IN MY LITTLE corner of Leith, I'd been puzzling for a while over speedbumps. Never once had I seen evidence of how a lump or two in a short street could cause a driver, already in second gear, to cut his speed. Or any statistics which revealed how many pedestrians' lives had been saved. Finally, I accepted the word of my local pub bore: these darn things must be the result of a dodgy deal cooked up between the council and the car exhaust companies.
How wrong I was. It turns out that these selfsame bumps are a crafty national policy to tackle childhood obesity and wean yoof off knife crime, by encouraging them to clamber on to their BMX bikes and ride like the clappers. While it's self-evidently
not been successful in this part of world, in Crewe it's worked like a charm, as the opening sequence of BBC1's Olympic Dreams made plain.
I've never seen anything like this. Down a steep street of red-brick terraced houses came a streak of light, a 19-year-old girl on a bicycle, her legs going 10 to the dozen. As she hit the first hummock the bike flew into air and she squawked in delight. Welcome Shanaze Reade, team GB's brightest hope for glory in Beijing.
Reade is what documentary voiceovers call "a phenomenon". She's not uncommonly big – you can't be if you're going to fit on one those daft little bikes – but boy, is this lass strong. When she was shown working out, a goggle-eyed coach shook his head and whispered in disbelief: "She's lifting 20 stone."
To say that she has superhuman speed is to understate matters. Pictured astride a stationary training bike in a Manchester gym her legs became an impossible blur as Reade effortlessly worked up her speed. If the bike had sheered off its mountings she'd have been up and over the Pennines and in Leeds in 20 minutes. Suitably impressed, the British selectors invited her to enter last year's track world championships (that's normal racing bikes to you and me). Naturally, she won gold in the women's team sprint, partnering the much more experienced Victoria Pendleton. It was only the second such race of Reade's life.
So where did it all go right for Shanaze? Her father left home when she was baby, leaving her to be brought up by her grandparents. Friends from school had babies early, but by 10, and by accident, she had already found her dream. Out for a walk with her cousins, they stumbled on a BMX race track where they could hire bikes for £1. Said she: "It was the best pound I've ever spent. Jumping massive jumps that you've never jumped before, that feeling of going through the air, there's nothing like it."
And where could it all go wrong? The film made that plain too. Apparently happy to train in the streets of Crewe, Reade was spirited away to the national cycle centre where she was faced with an army of psychologists, dieticians and anonymous men who were identified as the foremost coaches in BMX. Sure enough, within days of the boffins shackling her free spirit, her bike had flown off the track and Shanaze was being picked out of a bush.
Sport is littered with heroes who have been coached out of contention – golfers whose swing was tampered with, fast bowlers who had their actions over-analysed by 'experts'. In a film on the BBC website, Reade unconsciously reveals that the same could happen to her. "I think to myself before I start an event, 'this is it, you're putting yourself in a box now, don't let anything get in your way, just concentrate fully on just crossing the finish line'.
"But my coach isn't fond of me doing that. He likes me to break the track up into little sections and imagine a brick wall there, breaking that barrier and going to the next one, so I've started doing that… But over the years, when I've not had anybody, I've always kind of worked and trained my own mind-set."
Well, it was good enough to win her four world championships.
Get the kid back on a speed bump routine of her own devising and she'll be a shoo-in for gold.
