Yarn 26 | The Highest Cyclist in the World
It’s the morning of Saturday the twelfth of May, 2007.
High in the Bolivian Andes a sun bleached concrete bowl measuring 333 metres in circumference is perched on the only bit of flat ground for miles.
You could mistake this human-built structure for a crater atop a long extinct volcano. Jagged snow capped peaks surround the velodrome. Most agree this is the highest cycling track, and perhaps even the highest sporting arena in the world — 3,408 m above sea level.
Today a crowd has gathered. The grandstand is half-full, mainly with locals from the nearby city of La Paz. Most are in traditional dress. Men don fedora hats and women wear their bowler hats at jaunty angles to block the sun.
In the back row the Bolivian Army brass band, dressed in their green fatigues sit in a line. They erupt into song every few minutes.
But at 11am the band and the chatter from the crowd falls silent.
A figure emerges from a bright yellow tent at the centre of the track. The large muscular man looks like a fighter jet pilot. He wears a white skin-tight onesie, zipped up from the back and a bulbous teardrop shaped helmet on his head. A mirrored visor conceals his eyes and a clear oxygen mask covers the rest of his face. He walks up the steep slope of the banked track. His steps are ungainly and awkward in his cleated shoes as they clack on the cracked concrete surface.
He mounts a waiting bicycle and hands his breathing apparatus off to a helper. The cyclist clips his shoes onto the pedals and pushes off, completing a slow and relaxed warm up lap. When he returns to the start line a digital board starts counting down from 50 seconds. The last 5 seconds emit beeps until the board hits zero. A loud blast sounds. The cyclist bursts out of the start gate. The crowd roars. The stopwatch is ticking…
The cyclist’s mind is focused on his strategy. The best case scenario is that in less than a minute he’ll be doubled over in excruciating pain, gasping for air, oxygen deprived, his blood acidic. The worst case scenario is that he could fall unconscious or suffer from a high altitude pulmonary edema, which can be fatal… Now he’s starting to second guess his strategy.
This was the setting for Chris Hoy’s 1 kilometre time trial world record attempt. In 2007 the Scottish cyclist made the trip to Bolivia with a small team on a shoestring budget. Their goal was to beat the frenchman, Arnaud Tournaut’s record of 58 seconds or to be exact 58.875 seconds., Tournout set the record at the same location 6 years earlier in 2001. His ride was the first time anyone had done a sub 1 minute kilometre or Kilo as the event is nicknamed.
Chris Hoy was accompanied by his father David and mother, Carol, who were both heavily involved in organising the attempt in Bolivia. His team also featured a sports scientist or as Chris called him — the numbers guy and a doctor specialising in the effects of high altitude on the body. A journalist named Richard Moore followed along too. I’ve drawn from Richard’s book and Chris Hoy’s autobiography to tell this story but you’ll also hear the voices of experts I talked to about altitude, track cycling and about one of the toughest events of them all- the 1 kilometre time trial.
The premise is super simple- how fast can you cycle a distance of 1 kilometre around a banked oval shaped circuit, the clock is your only opponent on the track– So why is that so hard?
Here’s Irish Kilo rider Eamon Byrne…
Eamonn: “The strategy is to go hard stay fast and hold on…
“thats what id be asking you to do. Just go and blow.”
That’s the theory. Training for the event requires a lot of commitment…
Eamonn: “To be competitive at it. The training is quite grim…youre always gonna be looking for a bin.”
And what does it feel like during a kilo attempt?…
Eamonn: “It’s like riding through trickle. The walls close in… not one of them will be walking down the ramp looking happy and pretty.”
In the 2000’s the men’s Kilo event was dominated by two riders, Chris Hoy and Araund Tournaut. Tournant won the world championships in 2000 and 2001. Hoy went on to win in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2007. In the 2004 Olympics Hoy won the gold medal, leaving Tournant with the Silver.
The two long time rivals and friends will go head to head for the last time in La Paz- Well not exactly head to head. Tournaunt is at home 10,000 km away in France. But his presence is very much felt. Hoy is trying to beat Tournaut’s shadow so he can finally prove he’s the fastest over 1 kilometre and that he can also break the 1 minute barrier..
This will also be Hoy’s last Kilo ever. The world cycling governing body (the UCI) shocked everyone after the 2004 olympics when they announced that they were removing the event from future olympic programmes. They had to make room for the new addition of BMX.
This news must have been pretty bittersweet for Hoy. He started out as a BMX rider as a kid in Scotland. It was great news that BMX was to become an olympic sport but devastating that it had to happen at the expense of his specialty event.
Hoy’s father David didn’t hold back his disappointment in an email to CyclingNews. He said:
“The UCI has removed an event which has been an Olympic blue ribbon discipline since the start of the modern Olympics over 100 years ago. This will completely unbalance track cycling.”
That’s when Chris and David came up with an idea. What if they broke the world record, right before the 2008 Olympics so the UCI could see what they were losing. As david put it:
“The catalyst was dropping the kilo from the Olympics. Chris was looking for a way of finishing his kilo career on a high. That was supposed to be the Beijing Olympics but that was taken away from him. So we wanted to thumb our noses at the UCI. The world record got everyone excited. And Bolivia, of course, was the only place to do it.”
Of course… Bolivia, at one of the most remote sporting arenas in the world, the Velódromo de Alto Irpavi outside La Paz. Wait, what? Why was this beaten down old track that was so awkward to get to.. the “Only” place to do it?
Well, this area is legendary in the track cycling world. There’s something magical in the air or rather the lack of it…
“La Paz audio clip… It takes six minutes to boil a 3 minute egg.”
Fifteen world records have been established here: no other velodrome in the world can boast so many.
La Paz is the perfect place to break world records because the air is thinner — literally less dense — and it therefore offers less resistance: you travel faster through it or in other words it takes you longer to slow down.
This is illustrated at La Paz’s tiny airport; It has one of the longest runways in the world because it takes much longer for planes to come to a stop.
I personally think Hoy’s decision to stage his attempt at La Paz was also so he could say he beat his rival Tournor under the exact same conditions.
The thing that made Tournaut’s attempt in 2001 intriguing was that it was shrouded in so much mystery.
‘There’s no real information out there of Tournant’s ride,’ explained Scott Gardner, the sports scientist who accompanied Hoy to La Paz. ‘There’s no footage of it, no real data at all.’
Some of the stories — true or false — about Tournant’s attempt have passed into folklore, and contributed heavily to the mythology surrounding the kilo record.
Tournant arrived in La Paz a week before his attempt, allowing his body to acclimatize and adjust to the oxygen-starved air.
When asked about how he dealt with the conditions in La Paz, Tournat later said:
“It took me a few days to get used to the altitude, and I confess that the hardest thing for me wasn’t the effort of riding the kilo in itself, but rather these peculiar conditions. But I managed to get used to them, under very tight medical surveillance.”
Tournaut had been struck down by altitude sickness for a few days before his attempt — a condition that renders you barely able to move.
A friend of mine Cian Woods recently hiked up to Everest Base camp with a group, that’s over 5,000 meteres above sea level
Cian clip 1
I asked Cian if he experienced any of the effects of altitude sickness…
But it was completely manageable…Cian clip 2
The severity of the symptoms of altitude sickness can also just depend on how lucky you are genetically. Some people’s physiology allows them to cope better than others. If you hike up to Everest basecamp your guide will most likely want to monitor your heart rate and blood oxygen level regularly to see how your body is coping…
Cian: Depends on what you are born with basically…
One rumour in particular about Tournaut’s attempts caused the Hoy team some alarm. Following the frenchman’s record breaking ride, it was said that he collapsed and passed out. Apparently he was unconscious for almost half an hour.
In reality, Tournaut later confirmed it wasn’t quite so dramatic
‘No, I was not unconscious, but I had to wait thirty minutes before I could talk … and it took
me about an hour before I could walk again! I remember that my team had to cut open my suit
- my top and shorts — because I had the feeling that my legs doubled in size! I was conscious before my ride of the dangers of altitude, but I wasn’t expecting such pain
Even after taking the time to acclimatise, with the level of physical exertion it takes to ride a kilo the body will be oxygen deprived in an already low oxygen environment.
Tournant was accompanied by a fellow french rider in 2001, Laurent Gané. He took to the track to tackle the 500 m time trial record. But at around the 200m mark he crashed heavily, in part, because of the dizzy state he found himself in, a result of the lack of oxygen.
The risks are real… so what’s the worst thing that could happen?
I asked Nick Hart, a senior performance specialist at the Altitude Centre in London. He helps athletes to prepare or train at high attitude.
Nick: clip
AMS stands for Acute Mountain Sickness
Nick: clip
Unless you’re unlucky. Chris Hoy was no doubt given a similar speech on the risks by his doctor Kenneth Baillie..
It was then suggested by someone on Hoy’s team that there was one way of avoiding the effects of altitude sickness altogether. He could do the opposite of what Tournant did and not allow his body to acclimate at all.
Altitude sickness usually takes about 24–48 hours to kick in above 3,000 metres. So once travellers stop ascending, they typically give themselves three days in total for their bodies to adapt and adjust to the altitude. After three days, the body increases the red blood cell count to help absorb more oxygen from the thinner air.
Hoy’s team proposed that if he did the attempt within 24 hours of being at altitude he’d avoid any risk of getting sick. He could attempt the record and get back down to sea level again as quickly as possible.
When I first heard this I thought- that can’t be right? You can’t fool your body like that or beat it to the buzzer, surely?
But apparently you can. And as Hoy listened to his experts he started to come around to the idea, especially when they explained that the helicopter method (as they started to call it) would allow him to maintain greater power output and insure against something called de-training.
I was super interested to understand the merits of these two very different approaches and get an expert’s opinion on which they thought was better, so I asked this guy again…
Hi im nick…
First up — Tournaut’s method — acclimatising for a week at altitude.. What does Nick think.
Nick clip
So with Tournaut’s approach of living high and training high, He’d still benefit from less air resistance but he also risked de-training slightly (ie losing some power). And the Kilo is all about power.
Living at altitude allowed his body to adapt to the conditions — potentially produce more red blood cells and increase his lung capacity to take in more oxygen but there’s one key thing about the Kilo. It’s primarily an anaerobic activity. You see for sprint events the body does not use that much oxygen to produce energy.
So high altitude training isn’t that advantageous to sprint riders…
Nick clip
So it seems Nick is more convinced by Hoy’s helicopter method…
Nick clip
But there is another method in between Hoy and Tournout’s approaches. A method that might take the best from both…
Nick clip
The key thing I’ve taken away is that it’s all about finding a balance.
What’s right for sprint events like the Kilo would be terrible for more endurance based events like the Hour cycling record for example. That record is all about how many laps you can do in a period of 60 minutes…
Nick clip
Chris Hoy had decided on his strategy.
The approach carried some risk, as Hoy himself had hinted at with a casual comment of ‘I can handle a bit of pain if it’s worth it’. The problem would be that when his body really needed oxygen — in the closing stages of the ride, or just after — it would be shocked to find that the air contained — to be strictly accurate — 33 per cent less of the stuff than at sea level. The body might react badly to that.
So it was decided that whenever he was off the bike he would breath through an oxygen mask and there would be an oxygen filled body bag ready trackside if he needed it.
Chris’ father David helped him find a sponsor to cover the costs of the trip, the shipping, the timing equipment and an antidoping official but that was it. The total raised came to 40 grand. It was just about enough. If Hoy did break the record there would be no bonus, his only reward would be bragging writes and a place in the record books.
David Hoy was tasked with making sure the velodrome in Bolivia was race worthy. He tracked down the velodrome’s chief custodian — “Mr Bolivian Cycling”, Ruben Martinez, president of the Bolivian Cycling Federation.
Martinez was seventy-three at the time, but looked more like a forty-something.
He held every Bolivian age-standard record from forty upwards and his son was the Bolivian Kilo record holder with a time of 1 minute 4 seconds. With no prior introduction, David Hoy sent Martinez an email to ask if they could use his beloved velodrome.
Martinez responded by immediately travelling from his home in La Paz to the Alto Irpavi arena, armed with a video camera.
Then he walked around the track, his camera honed on the line Hoy would take for his kilo attempt, Ruben’s commentary described every hole, blemish and crack in the concrete, his hand — hovered over the surface — indicating the bits that Hoy should pay particular attention to. ‘Bumpy surface here,’ said Martinez on the grainy video he sent back to David Hoy in Scotland.
It was thanks to Martinez, and a few other Bolivian cyclists, that the track remained in use at all.
The Alto Irpavi track is seldom used for international competition — Tournant’s world record in 2001 was the last event of note held there — so a lick of paint and tidy-up were well overdue. Work was needed to fill in some of the cracks and gaps on the track itself and local volunteers had to use scythes to hack away the overgrown grass let loose on the infield.
Most track cycling events are done indoors on a wooden track so how do outdoor tracks compare… I asked Team Ireland cyclist Eammon Byrne…
Eamonn byrne clip
It’s the night of Thursday the 10th of May 2007. Chris Hoy is in Miami, Florida after finishing a week long training camp. He boards an overnight plane to Bolivia. The 6 hour flight is due to land in La Paz at 5:45am on Friday morning. The plan is to make his first record attempt that afternoon..
But en route Hoy’s plane develops problems with its hydraulics. Given the added complications of landing at high altitude — specifically the difficulties of stopping — The pilot opts to divert to another Bolivian city, Santa Cruz.
One saving grace is that Santa Cruz is located at sea level so Hoy’s internal altitude clock has not started ticking yet. The problem though is that Hoys optimal weather window is very tight. It’s forecasted to get progressively worse over the weekend.
By 2.30 p.m on Friday, around about the time Hoy had hoped to be warming up on the track. He is still at a small airport in Santa Cruz. Waiting.
Finally at 7 p.m on Friday roughly twenty-two hours after leaving Miami Hoy finally arrives in La Paz. His detour involved ten hours hanging around in terminals, and a two-hour transfer between airports in Santa Cruz,
There is a small party to meet him. 73 year old Ruben Martinez, Mr. Bolivian Cycling has been waiting all day along with the rest of Hoy’s team.
From the airport, Hoy travels directly to the track.
First he walks slowly around it, studying the surface, visualising the ride. In his grey hooded top, with his head down, he looks like a boxer. Then he completes a full race warm-up — a forty-minute routine. It is a stunning evening, the sun bathing the track in a pleasant, glowing heat. There is not a breath of wind; it is almost eerily still. Tiny tubes carry oxygen into Hoy’s nostrils whenever he is off his bike; but on it, without the oxygen, he says he hardly notices that he is at altitude. Everything is perfect.
He’s a little tired after his 22 hour ordeal but confirms: he will go for the record in the morning.
-
But in the morning the conditions changed.
It’s cool, chilly even. Hoy rides around the track in long sleeves and leggings.
He thinks perhaps he should have just gone for the record last night but he dares not say that out loud.
His support team appears anxious and nervous. Warm-up completed, Hoy disappears into the tent, where he continues his warm-up on static rollers, an oxygen mask clasped to his face.
As a crowd begins to gather, Hoys faces an agonising dilemma. Should he postpone the atempt, and wait until tomorrow? Then again, the forecast is notoriously unreliable in the mountains. There’s no guarantee it would be better; it could be worse.
The biggest problem is the temperature. Scott Gardner, the numbers man, had done the maths, he figured one degree was worth a tenth of a second: a significant margin.
At 8 a.m it’s 12 degrees in the track centre. Gardner reckons it needs to be a minimum of 16 degrees.
By 8:45, the temperature rises to 14 degrees, it’s encouraging; less so is the wind, which is also rising. So it’s a question of balancing out the warmer air with the stronger breeze, and deciding when would be the optimum time to go for the record.
Cold air and wind are a time trialist’s worst enemy. Modern velodromes try to eliminate these factors as much as possible…
Eamonn
Heat also helps the body perform better…
Nick- you can produce more power…
At 11am the temperature passes16 degrees so Hoy goes for it.
He bursts out of the start gate. His massive legs begin to build up power down the straight.
Because the Alto Irpavi velodrome is 333 m as opposed to the 250 m standard tracks its straights are extra long — there is a curious, deathly silence as Hoy completes the first corner of his kilo world record attempt and enters the back straight.
The noise dies away completely, the crowd watch him race up the opposite straight for what seems like an eternity: it looks as if he is pedalling in slow motion, as if he is in a silent movie.
Then he returns to the home straight, appearing to speed up as the noise erupts again.
He flashes across the start/finish line, mouth still open in silent roar.
The timekeepers pore over their computer screens and then convey the information to Hoy’s team: he is almost a second up on Tournant’s record. A second! His average speed is 3.8 metres per second. His top speed hit 60 Kph.
Now he is on the back straight again, pedalling silently; taking an age to reach the bend.
Then, again, around the corner, the volume increasing for the final lap, the final push.
And again the study of the computer screens. The lead has fallen slightly, but he is still 0.873 seconds up on Tournant.
The back straight, the silence, the slow motion; then around the arc of the final corner, and the first sign that the effort is beginning to tell, a noticeable wobble as he enters the back straight, shoulders swaying; and now a roar as loud as the one that greeted his starting effort as he thunders down the home straight, across the line and…. silence.
It’s a horrible silence that can only mean one thing: failure. The clock has stopped at 59.103 seconds. It’s the second fastest kilo in history. Hoy has broken the 1 minute barrier but he was still twenty-three hundredths of a second slower than Tournant. Zero Point two two eight of a second to be exact.
Hoy collapses to the ground as the doctor attaches an oxygen mask to his face. A small crowd gathers around him, including his mother. He doesn’t get up for the next 7 minutes…
What those 7 minutes felt like — I’ll never know. But I know someone who might have an idea…
Eamon clip- that’s how we’re built
Eventually Hoy gets up off the ground and climbs on his static bike, slowly peddling to remove the lactic acid from his muscles. His quick recovery blows away his doctor.
He describes the ride to his team..
‘My head exploded on lap three. It was all I could do to keep pedalling. I’ve never experienced anything like it; there was no oxygen coming in. It was like being underwater. Last night when I was training here it was fifteen degrees warmer — so if a degree is worth a tenth of a second, as we’ve calculated, then do your own maths….’
In the car on the way back to the hotel Chris and his father have a one to one chat.
David asks Chris if all the talk of the potential danger had bothered him — more to the point, had the prospect of imminent death put him off his ride?
“I think so”
Chris says…
“Yeah, with people telling me I could die doing it. You’re never going to give 100 per cent with that thought in your head. You’re going into the unknown and you might subconsciously hold something back if you’re a little bit scared.”
But he got through it, practically unscathed so now that fear was gone. Tomorrow he’ll attempt the record again and this time he won’t hold anything back…
It surprises me that an athlete can attempt another major physical effort so quickly after the first. How could you possibly hope to do better after exhausting so much energy?
I put it in Eammon. He explains that it’s not unusual to do two Kilos in one day during a competition…
Eamon clip
Doing two kilos — recovering for another round — psychological — have to get over it
Second effort can be better — more power — 3rd or 4th effort better — primed — not afraid
It’s Sunday morning, 9am. The sky is clear. It’s already warm and there’s virtually no breeze. Near perfect conditions. The crowd that had half-filled the velodrome the previous day has gone, only a few diehard fans remain among them is a small tv crew for cycling tv….
TV clip:
Day two, the second attempt on this kilometre record.
Well, they thought that Chris Hoy would need to be taken to hospital after his attempt yesterday.
The weather conditions are absolutely perfect.The temperature over 20 degrees centigrade.
Hoy goes through the same routine as the day before: sitting on the track, then rising and climbing aboard the bike, sitting upright, aggressively slapping the helmet into position, and then leaning forward and gripping the handlebars. Then, bang! He’s off.
After the first lap..
Let’s just have a quick look.What is the split?
22.553. Brian he is is .717 up.
Yes. Go on, Chris.You’ve got, you know, 2 km within 24 hours. A lot to be done by this man, but he’s still up.
After two laps, he’s still up: and now there is nobody in the velodrome who doesn’t think he’ll claim the record.
The final lap…
Well, Chris now powering his way into the area where yesterday he completely lost it.
His body shut down, he’s into massive oxygen debt. Can he beat this record?
There’s no wobble this time. Hoy powers down the final straight towards the finish line…
Oh, it’s so close. So close.
But the time is 58.880.
He is zero five outside.
Failure.
The clock says 58.880 seconds. compared to Tournant’s 58.875 — five thousandths of a second is the difference.
An analysis of his split times show Hoy’s strategy had been subtly different to the previous day: he started slightly slower (22.55 seconds for the first lap; compared to 22.35 the previous day), and he was still slower after two laps (40.17 seconds total, compared to 39.99).
His final lap was incredibly fast — only 18.7 seconds (it was 19.1 seconds the previous day).
But it wasn’t enough.
Five thousandths of a second, — that was all he missed the record by;
If you were to measure the gap between Tournaut and Hoy in distance… it was 2.3 cm, that’s the diameter of a one euro coin — the difference between success and failure.
That’s it, conceeds Hoy.
‘It’s not a possibility to go for it again, he says. ‘In an ideal world I could stay, recover and go a bit quicker, but not tomorrow, not after doing two rides like that in tweny-four hours. I gave it my best shot and it wasn’t enough.
‘But hey,’
he smiles,
‘nobody died.’
The event wasn’t a complete loss though.
The next day Hoy went on to break the 500 metre record
and 71 year old Ruben, Mr. Bolivian cycling broke the 2000 metre Master´s world record.
Hoy would retire from cycling in 2013 but not before winning his 6th Olympic gold medal.
So we’re going to turn our attention now to the men’s kilometre time trial.
Tournaut’s kilo world record was eventually broken in 2013, indoors in Mexico. It was actually broken twice in one night at a world cup event…
The world record has been broken in this session already by Maximilian Levy of Germany.
We’re seeing here Francois Pervis, the world champion in Aquilo going now head to head,
This world record has been held since 2001 by the Frenchman Arnold Turn On and Levy beat it in just a few moments ago.
Can Francois Pervis hold on to the pace that he’s putting in?
Can he do the unthinkable? Francois Pervis trying to beat the time of Levy of 57.949.
Can he beat the world record?
He has. He’s beaten Levy. He’s broken the world record.
Look at the time.56.303 from the Frenchman.The world record which was held by Aurnoud Turnon from 2001 at altitude in La Paz has been broken twice in one night.
That’s absolutely incredible.
That record still stands today.
Hoy never attempted the kilo record again. And no international events have taken place at La Paz since Hoy’s visit. The place must hold a very special place in Hoy’s heart though because he named one of his HOY branded bikes in his range The Alto Irpavi.
Thanks to Cian Woods, Eamon Byrne and Nick Hart for talking to me.
Eamon is a track cycling coach at Black Line coaching.
And you’ll find Nick at the Altitude Centre in London.
This has been a story for yarnpodcast dot com
Written and narrated by John Roche
With original music by Drembot.
—
References: Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution — Richard Moore (Author). Chris Hoy: The Autobiography of Britain’s most successful ever olympian — Sir Chris Hoy (Author). Arnaud Tournant: le phénomène — Pascal Sergent (Author).
Eamonn Byrne is a coach at blacklinecoaching.com
Nick Hart is a performance specialist at altitudecentre.com
