it and didn’t see myself progressing any further,’ he says now. Plus, as he told his old school magazine in 2004, ‘BMX was no longer trendy. It was losing me crucial streetcred being associated with an un-cool pastime.’
At the grand old age of 14, it was time for a new challenge. The mountain bike had emerged – it was like a BMX for adults. This new machine was the epitome of cool, to such an extent that in the early 1990s it seemed they would take over the world and render road bikes obsolete; and then they all but disappeared themselves, before staging a comeback in the late 1990s, with technological improvements such as suspension forks, rear suspension, and disc brakes.
Hoy got involved during the first, relatively short-lived wave of popularity. Would he have remained a mountain biker had that wave been sustained throughout the 1990s? No, probably not. And it’s just as well: because, as a mountain biker, Hoy was … distinctly mediocre.
He found that his cycling skills didn’t transfer seamlessly from the short BMX tracks, which rewarded sharp bursts of speed and acceleration, to the longer, more gruelling mountain biking trails, which provided a test of stamina. More particularly, the hills proved a problem.
David Hoy has joked of having to wait for hours for his son to finish endurance events. At least, I had assumed he was joking. ‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘The car park would be empty at these events and I’d be thinking about going and checking with First Aid. Then, finally, he would appear over the hill.’
Hoy, notes his father, ‘was just the wrong type of athlete’ for such events, ‘not that he knew it at the time. He enjoyed it. It started off with him heading into the Pentlands’ – the range of hills that sit on the southern boundary to Edinburgh, around six miles from the family home in Murrayfield – ‘and they’d be up there all day exploring the wee tracks and trails. There are miles of them; it’s a terrific place. Then he’d be back for his tea.’
Mountain biking could be dangerous, of course, not least on hidden paths in remote glens. Although the Pentland Hills are close to Edinburgh, they seem miles away when you are in the middle of them. While the hills are visible from every corner of the city, the same cannot be said in reverse: the city is invisible from the remoter parts, and there is no road access. So there were obvious dangers associated with riding in the hills – especially down them. ‘He told me he clocked 65 [mph] coming down one of the steep hills once,’ says David in conspiratorial tones, confirming that, although he officially disapproved, he was secretly quite proud. ‘We reached a compromise with him: we gave him a whistle and if he fell off he was to use it to attract attention.’
Hoy’s competitive debut on a mountain bike followed the appearance of a small advert in a mountain biking magazine, announcing the start of a new Scottish Cyclists’ Union (SCU) cross-country mountain bike series. David spotted the advert and called SCU headquarters – then and now a Portakabin parked beside the velodrome at Meadowbank – and spoke to their executive officer, ‘boring him stupid for half an hour’ about his son’s glittering BMX career. The best thing, he was told, was to join a club. He recommended the Dunedin Cycling Club, run by Ray Harris. ‘He’s a good coach,’ said the man from the SCU.
At the same time, at school, Hoy was playing rugby and also rowing. Rugby legend Gavin Hastings, a former pupil at Hoy’s school, was the teenager’s first sporting hero. The Scotland and British Lions captain came to the school one day to take training, though Hoy ‘was very cool about it, as teenage boys are’, recalls his mother, Carol. ‘But later, during dinner, he was full of it: it was “Gav this, Gav that …” as if they were best mates!’ (A decade later the roles were reversed. Interviewed at the official opening of the Scottish Parliament, Hastings was asked what the Parliament should do as a matter of priority. ‘It should build an indoor velodrome,’ urged Hastings, ‘for Chris Hoy and the Chris Hoys of the future.’)
Hoy showed promise as a rugby player. He captained his school team – no mean feat at a school as renowned for producing good rugby players as George Watson’s College – and he was also recognized at district level. On one occasion he even captained Edinburgh Schools against the North of Scotland at Under-15 level.
But he showed even more promise as a rower, going one better, competing for Scotland and, with his school, winning a silver medal at the British championship in the junior coxless pairs. His mother today expresses some regret that he finally opted for cycling instead of rowing, noting with a sigh, ‘I quite wanted him to do the rowing … I fancied myself at Henley, cheering him on – “Come on chaps!” – with a wee gin and tonic in my hand. The banks of the Thames seems more civilized than a sweaty velodrome. Ah well …’
But despite his involvement and interest in the sports offered by his school, cycling remained a big interest. It occupied most of Hoy’s spare time, though he continued to find the transition to mountain biking difficult. His easy superiority at BMX was forgotten as he struggled up the hills and through the mud of mountain bike courses – in fact, he seemed at the time to be showing more promise as a rugby player and rower than as a cyclist.
Yet Hoy was convinced it was just a matter of time before it clicked. It didn’t seem to occur to him that it might not. He was in it to win it, says his dad: ‘Oh yeah. He wanted to win; he didn’t just want to take part. He kept thinking, “I need to work harder. I’ve stepped up to a different sport so I need to learn.” If he finished five hours down one week then he’d try to finish four hours down the next! That was his attitude.’
Hoy himself gently disputes some of his father’s claims. ‘I realized fairly early on that I wasn’t an endurance athlete, but I persevered because I do have an element of aerobic potential. At school I enjoyed cross-country running and rowing, where you needed power and endurance. It was the power-to-weight ratio that was a problem. It meant that anything that involved going uphill was a struggle.’
Old school mates – and teachers – may dispute this claim, however. In the interview he gave to his school magazine, after returning from Athens as the
