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On taking up cycling again MacLean visited George Swanson’s bike shop in Edinburgh – no longer known as Scotia, but in premises near the original shop – and the two of them chatted. ‘Chris was working in the shop part time,’ says MacLean, ‘but I didn’t really know Chris. I knew his name from my BMX days. I told George I’d got back into doing a bit of cycling and he told me about the velodrome at Meadowbank, and the track league on a Tuesday night. I started going down there for that, just to watch, cycling from one side of Edinburgh to Meadowbank. But that was the extent of my cycling, because once I got there I just sat and watched from the stand, then cycled home.
‘I didn’t know anyone there and, you know … I was from Grantown-on-Spey – you’re scared to speak to people,’ says MacLean with another smile. As he points out, he was still into his heavy rock phase, noting, deadpan, that ‘I had long blond ringlets.’ And, despite his wild man of rock look, he imagined he could sit in the stand at the velodrome and blend anonymously into the background? ‘Well, yeah … I just used to sit in the stand in my cycling kit and keep out the way.’
One week, as he was making his usual journey to the velodrome, he was overtaken by a motorbike, which slowed as it passed him and then pulled in. ‘This motorcyclist stopped, watched me pass, rode past me again, then stopped again – he kept doing that,’ says MacLean. ‘It was pretty strange.’
The motorcyclist was the father of Stewart Brydon, then Britain’s top sprinter. Brydon senior rode to Edinburgh from the west of Scotland on his motorbike every Tuesday evening to help with the track league. He had spotted MacLean sitting in the stand and recognized him. The blond ringlets probably helped. That evening, when he arrived at the velodrome, and took his usual seat in the stand, MacLean was approached by Brydon. ‘He talked to me and said I should come and have a go,’ says MacLean. ‘He encouraged me to turn up on a Friday for the Dunedin club night. So I went down on a Friday night, introduced myself, and they said, “Okay, if you want to join then you’ll have to prove your worth.” You had to be nominated and seconded at the monthly committee meeting. So the following month, after four weeks of me going on club runs and going to circuit training, my fate was decided.’
MacLean’s recollection of the club’s recruitment policy seems at odds with Ray Harris’s description of the inclusive Dunedin club, though it might have something to do with MacLean’s perception of himself as an outsider – as evidenced by his reluctance to get involved in the track league, other than as an observer. But he insists: ‘I remember sitting in this club meeting in a Portakabin and having to go out the room while they talked about me, and assessed whether I was suitable for the club or not.’ He qualifies this, though, by adding that: ‘I don’t think they ever rejected anyone.’ And in his case, he adds, ‘I think Dave Hoy put in a good word for me.’
In fact, David Hoy was a Craig MacLean admirer from the moment, at around the same time, that he first took him away to a race – a mountain bike race in the north of England. ‘I remember we were travelling to a race and we had a spare seat in the car, so we asked Craig. I was really impressed. Chris and one or two of the others were just kids, but we went out for a meal on the Friday night and Craig had salad and rice, no meat. He was very particular about it. I thought, here’s someone who’s thinking about what he’s doing; he’s really thought it through. He had a very strict regime for looking after himself, and I was impressed that at that age – and that stage in his cycling career, because he was just starting out – he was so serious.’
When David Hoy’s praise is put to him, MacLean winces a little, because his close attention to diet, though it might have been interpreted as a sign of his commitment to his sport, actually masked a serious problem. ‘Partly because I got into cycling to lose weight, my diet was something I was into,’ explains MacLean. ‘But it became quite detrimental. It developed into an eating disorder. I was kind of reluctant to specialize in track cycling, to be honest – road racing was my main thing, mountain biking as well, because weight was a key thing to me. But I was fighting genetics, because I was never particularly light and I struggled to keep the weight off. It just turned into a bit of an issue for me.’
Within sport eating disorders might not be uncommon – even, or especially, at elite level. Chris Boardman has written about the subject in his book. ‘Instead of the weight loss becoming a means to an end,’ he wrote, ‘it became the end itself. I was losing weight in order to enhance my chances in the Tour [de France], but – and those close to me will sigh heavily at this point – it became obsessive.’
Boardman is unusual, because the subject of eating disorders is rarely openly discussed. And there is a difficulty of definition, since there is an extremely fine line – some might argue no line at all – between a strict, almost obsessive diet, and what most people would interpret as an eating disorder. Certainly ‘strict’ or ‘close to obsessive’ is how you’d describe the eating habits of perhaps a majority of elite sports people; it would be difficult to find any world-class athlete who is not preoccupied by what he or she puts in their body. Perhaps, as Boardman says, the line is crossed when the primary goal becomes weight loss, or weight management, rather than sporting performance; again, though, there are problems in determining where that line is.
But MacLean, with a refreshing unwillingness to become bogged down in issues of definition, says that his problem went beyond that. ‘It was a form of bulimia,’ he says. ‘It was never diagnosed, and it’s not something I’ve ever talked about; I just know myself that’s what it was. I would starve myself for two or three days, not having any food whatsoever, and train at the same time. When I eventually admitted it to myself I got control of it. But it took about a year and a half.
‘It was about 1993, and it was probably the worst season of my life. I was doing a little bit on the track by then. But my performance suffered. I would starve, binge eat, starve, binge eat. My form fluctuated and my weight actually increased as well. There was a point in 1994 when I realized I had a problem. I was at the British track championships, which were a week long, and because I had to cook, buying in the food I needed, I got to grips with it. I had to set myself some rules and targets, telling myself what I can and can’t do. It still took a long time. I think there are always going to be some body-image issues there as well.’
One of the main problems – as MacLean recognizes – was the fact that his heart, at that time, was set on road racing and mountain biking. Athletes in these disciplines are, almost without exception, lean and lithe, or – if you prefer – just plain skinny. It must have been demoralizing and dispiriting to realize that your build might effectively disqualify you from ever succeeding in these disciplines, especially if you were putting so much into them.
The answer was staring MacLean in the face, however. At the opposite end of the scale to the whippet-like road racers were the track sprinters, who were all big, bulky and muscular: the colossuses of cycling. Not only did MacLean have the build for sprinting, he also had the physiology – the fast-twitch muscles necessary for lightning bursts of acceleration, as well as the power to sustain the effort. He was, in short, a natural. And, more or less as soon as he made the decision to focus on sprinting, he demonstrated that natural ability. He rode with the Dunedin club from 1993 to 1994, when, on finishing his studies, he moved back home to Grantown-on-Spey and joined a Highland club, Moray Firth Racing Team. The following season, 1995, was, he says, the first when he focused purely on the track. He was twenty-four that year, making him a late developer.
But he was enterprising, even entrepreneurial. In Grantown-on-Spey he managed, early in his career, to eke out a modest income from cycling. The Highland Games circuit is a big deal in the north of Scotland, and most of the summer meetings include grass track cycling, with significant cash prizes. The grass track circuit has traditionally been the most obscure yet also, paradoxically, the most lucrative form of cycle racing in the UK and for a while those that took part were deemed ‘professionals’, and therefore barred from more conventional forms of cycle racing. MacLean rode events sanctioned by the Scottish Cyclists’ Union – that is, amateur events – but still made reasonable prize money. ‘It was my summer job,’ he claims.
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