To my mum and dad, Carol and David
Contents
1. The Art of Throwing Up in Secret
2. Pimped-up Rides and Broken Hearts
3. Smells of Sandwiches and Mars Bars
4. ‘That Can’t Be Good for You’
7. Holding Your Hand in the Fire
8. ‘They’ll Be Here in a Week to Ten Days’
10. I Believe the British have Pastries for Breakfast
11. Sydney, Silver and Stig of the Dump
14. Some of My Bark Is Missing
15. ‘Would You Like Me to Lap Dance for You?’
16. Taking On the Tour de France
19. He’s Like Something from The X Factor – the Outtakes
The Danger of Disappearing up My Own Orifice
On the day after I won my third gold medal at the Beijing Olympics I was visited by a small posse of Scottish journalists, and asked a question I have never been asked before, or since.
‘In the last 24 hours everyone has offered their opinions of Chris Hoy,’ said Gary Ralston of the Daily Record. He may have been stroking his chin as he contemplated how he was going to phrase the next part of his question – I could tell that it wasn’t going to be of the more familiar ‘How does it feel?’ or ‘Has it sunk in yet?’ variety.
‘I wonder,’ continued Gary. ‘What does Chris Hoy think of Chris Hoy?’
There was only one answer to that. ‘Chris Hoy thinks that the day Chris Hoy starts talking about himself in the third person is the day that he disappears up his own arse.’ It maybe wasn’t the response that Gary was looking for, but he, and the others, looked reasonably happy with it, and it duly featured in their stories the following day. (Thankfully, it also got me out of having to offer up a cringe-worthy response to the actual question.)
I bring it up because it popped into my head when thinking about this book. I asked myself: what kind of book would I like to read? Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the straight-forward ‘then-I-did-this-and-then-I-did-that’ life story. What I like, particularly in a book about sport, is an insight into what it’s actually like to compete at a high level, and what it takes to get there, and stay there – ideally sprinkled with a few semi-humorous anecdotes. In essence, I want to know how a sports person does what they do. I want to know why, too, but most of all I want to know how.
It’s the way I’ve always been. At school, I enjoyed subjects where the answers tended to be ‘no’ or ‘yes’. I liked logical subjects – maths, the sciences – which involved some kind of puzzle and a definite or correct conclusion or answer at the end of it. I liked there to be a ‘right’ answer, I suppose, but I also enjoyed the process of working towards it.
I wouldn’t want this book to read like a science manual or maths paper. But I hope that it can go some way to explaining ‘how’. If I were an aspiring athlete, or just a fan of sport – and without referring to myself in the third person – I think that is the kind of book I would enjoy reading.
In any case, I am still just as interested in the question of ‘how?’ as I was when I was a 14-year-old, and making my first, tentative and very nervous pedal strokes around the forbiddingly steep-looking banking of the Meadowbank Velodrome. As I look ahead to the London Olympics, with the knowledge that, just to make the British team, never mind win another gold medal, I will probably have to be a better athlete in 2012 than I was in 2008, the question remains as pertinent as ever.
The irony, of course, is that, while I say I like ‘right’ answers, in reality there seldom is a definitive answer. Training and competing are less an exact science and more an endless puzzle;