Congratulations from ABCC to the Great Britain World Track Championship team

I don't watch much TV. Thanks to the digibox I've got access to about 30 channels on which I've seen some episodes of Friends five times; successfully avoided thirteen soaps; never glanced at so-called quiz programmes (Weakest Link and Noel Edmonds are just opportunities for people to show how ignorant they are and to get their stupid answers in Private Eye); blanked out so-called 'reality TV' in which people behave in the most grotesquely unreal manner; and missed endless re-runs of Inspector Coarse and his sidekick WPC Loose.
But for five days from 26th to 30th March I watched television for a total of 12 hours. Because the World Track Championships were some of the best sports coverage I've ever seen: for once you couldn't complain about the BBC. Incidentally, it seemed bizarre that this display of flawless organisation should be happening at the same time as the disastrous opening of Terminal 5.
The commentary and interview team were a good deal better than average. If it's understood that the between-events interviews are a convention of sports TV and otherwise completely pointless, then Jill Douglas did them rather well, asking occasional pointed questions and even getting a few answers that weren't entirely anodyne - though it was a bit unfair asking Jamie Staff to answer questions that might imply criticism of his team-mates. Gary Sutton was a useful aid to Hughie Porter and frequently provided information which we might otherwise not have had. And Hughie: as long as you can ignore his inability to pronounce Spanish, Italian, German and French names, and his talent for complicating the rules of the simplest event, then he was fine - and at least he keeps your attention on what's going on in the race. And on Saturday if you switched to ITV's disastrous commentary on the boat race then you'd rank the cycling commentators even higher.
One of the most informative interviews was with Steve Peters, sports psychologist to 12 Olympic sports ('though cycling is my home') and rugby. Pendleton seriously lacked confidence in her early days, and Peters describes her as his best pupil. Even now he sometimes has to work to get her up for an event. Chris Boardman was his usual solid, reliable self and could probably have said more about GB's equipment if it wasn't all so secret. I'd have like to see more of the 3-D design pictures.
The principal reason for the success of the Great Britain squad in recent years has clearly been choosing and concentrating on those events where you can control all the variables, namely the track rather than the road, and individual and team time-trial events. It's notable that the squad were for a time less successful in those events where controlling the variables ranges from difficult to impossible: the points race, scratch race, and so on. But this squad have such physical superiority, expertise and confidence that they seemed capable of winning anything - the keirin, the individual sprints, and that most chaotic of track races, the madison.
In addition there's been a vast improvement in the identification and selection of talent - think of the good class British international riders ruined by the RTTC over the last seventy years: at one time riders like Houvenagel and Armitstead would have looked forward to a career of dull obscurity plodding up and down dual carriageways.
It's become almost impossible to say anything about two of the GB squad, because they've moved on to another planet. As we all saw on the front of the Observer supplement, Victoria Pendleton is by no means fragile; but neither is she in the massive mould of the former East Germans, the monster Felicia Ballanger, or Jennie Reed who beat her in the final of the keirin. But then size isn't everything - hey, that's not bad. I think I'll copyright that. I remember a very experienced coach, who should have known better, telling me years ago that a certain rider, a competition record-holder and then the fastest individual time-triallist in the country, would never be picked for the national team time-trial squad 'because he just ain't big enough.' Victoria just doesn't look hefty enough to be the fastest woman on the track - but she is, and no-one pushes her around, either. And nobody seems to have told her that she just ain't big enough.
As for Hoy - what shall we say? What can we or anyone else say? I mean, look at him: he's got thighs as big as most people's chests, he's the Flying Scot, he's Rob Roy McGregor, he's the stuff of which real heroes are built. He really is big enough to satisfy any coach. And he delivers: nine titles so far. Having been deprived of his favourite event, the kilo, he switched to the much more difficult and uncertain individual sprint, and he won, the first British winner of the title since Reg Harris (and Cyril Peacock, who took the amateur title) in 1954. Then he took the keirin - funny how an event which so many people call 'a lottery' is nearly always won by the same people. And another thing: if Japan, the home of the keirin, has literally hundreds of keirin riders competing for money every week, then where are they at the World Championships?

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