It was the same in rugby. I remember that one of the rival Edinburgh schools (who on one occasion beat us 54–0) had a winger with astonishing speed, and the ability to execute a deadly sidestep. This guy was the most naturally gifted player I ever shared a rugby pitch with … and I think he packed it in at 15. I had been convinced he’d be a Scotland star of the future, but he disappeared and I never heard of him again.
I imagine that he, like other prodigies I have come across, lost interest because it all came too easily. They had so much natural talent that there was never any correlation, for them, between hard work and achievement. Often, such talent is all you need as a youngster – but as you get older, and the competition gets stiffer, talent will only take you so far. At some point, you have to start working, and as people catch up, you have to work harder. Which can be hard to accept if you’ve never made the link between hard work and success.
For this reason I think that ‘talent’ is vastly overrated in sport. I am thinking especially of power and endurance sports, but the idea that even tennis players and golfers such as Roger Federer or Tiger Woods are the best in the world simply because they are the most talented is ludicrous; they have talent, of course, but they have maximized it by hard work. It’s why, particularly when it comes to young athletes, I think the term ‘potential’ has far greater relevance and value than ‘talent’. Talent, as far as I am concerned, can in some cases be a nebulous, even damaging, notion; it can be a hindrance rather than a help.
Winning – and I did win from time to time – is a buzz, no doubt about it. But I got almost the same buzz from imagining how hard work might translate into success in the future. Even back then, I saw sport as a process, with the rewards coming at the end of it. It was my potential, rather than my talent, that excited and inspired me, driving me on.
The year after Slough, 1987, was another big one for me. I was fifth in the European championships in Genk, Belgium – the best ride of my BMX career, I’d say. But I had a bit of a disaster at the world championships in Orlando, going out at the quarter-final stage in the under-12 age group.
* * *
Genk, Orlando … Slough – international travel was one of the aspects of BMXing that I most enjoyed; these trips could be eye-opening and even educational. Many of them were undertaken by car, sometimes just my dad and me in his old Citroen BX with its hydraulic suspension, and a mattress in the back of the car for me to sleep on.
We had some unforgettable experiences away from the BMX track. I remember driving to the World Games in Karlsruhe in Germany, and stopping en route at the Berlin Wall. My dad explained what it was, and what it stood for, and I stood and stared and struggled to comprehend that there were people on the other side who were trapped there, like animals in a cage, and shot dead if they tried to escape. The Berlin Wall came down about six months later, news which I could relate to and understand far better than if it had just been pictures on TV or in newspapers.
I also raced at Aalborg, in Denmark, at Perpignan, in France, and at an amusement park in Holland with the very Dutch-sounding name of Slagharen. Slagharen, which was like a Dutch Butlins, had an amazing track, probably the best in Europe. What I remember most about Slagharen, though, is the chalets we stayed in, which had paper-thin walls. And I remember this detail so vividly because of an incident involving a slightly older guy in our club, a 19-year-old student known to all of us as ‘Voucher Man’, because he seemed to have money-off vouchers for everything. He was a very nice guy, but I suppose you could say he was the archetypal stingy Scot; he was always dictating that we had to go to a certain place because he could get 2 per cent off, or a free medium drink if you bought four main courses, or something. You get the idea.
One night in Slagharen, Voucher Man announced he was going to eat in, while gently mocking us for choosing to waste our money in a costly restaurant. He had all the ingredients to make chilli, he said. So we went out and left him to it, returning a couple of hours later to retire to our beds and go to sleep.
We didn’t sleep for long. Within an hour the chalet, with its paper-thin walls, reverberated to the unmistakable sound of Voucher Man’s bowels emptying, in a hurried fashion; it sounded like a flock of pigeons were taking off in there. He spent the night shitting into a bucket, while the rest of us pissed ourselves laughing.
The other thing about Slagharen, which hosted the European championships, was that it had a freestyle area, with two half-pipes. I was desperate to play on these ramps, but Dad advised me not to. ‘You’re here to race,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to tire yourself out on those things; they’re dangerous, and you’re not a freestyler …’
I wasn’t an especially rebellious child, but on this occasion I ignored him. Well, all my mates were having a go. And it did look like good fun. As long as you knew what you were doing, and had the skills to pull off such stunts …
Which, as it happens, I didn’t. But up the ramp I went, before swooping down, and back up, preparing for an aerial manoeuvre; into the air I soared, turning my bike and preparing to re-enter the ramp … or not. I overshot it, missing the ramp altogether and finding myself briefly suspended in midair – a bit like the moment when Wile E. Coyote, in the Roadrunner cartoons, realizes he has run straight off the edge of the cliff, and, with his legs still going through the motions, waits for gravity to kick in.
I didn’t have the proper kit on for freestyling – I didn’t even have a helmet on. So when I hit the ground, with a thud, I … well, actually I felt nothing, because I was knocked out. As I came to, I realized that my face had taken the brunt of it, the left side covered in a livid red graze. But my main concern was what my dad was going to say.
To make matters worse, I had hardly any time to prepare for gate practice, as you were allocated only limited time to practise on the track ahead of the next day’s races. I met up again with my dad, whose reaction – apparently – was mild; taking one look at my damaged face, he probably figured that I’d learnt my lesson without him having to reinforce it. Meanwhile, I apologized profusely – much later he said that I had spent about half an hour ‘havering’, which is a Scottish expression for talking nonsense – and got on with my gate practice. I must still have been quite badly concussed at this point, though, because when I returned to the track the next day I couldn’t remember anything about the course. It was the strangest thing: I had no recollection at all of the previous day. Sitting in the gate, waiting for the start, I might as well have been looking at the surface of the moon for all that I could remember about the previous day’s practice session.
I have a picture of that race – there’s a great view of the scab forming on my face – which was won, as many were, by a Dutch rider known as ‘The Beast’. We were 11 at the time, but he was about six foot two and had a full moustache, having hit puberty when he was nine. I exaggerate, but only a little.
At 14, having committed seven years to BMX, I retired. The realization that I wasn’t really enjoying it any more crept up on me gradually, and had much to do, I suspect, with the fact that many of my peers were also drifting away. It was 1990, and the bottom was about to fall out of the sport, in Europe at least. There remained a healthy scene in the United States, and that continues to this day, but by my mid-teens BMXing seemed passé, a – ahem – young man’s game, and about as cool as Bucks Fizz.
It was time to get out. But I look back now with great fondness on my BMX days, even if the sport that provided my introduction to cycling would inadvertently, 15 years later, cause me great heartache.
These days, thanks to its inclusion in the Olympic programme, which came into effect in Beijing, BMX is enjoying something of a renaissance. The heartache I mentioned above owes to the fact that the inclusion of BMX in 2005 meant the axing of another discipline – my event, the kilometre. But there are no hard feelings: I maintain that it is the perfect sport for kids, and the perfect introduction to cycling, especially at a time when the roads are becoming more dangerous. It is also a great sport for adults – and the top BMXers are incredible athletes.
Former BMX riders now excel in all cycling disciplines, from