Hail his Hoyness. He started competing on his BMX bike at the age of seven and never looked back. Yesterday Chris Hoy pedalled his way into the Olympic record books when success in the men's cycling sprint won him his third gold medal. Even two golds made him Scotland's greatest Olympian and, together with the silver medals scooped by fellow cyclist Ross Edgar, rower Katherine Grainger and canoeist David Florence, this marks an extraordinary achievement from the tartan contingent of Team GB. We salute them all.
Hail his Hoyness. He started competing on his BMX bike at the age of seven and never looked back. Yesterday Chris Hoy pedalled his way into the Olympic record books when success in the men's cycling sprint won him his third gold medal. Even two golds made him Scotland's greatest Olympian and, together with the silver medals scooped by fellow cyclist Ross Edgar, rower Katherine Grainger and canoeist David Florence, this marks an extraordinary achievement from the tartan contingent of Team GB. We salute them all.
Hoy's success is as much British as Scottish, not only because saltires and lions rampant have been significantly absent from Beijing - something which has more to do with Tibetan than Scottish nationalism - but also because, like so many of Scotland's sporting stars, he has relied on facilities only available in England. In British terms, too, Hoy's is an extraordinary achievement: it is exactly 100 years since a British competitor won three gold medals in a single Olympics.
It matters, not merely because at a gloomy point in world history, sporting excellence has the power to raise people's spirits, but also because it can teach us important lessons.
There is nothing magical about Britain's success in the velodrome, though at times it seemed that way. Rather it was the product of painstaking incremental change. Of course, the achievement depended primarily on first-class raw material. But getting so many of them on to the podium, wiping away their tears of happiness to the strains of God Save the Queen has taken a huge investment in top-class facilities and meticulous attention to every aspect of their training over many years. Behind Hoy's huge smile lay an army of trainers, managers, psychologists, doctors, tacticians and technicians, all of them outstanding in their fields and all dedicated to shaving fractions of seconds off his times. To politicians who enjoy attracting big headlines for new policy initiatives that run into the sand a little way down the line, this example of the transformative power of a thousand tiny steps warrants attention.
Their success is also a fillip for the future. It is impossible to underestimate the capacity of an Olympic medallist to inspire the generations coming after them. Many of those on the podium began their long journey to Beijing watching previous Olympians giving their all 12 or 16 years ago.
It is important that Britain capitalises on this success in the run-up to London 2012 and Glasgow 2014. Westminster and Holyrood are pouring more money into sport than ever before. Lottery funding has enabled billions of pounds to be invested in infrastructure and elite training. But there is a huge mountain to climb. Today's bulging children are the victims of television, helicopter parenting, contracting playing fields, the long-term decline of physical education in schools and the mistaken notion that competition is unhealthy. All this can and must be reversed. Meanwhile, we can celebrate the death of glorious failure in British sport. If anyone deserves to have a "guid conceit o' himsel" today it is Chris Hoy.
