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Over the last three years, Team GB track cyclist Mark Stewart has probably taken on more professions than any other rider inside the Paris Olympics velodrome.
He has worked as a dog walker, a babysitter, a lifeguard, and now, after a last-minute call-up for Saturday’s Madison event, he has another role to add to his CV: Olympian.
The 28-year-old was never expecting to race his bike in Paris. He travelled to the Olympics as a reserve in the track squad, ready to be called upon if disaster struck. That moment came when Ethan Hayter pulled out of the Madison with a muscle strain, suffered when he fell out of his saddle in Wednesday’s team pursuit final.
“I found out this morning,” Stewart said. “I expected it. I thought, ‘Right, there’s a chance I’ll get the call up here.’ So I was ready. I took the role seriously.
“[Racing] is a horrendous mix of the worst nerves you’ve ever had, and confidence, because we’re high-performance athletes, and we’ve got this amazing support from British Cycling. You do go up there confident, but at the same time, you’ve got this contrasting thing of being the most nervous you’ve ever been in your life.”
Paired with his teammate and friend Ollie Wood, Stewart finished 12th in the race, a result that left him “gutted”. Still, the Olympics are only the third championship event the Scot has done with the national squad since he was dropped by British Cycling in 2020, shortly after the Covid pandemic was declared.
“When British Cycling kicked me off and dropped me from the programme, it was actually beautiful circumstances, although I didn’t know it at the time,” he said. “I just got out to New Zealand to visit my fiancée, Emma [Cumming], Covid happened, New Zealand locked down their borders, and I ended up staying for two years.
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“British Cycling supported me financially when they kicked me off because of the times, Covid, so I was able to train for the first year full-time. For the second year I was there, the money ran out. So I needed to get jobs.”
(Image credit: Alex Whitehead/SWpix)
In the months that followed, Stewart combined his training with up to 50-hour working weeks, on occasion waking up at 3am to ride his bike.
“I started off babysitting and dog walking for a close family that I know, and I loved that, and I found a lot of purpose in that,” he said. “I loved working for Taku Wairua, a self development programme, where we went into low socio-economic schools, and I taught kids over 10 weeks about their values and who they are as humans.
“I was also a lifeguard team leader, and I had five or six young lifeguards I was looking after, and I wanted to show them that I could get my training done before work started at 5:30am. I think they thought I was lucky being an athlete, but I wanted to show them it was a conscious decision, and if you want something, you can make it happen.”
Stewart re-entered the British Cycling fray early last year, when he raced at a Nations Cup meet in Canada, his first event for GB in over three years. He then went on to compete at the World Championships in Glasgow, riding with Wood in the Madison, and earning the silver medal.
Not expecting a call-up for the Olympics, Stewart said he was “over the moon” to be asked to be the reserve in the men’s endurance squad.
“It’s super-special, to be honest,” he said. “I joined the British Cycling programme in 2014, and spent five years trying to go to Tokyo. The opposite happened. They kicked me off. So even just to work my way back into the squad and compete at the Worlds in Glasgow last year was phenomenal. And then to get called up to be a reserve, to play a support role for my close friends, my teammates, was amazing.”
Now, he said, his focus is already on the next Olympics, scheduled for Los Angeles in 2028.
Does Stewart hope to be there? “Absolutely,” he said. “The beautiful thing about Madison is all the ages, shapes, everyone’s out there. I spoke to Roger Kluge, and I think he’s knocking on the door of 40 [years old], and I said, ‘Are you going to retire this year?’ and he said, ‘No! I’m going to go for a couple more years.’ If he can go a couple more years, so can I.”
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