Hoy has Redgrave in his Sights

Chris Hoy was presenting a gong for best super hero at the national film awards in London. His immediate predecessor on stage was Kylie Minogue, and he would be followed by Samuel L Jackson. Meryl Streep got in the elevator with Hoy, looked at his three gold medals hanging round his neck, and congratulated the Scot for his wonderful performance at the Beijing Olympics. 

“Afterwards Samuel L Jackson asked if he could have his photo taken with me,” Hoy reveals, shaking his head with incredulity. “He asked his son to take a picture of him with his arms around my shoulders. That same night Hermione (actress Emma Watson) from the Harry Potter films tapped me on the shoulder and asked for an autograph. I lay in bed that night and asked myself if I had imagined it all.”

It is fair to deduce from all this that life will never be quite the same for the 32-year-old who became the greatest British performer at a single Olympic Games when he won gold in the team sprint, the individual sprint and the keirin at the Laoshan Velodrome. With the gold and silver medals secured at the 2004 Athens Games to add to his Beijing haul, Hoy has now entered the realms of Olympic deification although it is a fact he struggles to take in.

“I’ve been described recently as a legend and it’s something I’m uncomfortable with,” he admits. “I guess on paper the statistics back this up and I’ve always looked at Matthew Pinsent, who has four golds, as a legend, but I don’t feel I’ve changed a bit as a result of Beijing, and I’m a little embarrassed by all the fuss.

“As a kid I used to look at Olympic champions like Daley Thompson or Sebastian Coe, and even Chris Boardman who I work so closely with now, and think of them as Gods. I guess the perception first changed when Jason Queally won the kilo gold at the Sydney Games because I knew him well and he was just a normal, nice guy. Now I’ve got a few medals but it’s still the same person who’s been winning world and Commonwealth medals over the years. I don’t feel as if I did anything different.”

Except win 18 out of 18 races in Beijing, and head Team GB’s incredible domination of the velodrome, with the likes of Bradley Wiggins, Victoria Pendleton and Rebecca Romero acting as handy accomplices.

It was only whilst lying on a beach in Thailand in November after a hectic two months of appearances that he was finally able to reflect on his incredible summer and work out how he managed to pull it off. Hoy came to China with the goal of trying to emulate his two gold and a silver medal in the team sprint at the world championships in Manchester the previous April, or better it, and he had no reason to doubt that he could succeed.
“I knew I couldn’t have done anything more, that I was in the best form of my life, and that it was going to take something special to beat me,” he explains. “Contrary to popular belief, though, I was riddled with doubt but managed to control my emotions enough not to let it get in the way. A lot was going to depend on the team sprint.”
It was this event that won him silver in Manchester, when the French broke the world record and beat the British by four tenths of a second. For Hoy to win the coveted treble, he first had to clear what seemed to be the highest hurdle.
“In the first round we smashed the world record by four tenths of a second and the French hadn’t even been on the track. It killed every opposing team and individual off and for the French, in particular, it meant waving the white flag on day one.”
Even though Hoy took gold for the team with the world’s fastest recorded lap ever, he was already thinking of the next event even before he mounted the medals rostrum.
“I knew the keirin would begin and end the next day and I was confident because of what I’d just done in the team sprint, and because the keirin was my best event. I knew I had no option but to keep my emotions in check. The following day I dominated the opposition from the front and made sure I kept out of trouble all the way to the gold.”
Then came the most taxing part of his five day challenge. Hoy was still expectant, but also aware that all his rivals were fresher for not competing in the keirin. “I broke the Olympic record in the first round with 9.8 seconds, the first time I’d ever gone under ten, and by some distance. After that Jason Kenny and I saw everyone off. Facing my teammate in the final was undoubtedly strange. I knew how good he already was, but I also knew I’d beaten him in every training session, and that’s how I approached the final.”
It was only after he had crossed the finish line with his arms aloft and a third gold medal secured that his rampant emotions, kept in check for five days, exploded into full public view. By the time he had reached his father and girlfriend, Hoy was a weeping wreck.
“It was just everything coming out all at once,” he explains. “I couldn’t celebrate my first or second gold medals and it had been so difficult to keep my emotions at bay. It was relief and disbelief. It was a reaction to the many days, weeks and months of sacrifice, to the times when I doubted myself, and to the physical pain of training which often saw me vomiting. To achieve everything I had dreamt of in front of my family made it the perfect evening. And it was a reflection of how hard the five days had been. The racing was difficult enough but for me the hardest part was the emotional slog of the longest five days of my life.”
Yet still the man is not finished. Despite everything he may have achieved, the appetite for more success burns deep, spurred on by how much he missed training in the weeks following Beijing when he made the most of the window of opportunity afforded to a now four times Olympic champion. “Although I enjoyed the attention and the accolades, I was also becoming cranky and irritable because I was missing my daily fill of training. I came to the World Cup event in Manchester and sat in the velodrome hating every minute of it. I didn’t want to be watching. I wanted to be racing. Now I’ve just returned to training and I’m very happy to say I don’t seem to have lost anything at all. I’ve already got my sights set on the 2010 and 2014 Commonwealth Games, and the 2012 Olympics in London.”
There are some who believe Hoy’s age and achievements will catch up with him, and the immensely talented youngsters in the British cycling team, such as Kenny, will overtake him but Hoy begs to differ.
“Well, I can tell you that a 43 year-old and a 36-year-old won golds on the track in Beijing,” he responds. “And I would ask you to examine my rate of improvement over the past few years. If I’d stayed still at a high standard and the others were catching me up then that argument would have some validity. But I keep on improving and believe I can do so right up to London and beyond. To be able to finish my career with a British Olympics and then a Commonwealth Games in Glasgow is too good an opportunity to turn down.”
There is another reason, though, why the new face of Kelloggs Bran Flakes has his sights on London. It reveals his greed for winning, even if it means the occasional crash as witnessed in Copenhagen during a world cup event. “If I can win one more gold in London that will make it five and a silver, and that beats Steve Redgrave’s five golds and a bronze,” Hoy admits. “If I can win two I’d be way ahead. If I win three I’d be the first man in Olympic history to do it in consecutive Olympics. That would be special, and then even I might be comfortable with words such as legend.
“I’d also feel more deserving as well because, although I’ve won medals in two Games, Pinsent won four in four and Redgrave an incredible five in five. I even think Ben Ainslie’s three golds and one silver in four Olympics is amazing.
“It’s not just about winning gold medals. It’s all about longevity, and proving you can do it over and over again, seeing off all-comers in the process. That’s why Steve Redgrave is the greatest, and that’s why I’ve still got so much to do.”
Chris Hoy, quite clearly, is a man still on a mission, and not even the best individual performance in the history of the Olympics is enough to alter his determined course for even greater glory.The next step is the world championships in Poland in March, but for the Scot London cannot come soon enough.