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the car and covered it with a blanket. Mum thought I was just going to watch Dad race when we set off for Welwyn. She had no idea that I was about to make my cement-track debut.

      The track at Welwyn was organized by some very officious people – in particular a grumpy woman who was furious that I climbed onto my bike from the wrong side. Even though the track was relatively flat, and without any steep inclines, she made me get off and walk around to the apparently safe side of my bike.

      ‘That’s how you get on your bike at Welwyn,’ she said cuttingly.

      I couldn’t believe it. I was going to show her and all her sniggering cyclists. The girl who got on her bike the wrong way would destroy the field.

      And I did. I won the junior race, beating boys and girls, with ridiculous ease. I made a point of getting off my bike the wrong way. I did it the grass-track way, rather than the Welwyn way.

      I was getting noticed – and by more thoughtful people than just surly ladies in Welwyn. All my results, and victories, were printed in the back pages of Cycling Weekly and, incredibly, attention was being paid to my progress; and not just by Dad.

      After Welwyn I started to ride against men, in handicap races. Dad and I would turn up and they would take one look at my skinny legs and my puppy-dog face and the handicapper would decide to push all the men a few more metres back. How could a puny sixteen-year-old girl hold off the muscly hulks? They were expected to hunt me down. Most of them couldn’t. At the finish line I would still be ahead. I would go up to the presentation table, collect my trophy and prize-money, smile demurely for the local photographer and go home, to Mum, where I would say, as usual, ‘Ta-Dah!’ and show her my booty.

      Yet, when it came, the telephone call just about knocked me sideways. I could tell that Dad thought it was important because he looked flushed when he handed me the phone.

      ‘Hello?’ I said, not guessing for a moment that my life was about to change forever. I still thought of myself as the guilty and frightened girl on the hill, chasing after Dad as hard as her spindly legs could pedal. I could not believe that anyone, seriously, thought of me in a positive way.

      Marshall Thomas sounded gentle and kind. He explained that he was the assistant coach of the national track team. I was amazed that we even had a British track team – let alone a coach who had actually heard of me. Marshall had been following my results. He had even seen the details of my win in Welwyn.

      I didn’t tell him that I was the girl who climbed on her bike the wrong way. Too stunned to really speak, I waited for him to continue.

      ‘We’d like to invite you up to Manchester,’ Marshall said, ‘if you fancy having a ride at the velodrome.’

      ‘I’ll pass you over to my dad,’ I said helplessly, but remembering to thank him for calling.

      I had no idea there was even a velodrome in Manchester; but Dad knew. His eyes shone and he smiled when he put down the phone. He looked so proud of me. The girl on the hill, the girl who once couldn’t read a map and kept washing her hands, had made her father so happy.

      ‘I knew it,’ he said quietly as he pulled me towards him. ‘I knew you were good …’

      My bed turned into a fairground ride. I lay in the dark and clutched the mattress as I seemed to tilt up and down, round and round, in an endless loop of blurring movement. There were moments when I wanted to laugh out loud, or even say ‘woooaaahhh!’ as the room rocked.

      ‘God,’ I whispered to myself, ‘this is crazy shit …’

      I didn’t take drugs, and I hardly drank, but an afternoon at the Manchester Velodrome left me tripping round the dizzying curves of the wooden track. Six hours had passed since I had slipped off my bike, but the wild rollercoaster ride would not leave the leaping pit of my stomach or the lurching whir of my mind. I could feel the same rolling sensations climbing high inside me, creeping up towards my buzzing brain, before racing back down again as if I was still on the bike and careering along the sharply banked track.

      At first, because he was careful not to scare me, Marshall Thomas made sure I did not really notice the dizzying gradient of the velodrome. Speaking in the same quiet voice I remembered from our phone conversation, he concentrated on making me feel comfortable in this jolting new environment. I was a flat grass-track girl, with just a gritty smattering of experience on the hard cement at Welwyn Garden City.

      Yet Marshall made me feel at home. He was much younger than I had expected – in his early thirties – and more low-key than Dad in his approach to cycling. He was also obviously intelligent and I liked the relaxed way in which he introduced me to the surrounding track.

      The Manchester Velodrome belonged to another world. It looked strange, even beautiful, as Marshall slowly led me round the curved wooden bowl on my fixed-wheel bike. Marshall explained that the structure of the roof was based on a 122-metre, 200-tonne arch which provided unrestricted viewing for spectators. The roof was covered in aluminum, and weighed around 600 tonnes. But Marshall, like me, was more interested in the track.

      The wood looked very shiny under the bright lights. Marshall said the 250m track was Britain’s first purpose-built indoor velodrome and that the wood flashing beneath us was the finest Siberian pine. Back then, in my teenage innocence, I had no idea that those smooth and gorgeous boards could tear chunks of flesh off your legs or arms as easily as a butcher might skin a rabbit.

      I might have fainted if I had seen the sight I witnessed on this same track fifteen years later when, in a World Cup keirin race in 2011, the Malaysian rider Azizulhasni Awang stared in horror at his leg after a crash. Twenty centimeters of pure velodrome wood ran through his calf, like a meaty kebab stick, with the pointed ends jutting out on each side. The pain of being skewered must have been terrible. A day later, surgery removed that huge splinter in a clean excision from Awang’s calf.

      Fortunately, as a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, I was spared such grisly visions of the future. I was also blissfully unaware that Jason Queally would suffer a similar fate later that same year, in 1996. He crashed on his bike, while circling the track at 35mph, and a large chunk of wood lodged in his back. Chris Hoy revealed later that it was eighteen inches long and two inches wide. Suggesting it was ‘more like a fence post than a splinter’, Chris quipped in his dry way that, ‘Jason’s scream of “I’ve got half the fucking track in my back” was not unreasonable in the circumstances.’ It took almost 100 stitches to close the wound. I was far too naïve to imagine that splintering trauma.

      Marshall skirted the dangers of the track by explaining that, as we cruised along the blue band running round the base of the circuit, we would ride at a steady pace. I followed him, my front wheel holding a perfect line with his back wheel, as Marshall led us round and round. After all my years of trailing Dad, I knew how to follow a wheel, and so I began to settle. It helped that Marshall was so warm and engaging. He kept telling me just to enjoy myself. There was no pressure or expectation on me.

      Gradually, Marshall took me further up the track. By the time we had reached the upper banking it felt almost ordinary as we went round in high circles. After so many years on the road and the grass, I felt comfortable on the wooden boards.

      Then, seamlessly, we began. Marshall’s bike banked to the left and, carefully at first, he steered us down the sheer gradient to the bottom. After another half-lap, he pulled us up towards the right and we began to climb back again to the top. We repeated the procedure again and again, and each time we seemed to gather speed as we zipped down the sumptuously curvy circuit. Up and down, round and round we went, faster and faster, until it really did begin to feel like a fairground ride. Towards the end we hurtled along the boards, my bike tracking his, as we flew down the banks with an exhilarating whoosh. The sensations were sharpened by the fact that, like all track bikes, there was only one gear and no brakes.

      I

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