On that occasion, having been introduced and interviewed in the middle of the pitch, I was asked if I was a big rugby fan.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I played at school, went to Murrayfield a lot – I love it.’
‘OK, Chris, a final question,’ said the MC. ‘Who are you supporting today?’
‘Well, no surprises there, I’m an Edinburgh boy, so I’m backing THE REIVERS!’
I was hoping to get a big cheer from the 5,000 in the crowd. Instead, and much to my surprise, there was a stunned silence, then a chorus of boos. Unbeknown to me, six months earlier, the city’s professional rugby club had changed its name from the Edinburgh Reivers to the Gunners. Which might sound innocuous enough, but in the highly politicized and heavily factionalized world of Scottish rugby, it was significant – they had only been the Reivers after an amalgamation, of sorts, with the Borders regional team. And now the name had been reassigned to the Borders; so ‘the Reivers’ referred not to Edinburgh, but to their bitterest rivals. What I had done was a bit like shouting ‘Come on, City!’ at Old Trafford – though fortunately rugby supporters are a little less partisan, and a lot more forgiving.
There was no such faux pas at Murrayfield in November 2008. Wearing a Scotland shirt with ‘3’ and ‘Hoy’ on the back, and with my three Olympic gold medals hanging from my neck, I was introduced to the crowd and walked into a wall of noise, plonking the ball down in the middle, then turning to the Scotland team and making what I hoped would be a series of rousing, fist-clenched gestures. I may even have shouted ‘Go onnnnnnnn!’ or something similarly encouraging. There was nothing planned or rehearsed about it; it was completely spontaneous, inspired by the noise of the crowd and the exhilarating sense of anticipation, expectation and sheer drama inside Murrayfield Stadium. It didn’t work, unfortunately – Scotland lost, after a decent performance – but the response from the crowd had a similar effect on me to that of David Sole’s famous slow march: the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was stunned. In all my previous visits to Murrayfield, most of them in the schoolboy enclosure, I could never have imagined that one day a cyclist would receive such a reception.
My souvenir Scotland shirt now hangs in a frame in my house, a memento of an unforgettable experience, and a reminder of my boyhood dream of one day playing for my country.
The time has probably come to admit that it is the closest I’ll ever get to fulfilling it.
Smells of Sandwiches and Mars Bars
Yes, my childhood revolved around sport – so far, adulthood hasn’t been much different – and bikes were the dominant theme. My BMX career, which started when I was seven, ran along parallel lines to my football, then rugby, and almost outlasted both. I retired from BMX when I was 14, and stopped playing rugby the following year.
But my burgeoning interest in BMX coincided with a very difficult time for my family, following the deaths, within two weeks of each other, of my grandma and grandpa – my dad’s parents. To appreciate how profound an effect this had on me, not to mention my dad, mum and sister Carrie, I should describe our living arrangements, which were fairly unusual. We lived in the top-floor flat of a townhouse in Murrayfield, a nice suburb of Edinburgh, and, in the style of a big Italian family (not that we have a drop of Italian blood, as far as I know), we shared the house with my grandparents, who lived downstairs in a separate flat with a shared entrance. In other words, to enter our house I had to go through my grandparents’ front door, which meant I saw them all the time.
It was the type of house, in the kind of setting, that presented myriad opportunities for boys’ own-style adventures. There was a decent-sized garden at the back, with a disused railway line over the wall at the end; a place that was, inevitably, out of bounds. I was always warned not to play on the railway line, that it was ‘dangerous,’ which naturally heightened my curiosity. Back in those days it was little more than a stretch of wasteland, overgrown and quite wild, though the platform from the old railway station, which was right behind our house, remained. These days, it has been tarmaced and is a popular cycle track, though I’m sure 8-year-old kids are still told to stay away. When I wanted to get round this rule, I didn’t clamber over the wall at the end of the garden – that was too obvious – instead, I sneaked around the side of the house, entering by the old platform, with my sister sometimes a partner-in-crime and willing accomplice in the illicit adventure.
Poor Carrie. She is two years older than me, and could be a little bit bossy, as elder sisters are prone to be towards baby brothers; and I could be a little brat, as baby brothers are prone to be towards elder sisters. We always got on well and still do, but I could be a bit sneaky as a young kid and I would frequently land her in trouble. If she was being bossy, and I was winding her up by resisting her commands, I had a knack of being able to make her snap at precisely the moment that Mum or Dad would appear on the scene. In they’d walk, to Carrie screaming and shouting, and me sitting there looking put-upon, an imaginary halo floating above my head. Still, Carrie and I were always playing together, and we had a lot of fun, especially in the garden, and up at the top of the road – where we were allowed to play – in an area we called ‘the Conkers,’ a clearing with huge chestnut trees. As we got older Carrie and I only became closer and closer, even as our own interests diverged. She was more into art than sport, and she loved reading, going on eventually to work in publishing. She was always highly intelligent, and became ‘Dux’ of our school, though, despite her talents, she has never seemed to have any ego at all. That can be seen in her support for me throughout my cycling career, which has been incredible, from attending all my major events, to, afterwards, spending hours producing beautiful albums of the press cuttings and photographs. These are no Pritt Stick jobs – they are stunning coffee table-sized books, and priceless mementos which have to be seen, and flicked through, to be fully appreciated.
My parents bought the family house in 1969, when they were newly married – and they remain there to this day, forty years on. It has proved a solid investment, then, though their friends questioned that at the time, since it meant – according to my dad – that they couldn’t afford furniture and didn’t go out for more than a year. After a year, so the family legend goes, they bought a fridge and went to the cinema. Or should that be ‘the pictures’?
The story of how they bought the house was unusual, too. It was owned by a wealthy friend of my grandma – my dad’s mum – who allowed my parents to live in the top-floor flat while they were looking for property; the arrangement was for six months. But in the midst of that she decided to sell, and offered them first refusal. The house was valued at around £5,000 and my parents, who had fallen for it, really pushed the boat out to buy it.
The house was far too big for the pair of them, but, with the shared entrance, it was impossible to rent out one of the floors. A solution presented itself a year later, when my dad’s parents, Jerry and Mary, lost the house in which they lived. My grandpa was the manager of a grocery depot, and he and my grandma lived in a flat above the warehouse, which was in Leith, and thus explains my dad’s allegiance to the Leith football team, Hibernian. The flat came with the job, and when grandpa retired, in 1970, they had to move. So it was that they came to live with my parents in Murrayfield, occupying the first floor, while we – not that I was born quite yet – lived upstairs.
Having my grandparents downstairs was fantastic, the perfect scenario for a young kid. There was the security aspect; if we were playing in the garden, or on the street, they could keep an eye on us (most of the time), as well as my parents. And of course, it meant I saw them all the time, frequently as I rushed past after coming in their – and our – front door, before dashing up the internal stair that led into our flat. After dinner I’d often sneak downstairs for some biscuits from my grandma, though my abiding memory of evenings with my grandparents was the intense heat. Like a lot of older people, they had