Obree opens up on a story of speed, success and suicide
17 September 2003
Had it not been for a 15-year-old girl’s decision to check up on her horse in a lonely barn in the Ayrshire hills one night just before Christmas 2001, Graeme Obree would be dead, and I would probably have written his obituary. Instead, we are sitting on a sofa in his house in Irvine, south-west Scotland, and he can explain why he wanted to die, to escape the depression that had followed him since childhood.
When Obree, twice a world champion and the man who revolutionised aerodynamics in cycling, was found hanging in the barn after his third attempt to commit suicide, he was a minute from death. The lungs that took him past a world record that the greatest names in cycling dared not tackle helped save him, as did the fact that the man who cut him down knew about resuscitation.
Suicide, Obree explains, is born of “a desperate need to not think, because thinking is so painful you can’t carry on. Anything will do: substance abuse, sleep if you can get it, or death. It’s why substance abuse is so common among depressives, because thinking is so painful. You will accept any substance to change your way of thinking, or not think, because it can’t be any worse.”
Now, diagnosed as manic depressive with a personality disorder, he is glad to be alive, and he feels he is winning the battle. “A lot of changes have come about through my psychologist, but it takes a long time. I have to protect myself, because if my mood starts going down it’s like clawing myself out of a hole. I have to express my feelings, I can’t let things fester. I used to just hide away.”
Obree’s attempts to take his own life and his fight against severe manic depression appear in his recently published autobiography, Flying Scotsman. His story, which must have taken considerable courage to write, is a harrowing but often entertaining reminder of how little we know of sportsmen, no matter how brightly the spotlight shines on them.
For three years, from 1993 to 1995, British cycling was mesmerised by Obree as he emerged from poverty and the obscurity of Scottish time-trialling to sudden celebrity. He came from nowhere to break in 1993 the hour track record, set by the Italian great Francesco Moser 11 years earlier and regarded as unbeatable. It was so intimidating that five-times Tour de France winners such as Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain had not dared stake their reputations against it.
There were numerous subplots. Obree competed for the record and the 1993 world track pursuit title with Chris Boardman; cold, clinical thinker with heavy financial backing versus spontaneous, unpredictable pauper. Obree broke the record, and won the title in an aerodynamic position of his own invention, on a bike built in his kitchen using, famously, a bearing from a washing machine. He subsisted on marmalade sandwiches and cornflakes. He was the two-wheeled Tough of the Track.
He was simply pigeonholed: genial, lovable British eccentric, the body of a world-class cyclist with the mind of Professor Branestawm. It was so easy to look no further. Yet a viciously painful childhood had left him badly damaged, bitterly isolated. “I observed the world, but wasn’t really part of it. I was dislocated from it. I never grew up.”
As a schoolboy, Obree was attracted to cycling partly as a means of escape from bullies; eventually “the racing side was about feeling worthy”, he says now. He was driven by “a need to win to feel worthwhile enough to operate, to go about the daily business of life. Winning the world championship in Colombia in 1995 against [the Italian] Andrea Collinelli, I was like a fox after a chicken. He had better form but I needed to win because of the fear of failure. All I could think was ‘I can’t lose the final, I’d rather die’.”
Celebrity probably did not help. The reaction after he broke Moser’s hour record was, he says, “a life shock. It has the same effect as having a good life which turns bad. One week I was on the dole, the next there were television crews from France, Belgium and Holland on the doorstep, 64 messages on the answerphone, and people saying: ‘Come and race in Denmark, we’ll pay you thousands’.” A week before, he had been hunting down the back of the sofa for 20p to buy a loaf of bread.
“I was out of control, I didn’t know what to do next; ‘how about the world championship? OK, give it a go’. That would be unthinkable for someone like Chris Boardman. I think it did affect me. I didn’t realise at the time, but I was just swept along. Sometimes I could have lain on a knife-edge and slept. Cycling was a front, a party trick, and I liked the reaction.”
Flying Scotsman was begun in 1994, but it ended up being written as “a form of therapy”, he explains. “You put it all down on paper, you try and get out the feelings that are trapped. It started with the psychologist saying it would do me good, and ended up as my life story. I had to make the decision either to write a ‘pop’ type book with lots of pictures but not saying much, or a real autobiography saying everything.”
The book is far removed from the average sportsman’s autobiography in its candour. There is much humour, in the tales of cycle touring and amateur racing, but without the mediation of a ghost writer the raw edges remain and the book is all the more striking for it. Obree describes trying to kill himself using acetylene gas in the same matter-of-fact tone as he does his successful attempt to beat Moser’s hour record. His visits to mental institutions are related just as baldly.
The Obree story struck a chord with the British cycling public in the 1990s, and when the book was launched last week at the Manchester velodrome he signed 200 copies and was struck by the affection with which people regarded him. It is rare for any sportsman to lay himself this bare, but he knows why. “I want people to know the real person. I want people to understand what it’s like, how it felt. I want my book to be the best I can be.”
The Obree story remains one of the great sporting tales, but his telling of it is simply extraordinary. What shocked me about his suicide attempts and the background to them was that although I had followed his career in detail – albeit from far greater distance than that of Chris Boardman – I had no idea what was going on in his life. It was a salutary example of how, as sports writers, we tend to see the sportspeople we write about purely in the context of their sport, and it is one from which I hope I learnt a lesson.
Hoy pedals through the pressure to glorious gold
21 August 2004
The heat and the pressure in the Olympic velodrome could hardly have been more intense, but Chris Hoy rose above it all in the kilometre time-trial last night, emulating Jason Queally’s triumph in the Sydney games and breaking his team-mate’s Olympic record in the process to become the first Briton to be awarded a gold medal in this games, the Yngling trio not having been officially presented with theirs as yet.
As world champion, the 28-year-old Scot with the 66cm thighs started last of the 17 riders, and had to look on as the Olympic record fell three times in quick succession, first to the triple world champion, the Australian Shane Kelly, then to the 2003 world title holder, the German Stefan Nimke, and finally to the four-times world champion and world record holder Arnaud Tournant of France.
“It was pretty horrible,” admitted Hoy. “I was more nervous than I’ve ever been in my life. In 2003 I lost my world title because I was put off by the times the other riders were doing, so today was all about thinking about my own ride. I had to get myself into my own world and shut off everything else. There’s a lot of pressure going off last man; it’s not an enviable position.”
Hoy had sat in his chair by the start gate with an impassive face, apart from a brief handshake with Tournant, and seemed focused only on putting talcum powder on his sweaty palms, but then the pressure was ratcheted up.
For some reason, the starter began the countdown while Hoy was still in his chair by the trackside watching his bike being placed in the starting gate, rather than when he put his leg over the saddle as is the rule. “I had to run on to the track and I was pretty annoyed.”
He was, however, fastest on each of the four laps, albeit never by more than a fifth of a second, a
nd although he was “hurting a lot” as he slowed in the final metres, he was roared on by a sea of British fans and union flags in the back straight of this elegant velodrome.
The support included Queally, who screamed at him that the starter had begun the countdown and leapt in the air as his time was announced on the scoreboard, and 16 of Hoy’s friends and family, led by his father David, his mother Carol and his sister Carrie.
“I saw the scoreboard and it was weird because when I won the Commonwealth Games and world championship I was so pumped I milked the crowd but tonight it was so hard to accept and believe it,” said Hoy. “It’s what I’ve been training for for all this time. I was so emotional I could not get my hands off the bars. I was in tears as I went round the track.”
As Tournant and Hoy said, any one of the top four could have won, and the toughness of this discipline – too long for a sprint, too intense to count as true endurance – was underlined when Nimke almost had to be carried from the track.
Hoy was quick to pay tribute to Queally, “an inspiration”, whose feat in Sydney led the former rower and Scottish BMX champion to move from specialising in the team sprint to this solo event.
The build-up had been almost as pressured as the evening itself, with hot competition for the two places between Hoy, Craig MacLean and Queally, who had been out of form since Sydney. The picture became more fraught when Queally’s fitness began to build in the last two months, meaning that a final decision to field the British record holder MacLean was taken only a few days before the competition.
Hoy will lead MacLean, Queally and Jamie Staff in today’s team sprint, where the British have not been out of the medals in a major championship since 1998, and he believes MacLean’s seventh place yesterday should not affect the quartet. “Jason is on as good form as he’s ever been and Craig will bounce back. We are capable of beating any team in the world.”
Another British cycling medal is guaranteed today in the men’s 4,000 metre individual pursuit. Last year’s world champion Bradley Wiggins faces the 2002 Commonwealth and world champion Brad McGee in the ride off for gold and silver, while another Briton, Rob Hayles, bronze medallist in Sydney, has a chance of bronze against Spain’s Sergi Escobar.
Wiggins set an Olympic record of 4min 15.165sec in qualifying, more than 3sec faster than the time held by Germany’s Robert Bartko, and Hayles also beat the old record, finishing fourth.
The speed of the track was proved in the evening’s first final, the women’s 500m time-trial, where the world record fell to Australia’s Anna Meares in 33.952sec. Great Britain’s Victoria Pendleton has been focusing on the sprint, which starts tomorrow, and showed she is on fine form in setting a British record of 34.626sec for sixth.
Athens in a nutshell: the emergence of Hoy and Wiggins onto the national stage. Pendleton made a stuttering start to her Olympic career here. The story that I remember from this Games, however, was that of Queally: the British coaches were to make the wrong call in leaving him out of the team sprint line-up, when he was in the form of his life. He would miss out on a second Olympic medal and would never have the chance again. He took the disappointment in impressively stoical style: there was no public hissy fit, and he carried out his duties as team captain in exemplary style.
Third medal for Wiggins the history man
26 August 2004
Bemused, bewildered and blissful, Bradley Wiggins yesterday became the first Briton since 1964 to take three medals in a single Olympic games. He and his Madison relay partner Rob Hayles – bloodied and bruised as well as blissful – won bronze in a display of colossal guts and ice-cold composure.
All had seemed lost when Hayles fell off shortly after half-distance, and the duo’s untrammelled joy as the race finished turned into an agonising wait after the German team put in an appeal over the distribution of points. The judges threw it out, and for once sporting justice was done.
Already the winner of the individual pursuit and a silver medallist – again with Hayles – in the team pursuit, the 24-year-old Londoner was overwhelmed to have matched Mary Rand’s haul in Tokyo in 1964 of a gold in the long jump, silver in the pentathlon, and bronze in the 4x100 relay. For a British cyclist, it is a unique feat.
“I was told a few times that this was possible, but this sort of thing only happens to other people,” said Wiggins. “I never, ever thought that anything like this could happen to me. It’s terribly hard to take in. I’m still in a bubble here, and I’ll have to wait and see what the response is when I get home, but it’s mindblowing for me.”
This 50-kilometre event is the longest Olympic track discipline, and is a curious cycling variant on tag wrestling, with one of each of the two-man teams circling the track slowly while his colleague races for a couple of laps before grabbing his hand and slinging him bodily into the fray. The object is to gain laps on the field, and score points which are awarded every 20 laps and are used to separate teams finishing on the same lap.
“The [individual] pursuit was incredible, the team pursuit was hard and a bit disappointing, but I had a day off yesterday, had some time away from the village and even managed to have a pint of beer, which must have done me more good than harm. I came here relaxed and ready for it.”
He will find out soon enough how the British public responds when he rides next week’s Tour of Britain as the leader of his Crédit Agricole team. His response since taking gold in the individual pursuit has been exemplary, however.
On Sunday and Monday he tried his damnedest to assist the team pursuiters in the latest episode in their lengthy, frustrating quest for victory over the Australians, and after that he could have been forgiven for relaxing a little as only the eighth Briton to take a gold and silver medal in one games in the post-war era.
This race was unfinished business, though. In Sydney, Hayles had crashed and broken his collarbone with two laps to go when the pair were in the silver-medal position, and they were relegated to fourth. “It haunts me,” said Hayles before yesterday’s start.
With 36 cyclists spread out over the 250 metres, travelling at up to 40mph, this is an adrenalin-fuelled, dazzling spectacle, but not easy on the nerves as cyclists weave past each other continually and throw their team-mates with gay abandon with inches to spare.
“I was about to attack, but a French guy swung up in front of me and I clipped his wheel,” said Hayles. “If it had been a car accident it would have been my fault because I hit him from behind, but I’m blaming him. I had visions of Sydney and thought ‘oh my God, the British public must think I’m an idiot’.” He landed heavily on his left side, got up rapidly, with his hip and elbow skinned raw. “A few beefburgers,” as their coach Simon Jones put it.
Riders are allowed four laps out for such an incident and Wiggins merely remained “in the race” while Hayles got back on a replacement bike but he quickly needed a second bike change. “It was the same one I fell off on in Sydney, so I wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I knew I was OK, it was a question of getting my breath back and going for the lap near the end when everyone was tired.”
They had made a superb start, taking an early sprint, and were well-placed in fourth but, with Hayles pedalling stiffly and painfully, they slipped to seventh. But Wiggins said: “I knew we had to wait for the right moment.” It came with 32 laps remaining when Wiggins, who had looked the strongest and smoothest rider throughout, shot out of the string of riders in a last-ditch attempt to gain the lap that would put them back with the leaders.
It took 10 laps of all-out effort to achieve the lap gain but it brought the crowd to their feet. It took the duo into the silver-medal position, but the next sprint edged the Swiss past them. The finishing sprint was all that remained; Wiggins raced his heart out from five to go to keep the pair well placed, and it fell to Hayles to hold off Ukraine and New Zealand.
Cruel luck, and the implacable judges had already deprived the pair’s team-mate Jamie Staff of a probable medal in the keirin. The worl
d champion had fought his way back into the final after going out in the first round of this event in which riders are paced for six laps by a small, puttering motorbike piloted by a grim-looking driver in a black catsuit.
Staff was judged to have obstructed another rider in the final two-lap dash for the line en route to winning the second round, and was disqualified. It seemed harsh, given that every round involved bumping, boring and jostling which led to two heavy crashes, and the former BMX world champion was devastated. At 31, this may have been his only chance for an Olympic medal, and for him, unlike Wiggins and Hayles, there may be no sweet revenge.
This was a simply outstanding race, inspiring more passion, I felt, than Wiggins’s gold medal in the pursuit, with the drama and skill illustrating why the Madison deserves a place in the Olympics. Amusingly, Wiggins’s reaction afterwards (fourth paragraph) is pretty much the kind of thing he said after winning the Tour de France. Jamie Staff was desperately unlucky here, but would go on to greater things in Beijing.
How science and self-belief took British riders to a higher plane
27 August 2004
While Britain’s track cyclists came from nowhere to take four medals in Sydney, the Athens Olympics may well mark a sea change in their outlook and produce another great leap forward, according to the team’s performance director Dave Brailsford.
“We’ve gone from just trying to get medals to being disappointed if we don’t win. The performance in Sydney gave the riders and staff the self-belief. It was clear to everyone that we were going in the right direction and we’ve moved on from there.”
Brailsford and his predecessor as performance director Peter Keen believe the team have developed in strength and depth and the results here bear them out. The four medals could easily have been six had the fates not intervened in the team sprint and keirin. In the 12 track events, top-10 placings were achieved in all but two.
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