Chris Hoy

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Chris Hoy bigraphy, stories - A British and Scottish track cyclist

Chris Hoy : biography

23 March 1976 –

Sir Christopher Andrew "Chris" Hoy, MBE (born 23 March 1976) is a British former track cyclist who represented Great Britain at the Olympics and World Championships and Scotland at the Commonwealth Games.

Hoy is an eleven-time world champion, six-time Olympic champion and a winner of a total of seven Olympic Games medals, six gold and one silver. Hoy is the most successful Olympic cyclist of all time.

With his three gold medals in 2008 Summer Olympics, Hoy became Scotland’s most successful Olympian, the first Briton to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games since Henry Taylor in 1908, and the most successful Olympic cyclist. He won a further two gold medals (in the keirin and team sprint) at the 2012 Summer Olympics, making him the most successful British Olympian of all time in terms of gold medals, and the joint most decorated athlete with fellow cyclist Bradley Wiggins with seven medals in total.

Career

Early career

Hoy joined his first cycling club, Dunedin C.C., in 1992 aged 16, and began concentrating on track cycling in 1994, when he joined the City of Edinburgh Racing Club.

Hoy won silver at the 1999 UCI Track Cycling World Championships in the team sprint, riding as the third man. Regular team mates in the team sprint over the years have included Craig Maclean, Ross Edgar, Jamie Staff, Jason Queally, Matthew Crampton and Jason Kenny. The team’s first World Title came in 2002, in the Ballerup Velodrome, Copenhagen. Hoy also won the Kilo (1 km track time trial) title the same year beating Arnaud Tournant by 1/1000 of a second.

Post-2004 Olympics

Following the decision to remove the Kilo from the Olympic programme after the 2004 games, Hoy sought to develop in other events. The first of these was the keirin. This event involves between six and eight riders following a small motorbike (the Derny) around the 250m track for 5.5 laps, as the bike slowly builds up the speed. The bike pulls off with 2.5 laps to go and the riders race for the line. Hoy had previously competed at the keirin in various events but one of his first major successes was at the Manchester round of the World Cup Classics Series in 2007, shortly before the World Championships, where he also won, ahead of his team mate Ross Edgar.

This showed that Hoy was developing from just a pure power sprinter, in events like the Kilo and Team Sprint, into also being one of the best in the world at more tactical sprinting events such as the keirin and the individual sprint.

2007 world record attempt

On 12 May 2007, Hoy attempted the world record for the kilometre. He fell 0.005 seconds short, clocking 58.880. He set a record for the 500m flying start at 24.758 seconds, over a second less than the 25.850 set by Arnaud Duble. Hoy set the sea-level kilometre record of 1 minute 0.711 seconds by winning the Olympics in Athens in 2004. The outright record of 58.875 seconds is held by Arnaud Tournant (France), set during 2001 at altitude in La Paz, Bolivia, where Hoy also attempted to break the record. Only 3 sub-60sec kilos have ever been ridden, Hoy recorded two of these over two days in La Paz.

Hoy’s main achievement is his development in the individual sprint event considered to be the blue riband event of track cycling. Kilo riders like Hoy have historically not fared as well at this event, as they were less experienced in the tactical elements required for the sprint. Previously, Hoy had competed in the sprint at various World Cup events and Revolution meetings in Manchester, but it was not one of his main events and he did not compete in it at the World Championships or the Olympics. In the semi finals Hoy defeated Italian veteran Roberto Chiappa 2–0, to set up a meeting in the final against France’s Kevin Sireau. Sireau was the World Cup Classics points winner for the season and had defeated Hoy 2–0 in their previous meeting only a few weeks earlier. However with the vocal Manchester crowd behind him Hoy was not to be denied victory and he completed the win 2–0, the first British man to win the sprint title in 52 years since Reg Harris.