There was only a 10-minute break between the second and third rides – hardly even enough time to vomit – and I was feeling completely exhausted by now; as if I didn’t have another effort in my legs. But I suspected that Bourgain – though he hadn’t had as busy a weekend as me, missing the previous day’s keirin – would be feeling pretty tired as well. It’s at this stage of the competition that the mind games come in. You’re in the track centre, warming up in full view of your opponents, and the trick is to appear less tired than you actually feel (and, if you’re going to throw up, to do so secretly).
I rode slowly around the track centre, preparing for that third ride, with Bourgain himself following the same routine just yards away, and then I made sure I went up to the start first. I wasn’t going to be seen delaying it, buying some more recovery time. When we were called, I was straight there, and I made sure I didn’t slouch in the chair as we waited to go to the line.
When Bourgain came and sat beside me he was shaking his legs out, and stretching them, clearly trying to revive them. Beside him, I sat perfectly still and bolt upright, trying to send out the message that I was fresh, that I was up for it. A pre-race ritual is the presentation of the ‘pegs’ that determine the starting order: peg one means you are on the inside, and lead the sprint off, with peg two giving you the rear position. I picked peg one and sprang up, heading straight to the start. My legs were screaming, but it was all about bluffing it at this point. I’ve no idea whether any of this psychological warfare had any effect.
Following Jan’s advice again, I used the same tactic in the third ride. Once I had forced Bourgain to the front he tried to get me to go past him again, slowing right down, almost coming to a standstill. I could have gone early – and in previous races probably would have panicked and done exactly that – but I stuck to the tactic of sitting patiently behind him, keeping high up the banking, forcing Bourgain to make the first move. Then, again as in the second ride, I swept past him to win, and make the final.
I lost the final to Sireau – after another embarrassment, when I managed to fall off the rollers while ‘revving out’ during my pre-race warm up, pedalling at about 250rpm, and clattering very noisily to the floor – but I didn’t mind too much about losing. Like Bourgain, Sireau had had a day off the previous day. He was relatively fresh, whereas I was on my last legs. It was the race against Bourgain that had been important. To have executed it the way Jan wanted me to – that was the breakthrough.
Shane knew it immediately. So did I. I don’t mean that I suddenly thought I could win the sprint title at the world championships, far less the Olympics, but I felt I’d cracked it, to a certain extent. There was this mythology around the sprint – it seemed like a bit of a black art. As a kilo rider, I was seen as a bit of a diesel engine, with plenty of power, but without the gift of great acceleration, and no tactical nous. If I beat someone in a sprint I was often told it was ‘just gas’ – just power – though Shane had always told me I could be a good sprinter, if I just put my mind to it.
Defeating Bourgain was significant because I was beating a tactically ‘better’ rider, and someone who’d qualified faster than me. It wasn’t gas – I was doing what a successful sprinter has to do: imposing myself on the race, and on my opponent. Match sprinting is cycling’s equivalent of a boxing match, with two opponents going head-to-head, or toe-to-toe; it is as much a battle of wills, and confidence, as a test of speed. Finally I had beaten an accomplished sprinter, and it came simply from not letting my opponent do what he wanted to do.
Four weeks later I surprised a lot of people by beating Theo Bos, also by two rides to one, on my way to reaching the final of the sprint at the world championships in Manchester. I then went on to surprise more people – including myself, I think – by beating Sireau in the final to become the first British rider since Reg Harris to be crowned world sprint champion. Harris, whose legendary status is acknowledged in the shape of an impressive bronze statue overlooking the home straight at the Manchester Velodrome, won the last of his five world sprint titles in 1954. Fifty-four years we had waited to claim the title again – and I was as shocked as anyone.
And now here I was in Beijing, with a chance of adding the Olympic sprint title – something no British cyclist, not even the great Harris, had ever achieved. Given all that was at stake it was just as well, really, that as I ate breakfast with Jason, then spent time talking tactics with Jan, I didn’t allow myself to think about the possible ramifications of success. It is one of the golden rules in the British team, drilled into us by our psychiatrist, Steve Peters: focus on the process, not the outcome.
Even now, with only hours left of the Olympic track cycling programme, I didn’t for a second consider the possibility of three gold medals, or the reaction back home to the success we – Team GB in general, the British cycling team in particular – were enjoying in Beijing. Any thoughts I might have had about how life could change in the event of winning that third gold medal would have been about as helpful as a puncture.
At this point, there was only one thing occupying my mind: my semi-final against Bourgain …
Pimped-up Rides and Broken Hearts
As a sports-obsessed seven-year-old boy Olympic gold medals were a long way from my thoughts, but bikes were not. Bikes were in my thoughts all the time during my childhood in Edinburgh; they occupied every waking hour, with the evidence plastered all over my school jotters, which were filled with poems about bikes, essays about bikes and detailed drawings of my ‘dream machine’.
It’s probably more accurate, however, to say that cycling occupied every waking hour when I wasn’t thinking about football, and obsessing over my favourite team, Hearts (as in Heart of Midlothian), or later, when I was a teenager, when I wasn’t thinking about rugby, and then rowing.
You get the picture: life revolved around sport. I have no idea how I found the time to do anything else. Such as chess, for example. Chess was my first passion, and in my first day at school, George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, I made a point of asking the head teacher how I might join the school chess club. I had been introduced to the game at the age of four by my uncle Derek, who had what was then an unbelievably modern piece of kit – an electronic chess board. I think I was fascinated both by the game and the novelty of the technology, and played my dad all the time; he let me win initially, before his competitive instincts kicked in. Sadly, my chess playing became a casualty of my all-consuming interest in more physical pursuits. But I’m really not sure I was Grandmaster material.
There’s a story which has been told quite a few times now about how I was inspired to take up BMXing after seeing the bike chase scene in E.T., when it came out in 1984, and I was an impressionable seven-year-old. In fact, it has now appeared in the media so often that I’m sure many people’s instinctive reaction would be to assume that it isn’t true – or am I betraying my relatively newfound cynicism?
It comes as a relief to be able set the record straight at last. It’s true. I was inspired by E.T. to take up BMXing. So thank you Elliott, thank you Steven Spielberg … though I suspect my love affair with cycling would probably have blossomed anyway, sooner or later.
Whether it would have started without BMXs is another question. I really don’t know. All I know is that – thanks originally to what I saw in E.T. – BMXs looked like great fun. What’s more, they were the epitome of cool for a seven-year-old kid.
It wasn’t just the bikes – though they were pretty cool. The padded outfits, complete with motorcycle-style helmets, were cool too, and the tracks were magical places, even the rudimentary ones, of which there were a few in Edinburgh. Not too far from my parents’ home, in Murrayfield, there were cinder tracks at Lochend and Danderhall. Lochend had been virtually destroyed, and Danderhall didn’t have a proper gate, but they were still great fun to tear around on our bikes. The nearest track with a proper start gate was in Livingston, a new town