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Chris Hoy hits out at “stupid” cyclists

“If you want respect you have to earn it,” says multiple Olympic medalist

Multiple Olympic gold medal winner Chris Hoy has emerged as one of Britain’s most vocal advocates for cycling. But he believes that some cyclists are doing the cause no good by their behaviour on the roads.

“When I’m out on a bike and I see someone doing something stupid I will absolutely have a word with them at the next set of lights,” he told the Telegraph’s Theo Merz in an interview.

Hoy gave a recent example, of a rider he’d chastised while in his home town of Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago.

He said: “There was a guy who was riding like an idiot, jumping lights, cutting up the pavement, and I just said: ‘You’re not helping matters here. If you want respect you have to earn it.’”

The response was stunned silence, perhaps at being told off by Scotland’s most famous cyclist, perhaps in amazement that someone had nothing better to do than police the behaviour of other cyclists.

Since retiring in 2013, Hoy has been developing his own bike brand with Evans Cycles, promoting family cycling, confusing football fans on Twitter who think he's a referee, and recently announced plans to get into car racing.

But he says cycling still matters to him and that’s why he gets annoyed with behaviour that, as he sees it, affects the perception of cyclists. He still wants to see more people on bikes.

“There are so many benefits to cycling,” he said. “It eases congestion, there are social benefits if you do it with someone else and of course there are the health benefits. It improves your cardiovascular system and you lose body fat.

“It’s particularly good if you haven’t exercised for a number of years. If you’re trying to run for the first time it puts strain on your joints, or people can have injuries that prevent them from doing that. But cycling is low impact, it’s easy for anyone at any level and it doesn’t have to be expensive.”

Hoy says he still gets out on the bike too.

“I still go cycling at least four times a week though,” he said. “Sometimes it’s to test models for my range and sometimes it’s purely for my own well-being. If I’m preaching about the benefits of exercise I can’t let myself go – and I wouldn’t want to.”

And of course, if he doesn’t ride, he doesn’t get to tell off those naughty red-light-jumpers.

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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