Golden Hoy - Chris Hoy interview

Published on Thursday 28 August 2008 15:17

STEP away from the podium. Chris Hoy is up there with his three Olympic gold medals and it's all glitz and glamour and euphoria. A few months ago, you might have whispered, Chris who? For most of us, he was born up there, emerging triumphant from the birth canal of the cycling track, baptised with sweat, destined for glory.

But of course the story doesn't start there. So move away and peep instead through here, through the windows of a Manchester gym.

Hoy is doing interval training, trying to create lactic acid in his body, the stuff that causes the burning sensation in your legs when you run up several flights of stairs in one go. He's on a static bike, going nowhere but hell. He's repeatedly pushing himself with only short recovery periods in between and his body feels like it's flooding with poison.

"It's the worst pain you could possibly imagine," he says. And see that figure bent over? That's him afterwards, throwing up. "You either do it 100% or you don't do it at all," he says. "It's like a torture chamber in there but you know that's what makes the difference."

Now here he is in an Edinburgh caf, where we're going to have breakfast the day after his return from Beijing. He comes in really quietly and sits down with his back to the door, facing all the camera equipment at the back but not immediately registering that it's for him.

The thing about people in interviews is that they are often so careful about the big picture of how they represent themselves that they forget how revealing the small details are. But everything Hoy does tells a story, from his understandable reluctance to put his feet on a restaurant table for the photographer, ("Can't we use a chair?" he asks) to the way he thanks another customer for offering to move to accommodate the pictures.

And when I see that the waiter has brought scrambled eggs instead of the poached eggs Hoy asked me to order, the cyclist won't hear of it being changed. It's fine. He has that particular focus of a person who knows what's worth bothering about and what's not.

That's what is interesting about Hoy. The way two facets of his personality dovetail: the affable and mannerly, and the ruthlessly competitive. "I've always been competitive," he admits. He got more controlled as he got older but his sister, who is four years older, found him irritating as a child, the way he turned everything into a contest. But he's never understood the big-mouth athletes and boxers; the ones who exercise their jaws as much as their bodies. "Maybe it's a kind of commercial thing but why talk about what you are going to do? Why make a big deal of it and put down your opponents? You're better just keeping your mouth shut, training as hard as you can, and then when it comes to the day, doing all your talking on the track. I've always tried to unleash the competitive spirit, the desire and drive, in training and in competition. When I am on the track, I am definitely a different person to who I am day to day."

He once said he wouldn't allow himself negative thoughts. So where's the border between arrogance and self belief in an athlete? "I think it's a misconception that athletes are supremely confident because they are not. I think more than most people they are full of self doubt. That's probably what drives them on because if you believed you were going to win all the time, there wouldn't be the same interest in trying to achieve the goal.

"If it was easy, and you knew you could do it, why would you bother? It would become boring and you would lose the motivation. There's always self doubt. Every day you have doubts about your fitness, your training, your injury status. But it's how you deal with doubts, particularly when you come to race day."

Hoy doesn't talk much about talent. He talks about graft. "You have to dig deep in every session you do. You can give 99% and the coach wouldn't know. The stop watch would only be a little bit down. Only you would know if you had given everything. It's about day in, day out, being able to give everything you possibly can so that when you get to race day, if you get beaten you can accept it because you haven't left anything out.

"If I turned up at a race feeling under-prepared, not having trained as hard as I possibly could, not having looked after my diet, having had a few beers the week before, I would be thinking, I wonder if I had done that differently… I don't want to be in that position standing on the podium in second or third place – or not having made the podium – and thinking what if…"

Talent is one thing but most people would be amazed what discipline and hard work can do. The public think Olympic athletes are superhuman but really it's not their talent that is extraordinary. It's their drive, ambition and determination. Their power is in their heads as much as their bodies. "You get out what you put in," says Hoy. "If you really work hard at something, and dedicate your life to it, you can achieve anything."

WHEN HOY WAS SIX, he went round to visit a friend's house. He couldn't ride a bike but his friend could – and so could his friend's four-year-old brother. Well, he couldn't have that, could he? A younger kid whizzing round on two wheels when he couldn't. His friend's dad took the three of them down to a bit of flat ground and eventually the stabilisers got removed, and Hoy went home to announce his triumph. He could ride a bike. His parents bought him a 5 model at a jumble sale and he was off.

When he talks of his parents, you get a glimpse into the influences that have fed into Hoy, making him the person and the athlete he is. His mother is a nurse, "a people person", he says, "very kind and caring". His father has been in the building industry all his life, working at everything from labouring to contract managing to surveying.

Interestingly, his father went to university in his fifties because he wanted to become a surveyor. It suggests the kind of vision and drive that has marked Hoy's own career on the cycling track.

Hoy first studied physics at St Andrews University before switching to a sport science course in Edinburgh. The move was not entirely linked to his studies. Hoy had been a BMX competitor in his teens and was dabbling in cycling at university. Now he wanted to see how far he could go in the sport, and since there were no training facilities in St Andrews, he moved back home to be nearer the Edinburgh velodrome.

It was one little step at a time, he says. Reaching the national team. Representing Scotland at the Commonwealth Games. By the time he graduated in 1999, lottery funding meant he could go into cycling full time if he moved to Manchester where the national training facilities are. The acknowledgement that such a move was necessary for him to fulfil his potential and his dreams explains Hoy's recent lukewarm response to the suggestion that Scotland should have its own Olympic team. It frustrates him, he says, that he has been misquoted on this issue.

But was his statement purely about the practicalities of a Scottish team or was it political as well?

"I have never been more proud than when I represented Scotland at the Commonwealth Games," he says. "I'm fiercely patriotic. But the point is that before any call by Alex Salmond or whoever for a Scottish Olympic team, you need to provide the facilities for Scottish athletes to be able to perform at the highest level. So for me as a cyclist, if I were to compete for Scotland alone and not GB, where would I train? When the Edinburgh velodrome closes at the end of September, where would I train until April? The facilities aren't there. There aren't enough world-class facilities and you need world-class facilities to compete at the Olympic Games."

The velodrome in Manchester was built in 1994 and has taken ten years to show results. "It's not an overnight thing, so you need to get the facilities, the coaches, the infrastructure. It takes a lot of time, hard work, money and investment and then you start to see results. So I say put your money where your mouth is – invest in the sport. Show us your commitment to it, that it's not just jumping on a political bandwagon, and of course I would represent Scotland at an Olympic Games. It would be amazing."

There is no doubt that in recent years the relationship between Scotland and England has, for political reasons, shifted and hardened. But, says Hoy, there was great spirit in the British team that transcended politics. "The thing that baffles me is why people perceive Great Britain as England. It's not. That's why you can be proud to be British as well as Scottish because Scotland is part of Britain, same as Wales and Northern Ireland. There was fantastic spirit in Beijing. The whole team came together and supported each other, no matter what sport you were from.

"With each medal came momentum and the feeling that you were achieving something really special here. It's naive to think sport and politics can be separated but it's a shame because the whole point about the Olympic ideal is drawing people from all over the world together, uniting under the same spirit, the same ethos."

When pressed about whether Britain should have a single football team for the London Olympics, he says, "All I would say is that Scotland wouldn't want to lose its identity from a FIFA perspective but I think it would also be a shame not to have representation at all the sports. So if there was any way of getting round the situation, it would be great to have a British team, hopefully with Scottish players involved too.

"The debate will rage from all angles but I still think the host nation should be represented at all sports. I'm sure there must be a way round it in terms of FIFA, the International Olympic Committee and the British Olympic Association coming to some kind of agreement that won't compromise the status of Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland."

Moving to Manchester was a sign of the commitment that has characterised Hoy's cycling career. For young cyclists, he is the main inspiration, the all or nothing hero they admire. "If you talk to people in cycling," says 18-year-old Morven Brown, the current Scottish junior cross country champion, "Chris Hoy is the one they all want to be like. He doesn't race for second place."

There have been sacrifices. Hoy lives in Manchester while his girlfriend Sarra Kemp, a lawyer, lives in Edinburgh. At 32, he has reached the age where a lot of his contemporaries are married with kids. He is now in a long-term relationship but has he been aware in the past of sacrificing a private life for his sport?

"Family and friends, going out and enjoying yourself, have to be put on hold during the season. If I don't put the work in, if I'm not disciplined, I won't get the results. But it's a very short lived thing being an athlete… a number of years and it's all over and you can spend the rest of your life making up for the things you missed out on.

"A lot of people these days are leaving marriage and starting families a bit later but I think you know when the time is right. At the moment I have to be so focused on myself… a bit selfish… no… at least self centred… well, you have to put yourself first." He smiles. "Yeah, I suppose selfish. You have to put yourself first as an athlete."

But there is no doubt, he says, that Kemp, whom he met two years ago, has changed his life. "I don't believe you can get the best out of yourself in training and competition if you're not content in your life as a whole. Sarra's just been so critical and crucial to my performance because she's so understanding.

"When I'm away from home she doesn't pine for me… it's bad enough if you're missing your girlfriend but if she's at home crying down the phone and having a hard time, it makes life really difficult. She knows it's short term and we have the rest of our lives to make up for the time we aren't spending together now."

They share a sense of humour, he says. I suspect they'd better – because he then says that seeing each other only at weekends means at least they're pleased to see one another and jokes that getting sick of the sight of one another will come later in their relationship.

The team psychologist is always trying to get him to think logically rather than emotionally, which might not always be great for a relationship but clearly works in the accumulation of gold medals. "When emotions creep in, that's when you behave irrationally… or like a human being. The psychologist, Steve Peters, teaches us to be robotic essentially. You have to know you have done thousands of hours of training. If you start thinking, oh it's the Olympics, or, there's people here, or you think about the consequences of failure, then you don't perform to your normal level."

Emotions can be harmful, a distraction. If he was going to lose focus, what would be the most likely thought to sabotage his race? "I think it would be, what's going to happen if this doesn't work out." Fear of failure? "Not fear of failure but fear of sacrificing a lot for little gain."

Negative thoughts pop into his head all the time. But the truly successful athlete is the one who can keep those thoughts out. The differences between athletes' strength and performance now are marginal – the difference is shown elsewhere.

"Whenever I get those thoughts, I try to visualise the race, the ideal scenario, how I want the race to pan out. You can only think of one thing at a time. That's why you see these athletes at the start of a race who look like they're in a trance. They're visualising the race, going over and over it in their heads. The more you rehearse, the more it seems natural that it will happen that way."

Peters has a phrase for it. Keeping the chimp in the cage. "The chimp is your emotional side. You can let him out afterwards. That's why you see athletes on the podium in tears. But during events, you have to keep him locked up. You have to keep the chimp in the cage."

THE CHIMP STAYED in the cage. Hoy visualised. He kept the negative thoughts out. He won. But euphoric as that made him, the gold medal he had already won in Athens in 2004 had already taught him an important lesson. "There was such a build up to that but when I won, I realised nothing changes. It's just a part of your life. It's not everything in your life."

To be too goal-centred can be destructive. Perhaps it's that which leads some athletes to take drugs, a problem that has dogged cycling more in the Tour de France than Olympic events. (Hoy says he's as much like a Tour de France rider as a sprinter is a marathon runner.)

"In all sports, you get people who try to take short cuts and cheat but the testing procedures have become far more stringent. There's nowhere to hide. You have to be available for testing 365 days a year so you have to give notification of where you are at all times. I probably get tested once a month.

"At the Olympics, they're freezing samples and keeping them for up to eight years so hopefully, when testing methods improve, we can retrospectively catch people who have been cheating at these Games and that's good from my perspective."

Sometimes, psychologists have noted, achieving your goals can bring elation, then depression, a sense of aimlessness. But Hoy has redefined his goals. He is already thinking ahead to the 2012 Olympics in London and the Commonwealth Games two years later. He enjoys the training, he says. There are sacrifices but he loves his lifestyle.

Hoy's agent at 110sport says the cyclist's gold medals will inevitably bring him millionaire status in the coming years with lucrative sponsorship deals. It seems unlikely to change him.

In Beijing, Kemp and the family he calls the most supportive in the world were watching as he clocked up his three wins. They know what success means to him, and he knows his success means the same to them. "There's never been any pressure. They have always said no matter what happens we will always love you. At the end of the day, they will always be there to say well done or hard luck." Because when the racing's over, the chimp just has to escape the cage. r

Britain United is an open air photography exhibition from adidas, sponsors of Team GB, ParalympicsGB and London 2012, which was unveiled on the South Bank, London, on August 1. The collection features 20 athletes – including Chris Hoy at Edinburgh Castle – pictured in the kit they wore at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Adidas supplies more than 120,000 items of specially tailored kit to over 500 athletes. The exhibition runs until September 17 and is free of charge. Visit www.london2012.com/adidas for more information.