Did I have any talent? If I did, it was well hidden – though, as I have said already, I think the notion of ‘talent’ is overrated. Counting against me, at this stage, was that I didn’t specialize in one event: I did everything. I began taking part in the Meadowbank Track League on a Tuesday evening – when it wasn’t rained off – where I would ride every race going. I was 16, still reasonably skinny – around 74 kilos, as opposed to the 93 I weigh now – and trying to be as lean as possible. If you look at most cyclists, they are as slender as jockeys, with large thighs, but sunken cheeks and protruding rib cages. The only cyclists who didn’t conform to that stereotype were track sprinters, but I was a long way from deciding that’s what I wanted to be. I was still riding the road, and doing endurance events – the pursuit and bunch races – on the track.
By 1993 I was riding the track league most weeks, and my first full season of track cycling coincided with the sudden emergence on to the world stage of a Scottish superstar. Graeme Obree, mentioned at the start of the last chapter, had been winning time trials for years, while enjoying a close rivalry with Chris Boardman, the English rider who, the previous year, became the first British cyclist in 84 years to win an Olympic gold medal, claiming the pursuit at the Barcelona Games – another event that I found profoundly inspiring. Boardman’s success seemed also to inspire Obree; he could see his rival’s career taking off and his name in lights and obviously thought, ‘That could be me.’
But the question for Obree was, how? He set his sights on the prestigious world ‘hour’ record, which had been established in 1984 by the Italian Francesco Moser, beating the mark set in 1972 by the legendary Eddy Merckx. ‘The hour’ is an unusual race, measuring simply the distance you ride in 60 minutes, and it was seldom ridden – mainly, perhaps, because it was so brutally tough. After his record ‘hour’ Merckx reckoned it had taken five years off his life.
Boardman had announced that he would have a go at Moser’s record in July, but Obree cheekily beat him to it, travelling to the Hamar track in Norway and bettering Moser’s mark just a week before Boardman’s planned assault. It was an audacious thing to do, but that was Obree all over. Though he had no real back-up or financial support, he lived by the credo of nothing is impossible – or ‘impossible is nothing’, as one of my sponsors puts it. Though Boardman beat his record a week later – only for Obree to claim it back the following year – Obree also won the world pursuit title that year, beating Boardman.
Obree became my cycling hero, as did Boardman. We weren’t blessed, in Scotland or Britain, with an abundance of world-class riders we could aspire to emulate, but Obree and Boardman’s rivalry sparked huge interest. Apart from them, the ‘heroes’ of the sport were, and had always tended to be, the continental road riders, or, on the track, the Australian and French sprinters. Boardman’s victory in the 1992 Olympics was a big inspiration to me – I listened to it on the BBC’s World Service on a family holiday in France – and Obree ticked every box as far as I was concerned – he was the best in the world, he was an original, he was inspirational … and he was from Scotland.
Cycling Weekly was a good resource for the latest Obree news. But it was surreal that he was one of us, competing in my own backyard. Guys from my club would come home from time trials in the West of Scotland, having competed against him on the GD21 course, or whatever, and report back. The times he was doing were unbelievable: he’d go four minutes faster than me over a 10-mile time trial. He seemed superhuman.
I first saw him at the national championships in Leicester in 1993, a month after he broke the hour record. This was before the world championships, and he had to win the national title to be selected for the British team alongside the Olympic champion, Boardman, whose selection had been guaranteed. Obree reached the final, where he faced Bryan Steel, one of the country’s most consistent pursuit riders. I was in the crowd watching, preparing to cheer on Obree, but my heart stopped as the race got under way and he pulled his foot out of the pedal.
He had been a strong favourite to beat Steel, having qualified fastest, but this mishap looked to have cost him the race, and his place at the world championships. Obree lost several seconds trying to get his foot back in – something that’s not easy on a fixed wheel bike, with the pedals constantly in motion – and when he eventually began to get going, working hard to turn the huge gear he used, he was well down on Steel. I was caught up in the excitement of it and moved to the edge of the track, cheering him on. It was a classic pursuit race, and gradually Obree began to reel him in, eventually coming through to win. It was an amazing performance, and entirely typical of Obree, whose life story was far from straightforward, and involved overcoming – sometimes selfinflicted – hurdles and difficulties. Funnily enough, I recently watched a Graeme Obree DVD with footage of this race, and saw myself standing watching in the back straight – a skinny youth in a white cap.
Obree wasn’t the only rider to pull his foot out of the pedal at those championships. I did, too. It was in qualifying for the junior pursuit, and I was using the old toe-clips and straps, which, ironically, were supposed to be more secure than the new clip-less pedals. Embarrassingly, and unlike Obree, I wasn’t able to reattach my foot to my pedal – there are echoes here of my traumatic foot-pedal mishap at the BMX world championships in Slough seven years earlier – and so I rode the entire race, all three kilometres, with my foot resting on top of the pedal, rather than secured in it. Consequently, it took me roughly the same time to cover three kilometres as for Obree to do four. I didn’t qualify.
And I didn’t do much better in the sprint, scraping through qualification in seventeenth (eighteen went through), then dead-heating in the first-round ‘repechage’. My campaign didn’t last much longer, but the experience of riding those championships, at the end of a summer when I’d been doing more rowing than cycling (I had just come from the Home Countries rowing championships, which were also a disaster: we sank the boat) was an eye-opener. As far as track cycling went, I recognize now that I was really only playing at it, and my going to the British championships was the equivalent of a golfer whose experience is limited to the driving range playing a round with Tiger Woods.
Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but I was certainly up against some serious opponents. Some of them had highly specialized, and very pricey, track bikes, whereas I used the same machine for sprint and pursuit, the only concession being to change the handlebars between races. I was competitive in terms of my attitude, but I wasn’t under any illusions – I knew I didn’t have the same experience, and hadn’t put in the same work as some of the others.
Really, the highlight of my first national track championships didn’t come in any of my races, but in briefly meeting Obree. He was so unassuming and approachable; no matter who you were (or weren’t), he put you at ease, and you got the impression he’d happily spend all day signing autographs, posing for photographs and chatting. He just seemed so normal. But as far as performance was concerned, he occupied a different planet.
When I returned to Leicester for the national championships the following year, having ridden virtually a full season of track league – and more or less finished with rowing – several things had changed, including my club. Over the winter of 1993/94 I decided I wanted to focus more on track cycling, and I joined a club dedicated to the track, the City of Edinburgh Racing Club. This was an impressive set-up, the Manchester United of British track racing, since it didn’t only sweep the board at the national championships, but it also tended to sign up all the best talent. I don’t include myself in that category, incidentally, but it was a club that took racing seriously, and it had an aura about it. A bit like the British track cycling team now, it was a club where mediocrity was not accepted;