At a certain age, joked Sir Chris Hoy in October 2011, you don’t even buy green bananas. The throwaway remark was intended to underline the complexities and unpredictabilities of being a “senior” athlete – Hoy was then 35, seemingly blessed with eternal youth – but it seems grimly apposite in the light of the Scot’s announcement that he has terminal cancer and may have only between two and four years to live.
There has been universal warmth and admiration for the way Hoy has dealt with his diagnosis, revealed publicly in an interview with the Sunday Times. An upcoming memoir, All That Matters, will go into further detail, along with relating the multiple sclerosis diagnosis of Hoy’s wife, Sarra. The unflinching courage shown by Hoy, the acknowledgment of the tremendous difficulty of processing and communicating what has happened to their family, underlines that here is a remarkable human being, who engages with life – and death – in his own way, with a humbling degree of perspective.
There are resonances here that are impossible to ignore. It is 14 years since the double Tour de France winner Laurent Fignon was taken from us, also by cancer, when he was a couple of years older than Hoy, at the age of 50. The “professor” was similarly, heartbreakingly accepting: “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want it to happen.”
When Hoy refers to his relief that he has been “given enough time” to say goodbyes and “make peace with everything”, it is impossible not to recall the sudden death in 2022 of our mutual friend, the writer Richard Moore – who was the same age as Hoy is now, 48 – and the anguish I know that caused Hoy.
It’s an old cliche that the horrors of the real world can put the matter of winning and losing on the velodrome or the pitch into perspective. It is however, true, and sometimes the connections between the serious side of life and the relatively frivolous are easy to draw.
Hoy’s response does fit the picture of the man we saw in his racing years, a grounded individual who always seemed to come to a stoical, humble accommodation with the things that life dealt him, good and bad; he is a man of frankly outlandish determination. To give one example, in our “green bananas” interview, he outlined the sacrifices that would be needed to win Olympic medals at 35; he could count the occasions on which he might have a drink in the 10 month run-in to London 2012: three.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Hoy’s glory years, 2002‑12, when the gold medals rained down at Olympic, world and Commonwealth championships, was how little any of it seemed to change him. There were no airs, no increases in hat size, none of the trappings of fame, other than an agent, and no existential crises at the scale and speed of his rise. That sense of perspective probably came from his being a rare throwback who could recall the days before Lottery funding flowed liberally into track cycling, transforming it in a few years from a Cinderella sport to the celebrated “medal factory”.
On 7 August 2012, on “Super Tuesday” in the London velodrome, Hoy left Olympic sport on his own terms, with a typically thunderous last two laps in the keirin final, a gold medal snatched from impending defeat in the most theatrical style. He exited as Britain’s most decorated Olympian to that date, with six gold medals, three of them in his clean sweep of match sprint, team sprint and keirin at the 2008 Beijing Games.
It always looked seamless, but it was far from it. “From the outside, it looks as if you are all calm and everything is great, but there’s always doubts,” he has said. In the run-in to the London Games, he had to deal with the indignity of being dropped from the defence of his match sprint title in favour of the younger Jason Kenny. His first gold medal, at Athens in the kilometre time trial, came in spite of a massive attack of nerves; a few years later, when the kilo was dropped from the programme, he had to painstakingly reinvent himself and in effect learn two new disciplines with all their tactical nuances. There were undignified, outlandish defeats and horrendous injuries, notably a hip “degloving” in 2010. Not surprisingly, for that brief period up to London, he was one of his sport’s flagbearers, along with Sir Bradley Wiggins, Nicole Cooke, Victoria Pendleton and Mark Cavendish.
On two wheels the Hoy legacy is, at present date, not a straightforward one. The British Olympic track cycling team, in which he played so foundational and inspirational a role, continues seamlessly to produce world‑class athletes and gold medals, epitomised last week at the world track championships in Copenhagen by Katie Archibald – herself no stranger to horrendous adversity as Donald McRae’s recent interview showed – and Josie Knight.
Paradoxically, however, the grassroots sport of track cycling, where Hoy started out at 17, has been in steep decline for several years in spite of the millions thrown at the elite side; the lack of rider numbers is obvious, while the letters from British Cycling pleading for ideas to revamp local track leagues tell the story.
It is a grim picture, and turning that around would be a fitting tribute to this country’s greatest track cycling star.
