You ever touched an Olympic gold before?” Max Clifford asks me in his bustling
Mayfair headquarters. This is not the time to mention my
hitherto-unpublicised role in Shirley Robertson’s sailing gold eight years
ago in Sydney. Meanwhile, Chris Hoy, the hat trick hero of this year’s
Games, is patiently removing his medals from the shock-proof maroon lozenges
in which they live. He does this with the care of a parent unswaddling a
newborn, gently unkinking the red ribbons, smoothing them out, gathering
their three loops together then presenting the trio arranged on his forearm,
something like a jeweller or a wine waiter.
Hoy, though, has reached the point where he is no longer as keen to do all
this as he was a week or two back, when he was freshly returned from Beijing
and in the early flush of being Britain’s first triple gold winner in a
century. A lot of handling, he explains, and the ribbons get frayed, plus
their lustre is compromised if they chink together too much, which really
rather seems to defeat the purpose of their being gold in the first place.
Hoy would know about the irksome degradability of Olympic gold, presumably,
because he won his first such four years ago, in Athens. As soon as he
returns to his base in Manchester, he says, the three latest are joining the
first gold in the bank vault: “The thing about that many medals,” he says,
“is that, really, it’s just statistics, it’s just numbers. There are guys
who can win only one gold in their field. Does that mean I’m three times
better than them?”
Clifford, meanwhile, continues to hover with paternal protectiveness, the kind
you find only when a man dealing on a daily basis with Kerry Katona and Jade
Goody moves up the evolutionary ladder as far as a real live Olympian.
Clifford is brokering Hoy’s entry into the upper echelons of the television
celebrity guest spot, a small indulgence that Hoy is permitting himself, a
little bon-bon, a sorbet between all those endless bouts of sinew-burning.
There has been a slight hitch in ensuring that Hoy’s new Armani trousers are
altered in time for his appearance on the Jonathan Ross show later that
evening, a crisis eventually averted with expressive relief all round.
He has done A Question of Sport and is to appear on 8 Out of 10 Cats, Channel
4’s topical panel show.
A call comes through from Top Gear just as Hoy is offering me his medals for
inspection; I had not asked to see them but providing them seems some sort
of reflex, some habituated trait in the cyclist. Hoy tells Clifford he’d
certainly love to appear on Top Gear just as long as it’s the time trial and
he gets to “drive round and round a circuit really quickly”, which seems a
fine advertisement for sticking, more or less, to what you know. Since he
took Hoy under his wing Clifford must have seen these medals a hundred times
but we nonetheless adopt the stances of the wise men around the crib, gazing
down with theatrical reverence, exchanging little eye-rolling gestures of
amazement. It seems the right thing to do.
An unprecedented hoopla has surrounded Hoy since his return from Beijing. Not
only is there what we see as the scale of his achievement, (Sir Steve
Redgrave, of course, has won five Olympic golds but only over the course of
five separate Games), there’s also the timing. The faltering administration
in Westminster has flourished Hoy as the vindication of its policies on
sports funding. An opposite reaction has come from Holyrood, with Hoy
adduced as proof that stand-alone Scottish teams would prosper without the
broader British safety net.
“It’s all quite new to me, the whole political angle,” Hoy admits wearily.
“I’ve been misinterpreted in supporting the Scottish Olympic team Alex
Salmond’s been calling for. My point is that until the cycling authorities
recognise Scotland as an independent nation it’s academic, it’ll never
happen. The idea of a distinct Scottish Olympic presence is completely a
moot point, regardless of what happened in Beijing.”
The curious thing here though, is that Hoy sets less store by what happened in
Beijing than he does by his success in Athens. He understands all the fuss,
but he regards the Athens gold as the greater achievement: “Nothing compares
to the first of doing something,” he says. “It’s just the most amazing
feeling, mainly of relief that all the sacrifice and application has
actually worked. There was so much self-doubt along the way, then you find
out you got away with it. So, in my mind, Athens was a bigger deal than
Beijing.”
Even so, Beijing has given Hoy an unsought-for political currency, a
consequentiality in the Westminster/Holyrood border warfare that clearly
makes him uneasy. He sticks to his line — that he competed and won as part
of a British team but would hear out any future Scottish schemes — like his
front wheel adhered to the parquet of the Beijing velodrome. Aware that any
stance he takes will be picked over like the giblets of an auspicious
chicken, he treads so carefully that he barely treads at all.
Those unsympathetic to the sporting mentality often struggle to cope with the
single-mindedness of the top sportsperson. They seem to share a preoccupied,
detached quality. Hoy is a little like this; courteous and amiable but
addicted to an impeccably inflexible world view that seems a touch simple, a
tad unreflective. Trust me, you wouldn’t wish to explain to an elite
sportsperson why, say, The Beatles were better than The Rolling Stones; they
tend to adopt expressions like labradors hearing high-pitched noises.
So I inquire instead into Hoy’s intellectual life. He attended the fee-paying
George Watson’s College in his native Edinburgh, then St Andrews University.
His sister Carrie is in publishing, formerly as European sales manager with
McGraw-Hill, and recommends books to him. He’s reading All Quiet on the
Orient Express by Magnus Mills, before that he tackled Saturday by Ian
McEwan and Diary by Chuck Palahniuk. It’s more or less what you might expect
of a 32-year-old university graduate. But, again, the cerebral capacity
exists for Hoy only as a function of the sporting capacity: “I read to blot
things out,” he says. Does he ever reflect that his dedication to sport has
an autistic quality to it, an excess of focus that may not be wholly
healthy?
“A lot of guys at my level do have issues,” he admits. “Winning a gold medal
is not a remedy for them. You win it and you notice that nothing has
changed. I do it because I enjoy the day-to-day life, setting a long- term
goal and breaking it down into little steps.”
I try him on T S Eliot’s belief that sport is an inferior activity because
it’s about nothing other than itself. It is merely the mechanistic process
of honing brawn and muscle to try to beat the odds.
“I disagree,” Hoy says. “Sport teaches you about friendship, comradeship,
dealing with success, dealing with failure. I’ve got an amazing life because
of sport.”
It sounds a pretty dull sort of life, with all that relentless training. Once
his hour in the media sun comes to an end it’s back to preparations for the
next Commonwealth Games and 2012 Olympics. How can he motivate himself,
knowing he’s done it all before?
“But I won’t have done it before,” he says. “I’ll be older, I’ll be a triple
gold winner. Those are parts of the next challenge. The challenge is always
different, it always changes. Steve Redgrave’s achievement far outweighs
mine, I think. So that becomes a motivation, to stay on top of my game as
consistently as him.”
Then there is Hoy’s relationship with Sarra, his girlfriend, a “very sensible,
grounded, nice girl, not at all demanding”, and one who might well be a
cycling widow were it not for her career as a solicitor in Edinburgh. The
pair often don’t see each other for a month at a time.
“Sarra knows and accepts that I have to be quite selfish in my day-to-day
lifestyle,” Hoy says. “She knows it’s short term and that afterwards
there’ll be time for marriage and a family. But, yes, in the meantime I
might miss out on going out with friends, having a few beers... being away
from Sarra is the only real sacrifice. I’m not so bothered about the rest. I
suppose I don’t actually miss going out and having fun at all.” At that
Hoy’s face creases slightly. “And I use the word fun with inverted commas. .
.”
