I’m pretty sure the boom days of the 1980s will never be repeated. But I am glad the BMX hasn’t gone the way of those other great inventions of the eighties, the ZX Spectrum and Sinclair C5, and disappeared without trace.
I started getting a bit of stick from my mates at school. Nothing malicious: just low-level, good-natured mickey-taking. I remember an art class in first year of secondary school where I was relentlessly slagged off for being a ‘BMX bandit’.
I like to think that things have changed a little now, with cycling more mainstream and not perceived as being too weird a pastime, but traditionally the sport has attracted a lot of individualistic characters. As a kid, you would generally follow your mates into team sports – football and rugby. I did these too, but the fact that I was a cyclist singled me out a little from many of my schoolmates. I remember Graeme Obree, the former world record holder and champion, talking in his autobiography about cycling as a form of escapism, because he was bullied at school. I think that for him cycling was a way of justifying why he wasn’t out kicking a ball with his mates, or hanging around a shopping mall. Saying ‘I’m going out on my bike’ is a bit like getting the first punch in; it’s a good excuse for being by yourself.
Fortunately I didn’t have the kind of negative experiences that Graeme had; I certainly wasn’t forced into cycling because of bullying, and I wasn’t bullied on account of the fact that I was a cyclist. All the same, by the time I got to secondary school, BMX had had its day. It was seen by most people as a kids’ sport – and there was nothing worse than that as you embarked on life in secondary school. One former classmate – Murdo, who is still a friend – has since claimed that any success I’ve had on a bike is all down to him, since he ‘convinced’ me to give up BMXing. He wasn’t the only one who applied peer pressure. The truth was, however, that it wasn’t anyone else’s opinions that mattered; I had just had enough of BMX racing and wasn’t enjoying it like I used to.
I still loved bikes, so I transferred my allegiance to the knobbly-tyred older brother of the BMX: the mountain bike. Mountain bikes were new, and although perhaps not ‘cool’ in the eyes of all my classmates, they were a bit cool, or at least grown up. And in Edinburgh we had a huge natural asset in the Pentland Hills, more or less on my doorstep. My first mountain bike outings – they felt more like expeditions at that age – were into those hills, and they have left me with some fabulous memories. In the early 1990s, when I first tried it, I would often head up there with my dad, who was quite fit, though I always managed to drop him on the climbs. It was part sport, part exploration, but what I loved most were the descents, which felt like the reward for all the hard work of climbing – it was as though you had to earn your fun. When I got home, there was another reward, which was eating. I developed a ravenous hunger when mountain biking, and devoured mountains of food after rides.
These days, when I’m travelling between Manchester and Edinburgh, as I frequently do, I pass the Pentlands as I drive into, or out of, my home city. It can prompt me to gaze a little dreamily at them (while keeping my eyes on the road, I should add, to reassure my mum, as well as any traffic police operating in the area). From the road they are just benign-looking lumps; the kind of rolling, rounded hills that are typical of southern Scotland. Further to the north, especially in the Highlands, the mountains are more rocky and jagged, often looking like mini-Alps. But don’t let the apparently gentle slopes of the Pentlands fool you: they are steep and rugged in places, and contain a labyrinth of hidden glens, meandering and often quite gnarly paths, and trickling burns (Scottish for small rivers).
It’s a paradise for mountain biking, and I loved it. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty incompatible with my career in track cycling, because of the risk of injury. On a mountain bike, if you don’t crash on a fairly regular basis then you have to ask yourself if you’re trying hard enough … so it’s difficult to do now, though it is something I intend taking up again when I retire from track cycling. But I won’t be racing. Definitely not racing.
When I was getting into mountain biking, in my early to mid teens, a series of cross-country races were staged in the Pentlands. They were gruelling tests of endurance and strength on courses that often got churned up; you’d finish looking as though you’d been down a coal mine. They were tough races, and they pushed me to levels I didn’t know I could reach. The contrast to BMX races, those 30-second blasts, could hardly have been greater.
I think I realized, pretty early on in my mountain bike career, that I’d never be brilliant at this sport. But I did win one race. And it was an uphill race, bizarrely enough. It was at Innerleithen, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh: a mass-start event that went straight up a hill like a ramp and seemed to get steeper and steeper. Clearly organized by sadists.
Not surprisingly, the front group was rapidly whittled down. This was the kind of race where the action is at the back rather than the front, with people hanging on for dear life, until they can hang on no more. The mental battle is a big part of it – when your legs are screaming, your lungs burning, your brain telling you to stop, and you have to dig deeper and deeper. With such efforts, the physical limits lie somewhere beyond the mental limits.
Eventually there were only five of us left, at which point one guy attacked, jumping clear as though going for the finish. Nobody was mad enough to try to match his pace, preferring instead to watch him gradually slowing down in the distance and then ‘blowing up’ altogether. The words they use in cycling to denote that moment when you hit the wall – ‘blow up’ and ‘die’ being the most common – say it all, really. There is no return, especially on a hill. When this guy ran out of gas on the hill he became almost stationary – we had to avoid him as we went past, as if he was a bollard in the road.
Then I attacked. I attacked! And nobody came with me. As ever, the effort started to really hurt after about 15 seconds, but I managed to keep a bit in reserve and avoid the fate of the earlier attacker. I won on my own, which, looking back now, seems hard to believe. Let me write that again: I won a hill climb. This, appropriately enough, represented the summit of my achievements as a mountain biker. I’d rather not dwell on other races, typically longer races, following which – as my dad likes to tell everyone – he would be waiting in the car park, thinking I must have suffered some mechanical or other disaster, only to see me finally haul my exhausted body to the finish, well after everyone else had packed up and gone home.
At around the same time, there was another sport that was beginning to exercise me, in every sense of the word. Rowing. I still enjoyed rugby, but the increasing number of injuries I was suffering persuaded me eventually to give it up, and rowing was the sport that replaced it at school – cycling, unfortunately, not being part of the curriculum.
One of my best mates at school, Grant Florence, had started rowing, but there weren’t many guys who did it. For some reason it was seen at my school as a girls’ sport; male crews weren’t really encouraged. Obviously, for us male rowers, this wasn’t an entirely undesirable situation. But that isn’t why I was attracted to it, honest.
Seriously, it isn’t. If it had simply been a ruse to spend time splashing about on the water with the girls, then I wouldn’t have lasted very long, because this was a brutal sport. It was rowing rather than cycling, in fact, that opened my eyes to how hard it is possible to work at something. There was also a bit of family history in rowing. My uncle, John Poole, who’s married to my dad’s elder sister Joan, rowed in the ‘B’ crew for Oxford in the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race in the 1950s. At 6ft 8in he’s a good build for it.
Where we trained, the Union Canal, is a seriously thin strip of water. In places it is not much wider – or less narrow – than the boat. A fractional misjudgement can cause the oar to hit the towpath, perhaps taking a runner’s legs from under him,