It was fitting that Chris Hoy should win Britain’s 15th gold medal of the
Beijing Games yesterday.
At 6ft 1in and 14½ stone, with a torso that draws gasps when he rolls down his
Lycra bodysuit, few athletes personify better how far British sport has come
since the genteel era of 1920 when the Olympic team last enjoyed such
soaraway success.
The 32-year-old Scot is a formidable sight on a bike. With his space-age
helmet, racing on razor-sharp wheels on a 40 degree angle at nearly 40 miles
an hour, all he is missing is the cape.
Jason Kenny, the 20-year-old Brit who won silver as Hoy powered past him to
complete a Beijing golden hat-trick, has described his older teammate as
“close to unbeatable”.
After Hoy took his medal haul to five – four gold and one silver from three
Olympics – it is safe to say that the caveat can be dropped.
The same could be said for Team GB after an astonishing ten days in which
Great Britain has stunned the world with a display of sporting excellence,
technical prowess and sheer determination to win. With seven golds, Britain
is the undisputed king of the velodrome, a previously alien environment for
most British viewers.
After Nicole Cooke’s opening gold in the road race there are high hopes that
Shanaze Reade will add to the record haul of eight golds when she takes to
the BMX track tomorrow.
By winning three gold medals at a single Games, Hoy equalled a British record
set 100 years ago in London by the swimmer Henry Taylor.
Hoy’s spectacular achievement crowned four days of peerless performances by a
British cycling team that lost out on only three of the ten gold medals up
for grabs in the velodrome.
Their success has catapulted a marginal sport into the public consciousness in
a way not seen since Chris Boardman took gold at the 1992 Games.
While Boardman’s success 16 years ago failed to turn cycling into a mainstream
sport, the 2008 squad’s extraordinary achievement, along with a
multimillion-pound five-year sponsorship deal with the satellite broadcaster
Sky, threatens to change that.
Indeed, Team GB’s excellence has left the rest of the world shaking their
heads. By comparison, the Germans described themselves as a “Mickey Mouse”
operation. Even the Australians, who have long held the bragging rights over
Brits when it comes to sport, are looking to Team GB for inspiration.
Dave Brailsford, British Cycling’s performance director, insists that there is
no magic ingredient. “I wish,” he told The Times, after
accomplishing a feat that began in earnest more than a decade ago.
There is no doubt that the sport has benefited from targeted and sustained
funding. British Cycling received £22.2 million for the four-year build-up
to Beijing from UK Sport, the funding agency. Serious lottery money has
allowed the team to be full-time professionals – a luxury for many of their
part-time rivals.
There is a support team of 70 behind the 14 competitors. Besides the coaches,
there are psychiatrists, scientists, masseurs, engineers, designers and
nutritionists.
“Everyone has been picked for their particular skill. It’s like when you get a
great pop group – when it gels, it works,” Mr Brailsford said.
“Obviously, we need the raw talent. We are in the business of thoroughbreds,
so give us a donkey and we won’t go anywhere.” The theory is that
thoroughbreds such as Hoy work with the best, to be the best.
In the Manchester Velodrome, the state-of-the-art facility built for the
Commonwealth Games, which has been the cornerstone of the team’s success
since 2002, the one thing you won’t hear are raised voices. In the
high-octane atmosphere of the velodrome it is left to the athletes to beat
themselves up.
Giving them “ownership” of their success and failure is a distinguishing
feature of Mr Brailsford’s regime. “It goes against the grain of traditional
thinking but we’re just here as expert advisers. We do not dictate,” he
said.
It is evident in the steely determination of riders such as Rebecca Romero, a
new Olympic champion who switched to cycling after winning a silver rowing
medal in Athens 2004, that British cycling has cracked the mental side of
its sport.
Steve Peters, the team psychiatrist, is no flaky sports psychologist. With
three degrees – in mathematics, medicine and psychiatry – he worked
previously at Rampton secure hospital.
His ability to strip out the frailties and help the athletes to develop a
winning mentality has been demonstrated time and again on competition days,
no more obviously than at these Games.
As Sir Clive Woodward, the British Olympic Association’s performance director,
observed: “Most people just see the glitzy helmets and the flash bikes but
it’s a very tough environment. They’re modern athletes and they train the
house down.”
Like Sir Clive, England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup-winning coach, Mr Brailsford
will find himself held aloft as a sports guru upon his return to Britain.
He has already said that he is willing to share his expertise with other
Olympic sports if they are interested, adding that he “would not dream of
being so arrogant as to offer it”.
But the rest of British sport clearly has much to learn from cycling, an
outfit that has become the envy of the world.
The key cogs in the wheel
Chris Hoy
As a child growing up in Edinburgh, Chris Hoy developed a love for BMX after
becoming obsessed with the biking adventures of the character Elliot and his
friends in E.T., the Steven Spielberg film. His mother, Christine,
bought him his first bike, in a jumble sale for £5, which her son promptly
broke by doing wheelies.
Bradley Wiggins
Former wildchild Wiggins was born in Belgium but raised in London by his
mother after his Australian-born father – himself a successful cyclist –
left when Bradley was 2. Wiggins Sr died this year aged 55 on the side of a
road in Australia. He was clutching a briefcase containing newspaper
cuttings of his son’s success.
Victoria Pendleton
Pendleton was inspired to take up cycling by her father, Max, a talented
amateur who featured on the cover of Cycling Weekly several times.
She excelled at sport at school, where she was so aggressive that she often
lost her voice. Her interests include dressmaking, drawing and baking.
Rebecca Romero
Romero was the first British woman to win an Olympic medal in two sports,
taking silver as a rower at the 2004 Games in Athens before ditching the
boat in favour of the bike. Romero’s only previous cycling experience was
working in a bike shop as a teenager. Romero raised the sport’s profile by
posing naked on her bike in the build-up to the Games.
Nicole Cooke
Some of Cooke’s earliest memories involve pedalling a tandem on family cycling
holidays. A prodigy in more ways than one, Cooke took her first GCSE aged 12
and her maths A level a year early. At the age of 11 she announced on live
television that she wanted an Olympic gold.
Dave Brailsford
The performance director of British Cycling, Brailsford is one of the key
figures in the sport and a guiding light of the Olympic team in its
spectacular haul of medals. The son of a blacksmith, who turned to
mountaineering, Brailsford left school at 16 to become an apprentice
draughtsman, joining the local council’s road design department later. His
doctor told him that riding a bike would help his recovery from a football
injury. Bald.
The Cycling was stunning.
Let's not forget that Steve Peters should be one of the 'The key cogs in the wheel' as he instigated the British Cycling management and working ethos that Dave Brailsford then wholeheartedly embraced and helped implement.
Simon, Salford, Manchester,
As one who has not been interested in the Olympics before, I have become mesmerised by the cycling team and their outstanding performance. What a joy to watch and so thrilling. It inspires me. If only all sport was this exciting!
Henrietta Knight, Southampton, UK