Riding our bikes into Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, we were treated like heroes, but even that didn’t prepare us for the atmosphere inside the velodrome, with its large, concrete, lumpy track, a running track around the inside, and stands absolutely jam-packed with people, probably around 5,000 of them. I was there with two fellow sprinters, Craig MacLean and Peter Jacques, and the endurance rider Martin Williamson, all City of Edinburgh club mates, and on the first night I lined up alongside eight other riders for a keirin. The others were from the islands, with some South Americans there too, including a couple of Cubans who quickly gained a reputation for their no-holds-barred style of racing.
There was some pretty rough riding, to be honest, with the rules sketchy, and an anything-goes approach, particularly when it came to ‘primes’. These are special prizes awarded at the end of certain laps, announced the lap before with a blast of the ‘commissaire’ (referee)’s whistle. Some of these guys would run over their granny to win a prime – a prime, I should add, that carried prize money (we worked out) of approximately £3.50.
In the keirin, with the lumpy track and the jostling, it felt dangerous, and so it proved. I was ‘hooked’ by one of the Cubans, meaning he cut across my line, and down I went, like a tonne of bricks. I was in a bad way, with multiple cuts and road rash, but it was my neck that gave most cause for concern. As I lay on the track I was attended to by an official from the Barbados Cycling Federation, who took me to the local hospital, where I was examined and fitted with a neck brace.
I feared the worst, that my racing trip to the West Indies would be cut short after 24 hours of an intended three-anda-half week odyssey, but, after a couple of days, I had recovered sufficiently to remove the neck brace, get back on my bike and resume racing. The rest of the trip included racing in Trinidad, where we stayed in a terrible hotel, occupied by an army of cockroaches, and competing in one of the most bizarre velodromes on the planet, involving a two-and-a-half hour journey by mini-bus into the middle of a jungle in Palesco. It was a 500-metre track but with bends as steep as a 250m track, which made it unbelievably dangerous, and meant you could hardly ride above the black (bottom) line on the banking. You’d have to ride single-file around the bends and then overtake on the long straights. I fell off there, too, in an incident that proved the point just made: a guy was riding above me on one of the bends, and, even though he was going at a decent speed, his tyres slipped, and he slid down the banking, taking me out. Fortunately I wasn’t too badly hurt this time.
The other memorable incident in Barbados concerned one of my team-mates, Martin. While Craig and I had travelled straight there from a training camp in Majorca, and therefore had a bit of colour – meaning that our skin had turned from the usual Scottish pale blue to creamy white – Martin was as white as a sheet. When he was in the local supermarket he decided to do something about it. On the shelf he saw something called ‘Melatonin’, which he mistook for a natural remedy that he had heard was used by bodybuilders to make their skin turn darker more quickly (basically making their skin more photosensitive). He didn’t realize melatonin was also a natural sleep-promoting remedy. When he looked at the packaging, it said to take one before bed time. ‘Why bed time?’ he asked, before stretching out under the sun for the remainder of the afternoon. It was our first day, we were racing in the evening (when I would suffer my heavy crash), but, as we started to think about leaving, we noticed that Martin had crashed out. We tried to wake him, but he was completely zonked. After several coffees a very lethargic Martin started to come round. But he wasn’t any browner.
Even after living the typical life of a fresher student in that first term at university, I found that, once I got my head down and resumed training, with the training camp in Majorca and racing trip to the West Indies both providing essential building blocks in my preparation for the season, I was still on an upward curve. At the British championships that summer I won my first gold medal, riding with City of Edinburgh in a new event, the three-man team sprint, and added a silver medal in the team pursuit.
As well as Graeme Obree there was another Scottish cyclist who proved a great influence, and an inspiration, at this time. Craig MacLean, one of my companions in the West Indies, was five years older than me. In fact, he still is.
Craig and I were Dunedin club-mates, and he too had dabbled in mountain biking and road racing, but by the mid1990s he was committed to the track, and he was already enjoying some success. Like me, he did a bit of everything, but his main attribute was an incredible turn of pace. Whereas I was still relatively skinny, he was stockier and shorter – more the classic build of a sprinter. He was muscular, but as lean as a particularly lean piece of fillet steak. Craig was definitely going places, even if the City of Edinburgh Racing Club didn’t see that at first. His application to join the club in 1995 was rejected, so he raced that season with the Moray Firth club, based up in the Highlands, which is where he comes from.
I had a long way to go to catch Craig up, although sometimes, if he was on his worst day and I was on my best, it would be close. I remember the first time I beat him. It was during that breakthrough season, 1995, at the Scottish 15km scratch race championship, in a bunch endurance race on the outdoor track at Caird Park in Dundee. This was a track in an even more decrepit state than Meadowbank, and concrete rather than wood, but on this occasion it hosted a great race – though I may be biased.
As we came to the finish, I led it out, with Craig on my wheel. I was going hard, full gas, and I was aware of Craig moving off my wheel, and beginning to claw me back, inching up towards my right shoulder, when I dug as deep as I possibly could, and broke him; he swung off up the track fairly melodramatically, settling for second. Already Craig was seen as the main man, the daddy, and I was regarded as his protégé, which led some to the natural assumption that he had gifted me the race. John McMillan, the race commissaire, came up to both of us afterwards and said: ‘Craig, if you’re going to give him the race, do it more subtly than that …’
I was fuming! I knew I’d won it fair and square, but Craig didn’t correct John – he just laughed. It was like that Billy Connolly sketch, where he mimics someone tripping up on the pavement and breaking into a run as if he had been about to do that all along. Craig was happy to maintain the illusion, because it saved his face. Competitive bugger.
And just to compound the insult, the annual Scottish Cyclists’ Union handbook, which is the bible of Scottish racing, later listed Craig as the winner! He had won it the previous year, and he would go on to win it again the following year, but his name appears as the winner of the title three years in a row. It was my first senior title, and something I was very proud of. Imagine how I felt when I found that my name was missing from the record. I was gutted!
Returning to university after a summer that had yielded senior gold medals in the British and Scottish championships was difficult. St Andrews is picture-postcard beautiful: a seaside town surrounded by vast, golden beaches, as well as the most famous golf course in the world. But I was more interested in velodromes, and increasingly concerned about its isolation in relation to the nearest of them. Meadowbank was around an hour away, and Manchester, to which I was by now almost a weekly visitor, up to five hours.
My dilemma was made worse by the fact that I was less and less sure about the course to which I had committed four years of my life. Maths and physics had been the subjects I’d done OK in at school, but now, though I was passing the exams, and coping with the course work, I was no longer enjoying them. I was also beginning to wonder where they would take me and, more to the point, whether I really wanted to go there …
I returned for my second year harbouring these doubts, and within a couple of weeks I realized they weren’t going to disappear, but would grow worse. When I made the decision, I made it quickly. The degree I’d chosen wasn’t for me, and there was no point in prolonging the uncertainty. I phoned my parents, told them my decision, and, though I’m sure they were concerned, they couldn’t have been more supportive. Subsequently they have admitted to thinking ‘What the hell is he doing?’ and they weren’t all that reassured by my new plans: to try and get on a sports science course. At the time, though, they didn’t interrogate me too much. My dad came and collected me, and I returned home, where my parents made it clear that I couldn’t ‘sponge’