The outlaw Jonny Wale
COMMONWEALTH COUNTDOWN Meet the bipolar maverick who has ripped up the rule book, turned cycling upside down and is ready to create the most unlikely sports story since Cool Runnings
HE’S the maverick’s maverick. A black sheep, bipolar biking hero. The outlaw Jonny Wale.
Scotland have 224 athletes at Gold Coast, almost all of them from the privilege of elite, funded programmes aimed at getting them on the podium.
But the 26-year-old former finedining chef has taken the long way around the track to get to the finish line, flying in the face of the lauded cycling establishment with his mates to take them on – and beat them – at their own game.
Now, for the first time in his life, he finds himself INSIDE the tent, a wild card on wheels, still fighting the fight against conformity – but no less proud to be part of Team Scotland.
Born and raised in Edinburgh for the first 13 years of his life before moving down south, Wale and his Team KGF pals have never been part of any cycling system, yet are taking the UCI World Cup by storm by themselves.
They’re Cool Runnings without the ice, the unlikeliest success story since the Jamaican bobsled team.
And Wale, who’ll ride the 1km time trial Down Under and be disappointed with anything less than silver, said: “They’re actually making a documentary on us with that same idea!
“We’re just four best friends living together in Derby who set up their own UCI trade team to start racing. Then we won the national championships two years ago. We just bumbled into it.
“We got the to the final and we thought, ‘F****** hell, we’re in the final!’
“When we won it? You know those great underdog stories?
“We all just looked at each other and thought, ‘Holy ****, we’re four guys who’ve done track for five weeks.’
“We posted a 4:04 which would have got us eighth in the Olympics. So we wondered, what could we actually do with 12 months of training for this?
“None of us had ever been on any national governing body programme or anything. So that’s why we set up KGF’s UCI trade team. We went to World Cups and the first couple were a disaster.
“Normally a national governing body, they’ve got every athlete in the country they can pick from.
“With us, we reverse engineered it. We had to change the way team pursuit was ridden. Rather than being one and a half laps, then change, then one and a half laps, change, and so on, we radically changed the format.
“So I’m a kilo rider and what I do is one long mega-stint, then disappear. The whole approach is different and we’d never have been able to do that as part of a formal set-up.
“Because we’d have been drilled to believe ‘This is the way you ride Team Pursuit.’ We made our own rules.”
A self-confessed nerd, Wale had to make a living to fund his cycling habit.
He revealed: “Myself and one of my Team KGF colleagues, Dan Bigham, run a company called WattShop, which does sporting engineering. We do aerodynamic testing at the velodrome, make various cycling products, make people cycle fast, basically.
“The expertise from running WattShop, all the aero-nerdiness we have, helped. We didn’t like our wheels so developed our own and made new ones. The establishment definitely do not like us!
“The Belarus World Cup was the last one, back in January, and we ended up winning it, which was pretty cool.
“The Russian ‘A’ team won silver and their ‘B’ team won bronze, and there were interesting looks coming our way across the velodrome.”
So far Wale has been thrilled with his recruitment to the Scottish cause, spending the past month in Glasgow and working out at the Sir Chris Hoy velodrome on a daily basis.
But he admits he’s still finding his feet in an elite environment.
He said: “I’m 26 and I’ve never been in anyone’s system. Everyone else here is so familiar with it all. The funny thing is listening to everyone saying, ‘Oh, we’ve had to pack our own bike boxes…’
“Mate, we turned up at the World Cup in Belarus and we didn’t even have a hotel booked. My real-world experience is a massive advantage.
“This is luxury. It’s the first time I’ve had video footage of my training. I’m looking at it giving it ‘Ah, so THAT’S what I look like…’. Its head and shoulders above what we have.
“It’s amazing. I’m used to having one coach across 30 cyclists, here’s it’s one on one coaching.
“The thing is, though, if you’re part of the establishment, you have to fit their programme. Whereas we’re four outsiders, we question things.
“Its the biggest thing we do which guys here don’t. They’ve been told by a coach what to do for the past 10 years of their lives so they’ll rarely ask why.
“I’ve had arguments with the coach here because I question everything. If they’ve never been questioned it comes across as an arrogance from me but, no, the whole reason I’m here is because I did question everything.”
There’s another reason Wale rides outside the lines – and he believes it’s the single biggest reason why he would never have fit in.
He said: “I’m bipolar so it’s difficult for me to manage in a set-up.
“The difference with KGF is that they say ‘Right, we’ve got Jonny here, he’s good on a good day, but he’s s*** on a bad day’, so it’s the willingness to accept that we’re all humans and all have flaws but there’s a way to get the best out of every individual.
“We’ve worked that out through our team and it has been fine here as well.
“Last Monday I felt terrible, and they said to me to take the night off and have a bit of space, rather than go to a formal dinner. I could have gone but then I wouldn’t have been there the next day.
“It’s understanding your body, which is what athletes have to do anyway.
“But I don’t take any medication for it, I don’t like that. I have done it in the past but you have to combat these things yourself. It’s just being aware of who you are and where you are.”
Wale’s parents are both English but he’s Scottish through and through.
He said: “I was born in Edinburgh and lived there 13 years before moving south. I identify as a Scot.”
GORDON WADDELL