Kenny Hunter's message is 'bikes not blades'

Kenny Hunter is a policeman who fights crime using a BMX. It could be the tag line for a 1980s children's television programme born in the BBC broom cupboard and sandwiched between Bananaman and Grange Hill. Or, worse still, the kind of video touted round schools about law and order.

Yet one qualified use of the word "rad" apart, there is nothing cringeworthy about the 38-year-old's efforts. A former rider of repute, Hunter is one of the founders of the Western Titans, Scotland's only BMX racing club and is intent on not only using the sport to repair fractured community relations but also to further the recent growth of the discipline.

Its inclusion in the Beijing Olympics has bewitched a new generation of bikers but the lack of awareness of the sport is such that some correspondents recently reported that Scotland had no outlet for this increased interest. This weekend, however, the club's Clydebank track - the only one in the country - will host the final two rounds of the Scottish BMX Racing Series as well as an Old School event, in which competitors from the eighties will compete on bikes from the sport's glory decade.

For Hunter, it is just the start. Local councils have noted an interest in building tracks and starting clubs in other areas thanks in part to the increased profile but also to the achievements of the Western Titans since their formation in 2005.

"In Clydebank, having the track has actually caused trouble to decline," insists Hunter, who travels from his Bridge of Allan home to help run the club. "It used to be that the kids there would fight pitch battles with those from Drumchapel but the track has disrupted that. Not only is it on land where they used to scrap but the kids now bring bikes rather than blades and they are only interested in what tricks each other can do, not where they come from.

"It has broken down so many barriers and it's a great diversionary sport because you don't have the time to buy your Buckfast and Mad Dog and hang about on street corners causing trouble."

Hunter talks from experience. Growing up in the Clackmannanshire village of Tullibody, he remembers peers who went astray after leaving school and others whose involvement with Scotland's only BMX club at that time, in Falkirk, perhaps stopped them following a similar path.

Having joined that group when he was 11, Hunter moved on to the Scotia team in Edinburgh, where contemporaries included a young Chris Hoy. But while Scotland's greatest Olympian was concentrating on the racing side of BMX, his older team-mate was breaking freestyle records, once clearing four cars in a jump at Meadowbank Stadium.

"I don't think that's been done since," muses Hunter. "But it was great fun. Kids are attracted by danger - they feel indestructible and embrace the fact that they can get rad, to coin a eighties phrase. My own son started when he was four, just a week after having his stabilisers removed, but there are guys in their 40s still doing it too."

These ageing thrillseekers consequently introduce their own children to the sport, just like Hunter has. Son Kade, now five, is eclipsed by his 10-year-old sister - "I wanted a motorbike for Christmas but she was born on Christmas Eve so I called her Harley" - who has won her age category for the last two years.

Not content to let the kids garner all the plaudits, he is looking to enter the British Masters Series next year after snapping his Achilles in practise for the same event in 2006 and has even enticed wife Gaynor to get involved with the other passion in his life.

"I was on a lunch break in primary seven and I went into RS McColl and noticed a BMX magazine on the shelf," he recalls reverentially of his early exposure to the sport. "It was issue two of Official BMX and it looked amazing. At the time, I was still jumping off a plank of wood propped up by a couple of bricks, but this was something completely different. I had to find out more and went down to Halfords, saw the Raleigh Burners that they had just got in, and put down a deposit for a Christmas present. It moved on from there, with a £100 bike becoming a £300 one, then a £1000 one, as I sent my parents towards bankruptcy."

The expense of the sport contributed to its decline in the nineties, but Hunter and counterpart Kenny Scullion maintained their interest. Upon hearing about the Clydebank track - part of an Enviroment Trust regeneration project funded by the proceeds of crime - they corralled their decades of experience to form the Titans and the club has thrived.

For the influx of new riders, London 2012 beckons, but it is also attracting those in other cycling disciplines. Scotland can boast world champions in downhill mountain bikes and Hunter has already talked to several competitors whose riding skills could hastily be honed to suit the new Olympic discipline. His problem over the next few years could be policing expectations.