Hoy still sore about Worlds blow but glad of the break

SIR CHRIS Hoy is used to pain so it is just as well his body gave him a very obvious sign that he had to pull out of the World Championships.

The 32-year-old Scot, winner of three cycling gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, is known to train so hard that occasionally he vomits when he gets off his bike.

And after he escaped without broken bones when he crashed at high speed at the Copenhagen World Cup three weeks ago, he thought he would be able to resume preparations for the defence of his two world titles in Poland later this month despite the kind of pain which made just getting into his car agony.

But a rare injury – a muscle in his hip had become detached from the tissue around it – meant that every time he got on his bike, fluid filled the gap. "I had this big bulge of fluid stuck on my hip," he explained. "It looked really weird – I couldn't get my jeans on it was that big."

He added: "The big concern was that if I did keep training on it, training through the pain, the damage I would cause would be a longer-term thing and that could cause me problems in the future."

The medical advice? Total rest – not easy for an athlete who trained for two to three hours a day when he took his girlfriend away for a holiday in Thailand and who thinks nothing of pedalling away from his Christmas dinner.

"It's a self-preservation thing," said the Edinburgh rider. "You just have to stop everything, give it a chance to heal and then once it's all reattached, you can have a bit of physio and ease your way back into training."

Hoy added: "So I reckon that within a month I'll be doing light exercise and building up for next season.

"It's quite a rare thing and if you don't let it heal by itself, eventually you have to go through a fairly complicated operation which involves opening it up, scraping all the stuff out and then having to be bed-ridden for a while – so you want to make sure that doesn't happen."

This year's World Championships will be the first without Hoy since 1996, and the first without a Hoy gold medal since 2003.

And if the nine world titles he already has on his CV would be enough for most, Hoy is having to try hard to look on the bright side.

He said: "It's going to take me quite a while to get over the fact that I'm not going to be at the World Championships and I think it will be worse when the championships start and I actually have to sit and watch them on telly."

However, he admits that he is happy to take the chance to shift down the gears for the first time since those five golden days in Beijing which transformed his life completely and forever in August last year.

He intends to burrow through some paperwork, see his friends, and enjoy "a bit of peace and quiet".

For the four months after he left the Laoshan suburbs of the Chinese capital, he hardly spent more than one night in the same bed as he shuttled from red carpet to charity fundraiser to television interview to photo shoot.

On the way he collected a knighthood and the BBC Sports Personality of the Year accolade in a landslide win over the Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton and fellow Olympic gold medallist, the Mansfield swimmer Rebecca Adlington.

An intense six weeks of training in Western Australia followed before he returned to competition in Copenhagen where he was on the way to winning his second event of the weekend when he came off his bike.

"Mentally as well as physically it's probably quite good to have this break," Hoy said.

"It's just it would have been better if I had been able to have it after the World Championships with two or three gold medals around my neck."

And, if he is a reluctant patient, he is grateful for a reminder that he is not – as he was dubbed by his Team GB team-mate and fellow Olympic champion Victoria Pendleton – a superman, but a mere mortal who bounces the same as anyone who hits the Siberian pine boards of a velodrome at over 40mph.

"I'm lucky that I've only had one bad crash in four years," Hoy said.

"So much goes into the performance but so much can go wrong – not just on the day, you've got your preparation, your training, there's the risk of illness."

He added: "I've accepted it now – it could have happened last year and it would have been a major disaster.

"I'm thankful – if it has to happen then in the first year of an Olympic cycle, that's the least detrimental time and, ultimately, who was thinking about the world championships of 2005 in Beijing?

"By the time I get to London, hopefully this will be a distant memory."