Why's there a sense of Olympics apathy among many Scots?

Hugh MacDonald on Saturday: My granda used to make my bikes. It was particularly awkward because the wheel had not been invented when I was but a boy.

MY GRANDA used to make my bikes. It was particularly awkward because the wheel had not been invented when I was but a boy. But old papa would head down to the scrappie, put the Alsatian guard dog between two slices of Bilsland bread and assemble a bike from spare parts in much the same way as Gordon Brown forms a Cabinet.

Most of these contraptions were what we called "fixed-wheel". That is, if one stopped pedalling one overtook one's handlebars. The pedals were as dodgy as a thrice-microwaved kebab. One bike's pedals had huge lumps of steel protruding from their sides. They were obviously lifted from the chariots in Ben Hur.

These flashing blades once extracted a pun of mince from my inside leg. "I knew you would have someone's thigh out with that," said mater as she stuck a mustard poultice on the gaping wound and served the meat up to faither with a nice bit of mashed tatties and butter.

She then went about her business which included caring for my brother who almost decapitated himself by standing on his handlebars when careering through Busby Glen.

The severe head injury had a benign side effect as his diminished intellectual capability has been a great boon to his career as a businessman.

Bikes, then, were fun. They were not sport. They were transport.

The only racing connotation a bike had for me was when I transformed it in my mind into the Derby favourite and took Church Road at full tilt.

Then the Tour de France came into view with its endurance and its doping scandals but I figured one should just take the drugs without finding it necessary to cycle for a couple of hundred miles in the searing heat.

This indifference changed irrevocably with the emergence of Robert Millar as a world-class cyclist. A Glesca boy became King of the Mountains. He produced images of wonderful intensity. One of my greatest sporting memories is Millar leading team-mate Ronan Pensec 13 kilometres up a mountain in the Tour.

It was selfless, draining and testimony to a technique and endurance that eludes the mass of humanity. It also inspired a generation of British cyclists.

As the Olympic Games open, we Scots can bemoan the realisation that we have no truly great athlete in track and field. It is also a week when one of our leading football clubs lost an important match in Lithuania, a country where football runs far behind basketball.

There is, then, a sense of apathy among many about the Olympics. But Scotland has great sportsmen and women. It is just that they do not run on the track or pass a ball.

Andy Murray may become the greatest sporting Scot in world terms since Jackie Stewart. He and his brother, Jamie, are medal hopes. Chris Hoy is a genuine great. The cyclist has had his event taken away from him but has returned as a medal favourite in the keirin, the event where one has to chase a small Irishman around the track.

The achievements of Hoy and the British cycling team are brilliantly recounted by Richard Moore in Heroes, Villains and Velodromes. Moore, too, has written one of the great sporting biographies with his insightful, intriguing tale of Millar.

The former King of the Mountains blazed a trail but Hoy has taken track cycling to new levels. They are differing Scots. Millar is dry, private and slyly witty. Hoy is generous, open and friendly. But they share that will to win, that incredible drive that separates the sporting great from the sporting also-ran. Millar is testimony to the notion that there is a sporting world beyond football and the West of Scotland. Hoy, an Olympic gold medallist in the one-kilometre time trial in Athens, is seeking to add to his haul in Beijing. Is it too much to hope that Hoy rides into history as a national hero of our times? Can we take our eyes off the latest lumbering centre-half bashing the ball in the stand to appreciate true world-class sport and wonder at the demands it makes physically and psychologically?

I hope so. Reading Moore's two books is the first step to an enlightenment. Just don't flick through the pages when standing on your handlebars in Busby Glen.