Richard Bath: Keirin can propel Sir Chris Hoy to very top

THERE has been endless television punditry chat about the greatest Olympian of all time. Jesse Owens and Michael Phelps have led a cast of thousands, with one-shot wonders from Bob Beamon to Tommy Smith being lauded. But so far, incredibly, Sir Chris Hoy has barely merited a mention. That, though, may well change this week when the 36-year-old Scot competes in the keirin.

Already Scotland’s most successful Olympian, Hoy now stands on the cusp of undisputed greatness. If he retains his keirin title in front of 6,000 screamingly partisan fans at the velodrome at 5:50pm on Tuesday, his six gold medals will eclipse the five won by rowing’s Sir Steve Redgrave.

A medal of any sort will see him top the British Olympic medal table by equalling cyclist Bradley Wiggins’ mark of seven (Hoy also has a silver medal from the Sydney Olympics)while also having won more golds than the divine sideburns. Either way, he seems sure to end these Games as Britain’s most prolific Olympic winner of all time.

Even without the sheer numerical superiority, there is ample reason to install the Edinburgh bullet in a class of his own. Apart from Wiggins, who won six medals in the velodrome before heading out to win his seventh on the road, and the largely forgotten Paulo Radmilovic, who a century ago won a trio of water polo gold medals and a gold at the 200m freestyle relay, no-one has come close to matching his adaptability. Five-times Olympian Redgrave may pip him for longevity by one Games, but it is the Scot who has shown an unparalleled ability to adapt.

After all, as a young rider inspired by the film ET to take up BMX (he was ranked in the world’s top ten) and who later gave that up along with rugby (he was in the George Watson’s first XV) and rowing (he competed for Scotland’s junior coxless pairs) in favour of track cycling, he threw himself into the event which best suited his raw power and speed, the 1km time trial, known as the “kilo”. Such was his explosive strength and peerless technique that he was marked out as a future champion from his earliest days as a teenager with the Dunedin Cycling Club.

If it was no surprise when Hoy won his first Olympic gold in the kilo in 2004, having already won silver in 2000 in his other great event, the team sprint, it was, however, a complete shock when the event was dropped from the schedule for the 2008 Olympics. For many riders it would have meant the end of the line, yet despite widespread scepticism Hoy moved flawlessly into the keirin. It wasn’t quite like a triple jumper moving into long jump, or Usain Bolt taking up hurdling, but it wasn’t far off.

Rather than the hell-for-leather explosiveness of the kilo, the keirin involves six to eight riders following a small motorbike called the “Derny” for five and a half circuits of the track before the motorbike peels off, sparking a pell-mell scramble to the line for the remaining two and a half laps.

Despite the highly technical nature of the event and Hoy’s late adoption of it, he has come to completely dominate the keirin, winning gold in Beijing (to go with the team and individual sprint) and four golds and one silver in the past five world championships.

It was the most recent of those world championships, at Melbourne in April this year, which once again underlined just what a peerless performer Hoy remains and set the scene for this week’s historic race. Hemmed in and seemingly out of contention, the Scot pulled off an audacious manoeuvre to swoop down off the banking and crowbar his way along the inside past Kiwi Simon van Velthooven and eventual silver medallist Max Levy of Germany to record the most spectacular of all his 11 world championship medals.

It was, he said at the time, the point at which he believed he could retain his title in front of his home crowd in his final Games. With this week’s spectacular team sprint gold proving the Hoy and his confreres are actually better than four years ago – the threesome comfortably beat the British time set in Beijing, setting two world records in the process – Tuesday’s keirin could be the most tumultuous race in the whole Olympics.

Standing in his way will be teammate Jason Kenny, second-favourite Levy and Gregory Bauge, the fearsomely strong Frenchman. Hoy, though, is expected to beat them all: the bookies have him at an unbackable 4/6 on, while none of his rivals are any shorter than 6-1.

Nor are the bookies the only ones who believe Hoy will end these Games as the greatest British Olympian of all time. The man himself said after the team sprint that he “had dug deeper than ever before”. Ominously for the rest of the keirin field, he added, that the race represents a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” which he is utterly determined to take. Few will doubt that he has the armoury to do so.