As for the racing, it was like groundhog day. The painful legs when you woke up; the ordeal of breakfast; the long neutralized section; and then balls to the wall racing for three hours. I remember one stage in particular – 60 miles long, and covered in not much more than two hours. Our average that day was 29.6mph – you don’t get many stages of the Tour de France run off at that speed.
Despite all that, I did manage to force my way into the top 10 on three stages, my best placing being fifth in one bunch sprint. But on stages where there were hills I had no chance – having had a growth spurt in my late teens, I was bigger than most other road cyclists, who tended to be small and wiry – and it turned into a massive test of endurance and willpower just to finish. By the end there were three of us left in the Scottish team – the other two having abandoned – but I did finish, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. The 1994 Junior Tour of Ireland also gave me the answer to one question that had lurked at the back of my mind, as it does with any young cyclist.
Would I ever ride the world’s most famous race, the Tour de France?
No. Definitely not.
It was with the Dunedin Cycling Club that I started riding at Meadowbank Velodrome, the track in Edinburgh that was built for the 1970 Commonwealth Games, and rebuilt for the 1986 Games.
I vividly remember my introduction to Meadowbank. But I’d imagine that most people remember their first visit, because it’s so difficult to find. It’s in a strange place, out on a limb from the rest of the Meadowbank Stadium and sports centre, which includes an athletics stadium and football pitches on a sprawling, campus-style complex. You enter the car park, with the main stadium on your left, and then drive to the furthest corner of the car park, where a narrow, pockmarked road runs parallel to the main Edinburgh–London rail line. After about 100 metres it opens out into another small car park, with a Portakabin – headquarters to the Scottish Cyclists’ Union – on your left, and, straight ahead, a big, white, pebbledash building.
There is no clue that it is a velodrome, and no obvious entrance. You gain access to it by some steps that lead down into a dark tunnel, which tends to act as a repository for rainwater … ah yes, rain: a subject I’ll return to in a moment. There are often a couple of puddles to avoid as you make your way through the tunnel, heading for the set of steps at the other end, taking you back up into daylight.
I remember emerging from the tunnel that first time, blinking, into the light, and being taken aback, and a little intimidated, by what I saw. For all that the place was clearly quite run down, and the entrance so unprepossessing, there is nothing that really prepares you for your first view, ‘in the flesh’, of a velodrome. Before me there stood what looked like a wooden wall of death: the corners really were like vast vertical walls rearing up from the ground. Though I had known what a velodrome was, I hadn’t anticipated how steep its corners would be. And, funnily enough, that’s usually the first thing most people say when they enter a velodrome for the first time.
Meadowbank’s only failing – and one of the reasons for it looking so run down – is that it has never had a roof. Rain has always been the curse of the place, and many a scheduled session of racing or training has been destroyed over the years by rain, which renders the wooden boards unrideable by transforming them into an ice rink. But the problem goes beyond interruptions to the calendar. The constant exposure of the track to the elements has taken its toll, damaging the boards, and leaving them prone to splintering. As I write, the Meadowbank Velodrome still stands – just. I supported the ‘Save Meadowbank’ campaign in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, and following the Games the track – and indeed the entire complex – was granted a reprieve by Edinburgh Council. It would be nice to think that this was in response to the campaign, but I suspect it also had rather a lot to do with the economic crisis and its effect on the value of the land that the track sits on. The site of the velodrome had been earmarked for luxury flats, but as the value of land plummeted, this scheme made less and less financial sense to the council. So, Edinburgh still has a cycling track, though for how long, no one really knows. It could certainly do with a new one – nothing fancy, just something beginners can have a shot on, and serious riders can train on, 12 months of the year. In other words, preferably with a roof.
Thinking back to my early outings on the track, there was no real Eureka! moment; nothing, initially, that indicated to me that I had finally found the sport to which I would dedicate the next 20 years – and counting – of my life. The first time I turned up was on a Friday evening for a Dunedin track night. I suspect that everyone has felt daunted before going out there, and I was no different. I was given a track bike belonging to the East of Scotland Cycling Association – a very basic, fairly old machine with no gears and no brakes, as is the norm with track bikes.
Track bikes have ‘fixed wheels’ – only one gear and no brakes – and so you slow down by easing the pressure on the pedals, which is a lot less effective than squeezing some brake levers with your fingers. As a consequence, you have less control on a track bike, and once you are up there on the boards, you are largely at their mercy. Or at least that’s what it feels like at first.
As I wheeled my borrowed track bike over to the straight – where the gradient is more gentle – and swung my leg over, I was very nervous and a little bit excited. There was a group of riders lapping the 250-metre track, going at around 25 to 30mph, riding in a compact line, one tucked behind the other for maximum shelter. Riding in such close proximity to each other with no gears and no brakes looked as if it took skill and nerve in equal measure, and I wasn’t sure when, or if, I’d be able to do that. My first thought was that I should keep out of their way.
Our club coach, Ray Harris, who was running the training session, gave me a few pointers. ‘Keep your speed up – if you go into the banking too slowly, the tyres will lose their traction and you’ll slide … look where you want to go – straight in front of you … use the lines on the track, especially the black one near the bottom, to keep your bearings … overtake riders on the outside, not the inside … and whatever you do, don’t try to stop pedalling!’ This is the biggest danger for the fixed wheel novice. If you make any kind of effort on the road you can freewheel for a bit to recover. If you try that on the track, with the ‘fixed wheel’ bikes, you’ll do a good impression of a cowboy on an angry horse, and end up on your (soon to be splintered) backside. The pedals won’t stop, so you can’t just stop pedalling; you have to ease off gradually. Depending on how fast you’re going, it can take a lap or two to come to a complete halt.
As I set off off along the home straight, Ray shouted after me, urging me to press harder on the pedals, and to increase my speed as I entered the banking – to commit to it. Commitment was the key; if I backed off at all I’d slither down the track. But it’s counter-intuitive: your instinct is to back off, because if the banking seems steep from the centre, it appears even steeper as you ride into it. And it does appear, at first, as though you are riding into a wall rather than around a bend; it can induce a claustrophobic feeling, looming over you, almost swallowing you up and giving you nowhere to go. The bend curves to the left, but every instinct is telling you to lean to the right to try and correct that. It takes several laps just to begin to feel confident on the bends; to ride at speed, leaning, counter-intuitively, into them rather than trying, counterproductively, to lean out