Cyclist Ethan Hayter raced to success at this year’s Commonwealth Games, despite only taking up the sport in 2012.
The 19-year-old won bronze in the 40km points race, silver in the 4000m team pursuit with Kian Emadi, Charlie Tanfield and Ollie Wood, and also came eight in the 4000m individual pursuit and fifth in the 15km scratch race.
Hayter, who made his Commonwealth Games debut at Gold Coast 2018, trained at Herne Hill Velodrome in South London, along with fellow Team England cyclist Abigail Van Twisk, 21, who came 16th in the women’s road race.
John Scripps, a member of Hayter’s home club VC Londres and a British Cycling talent coach, said: “Ethan got into it after the Olympics games in 2012, he saw what was going on there and was about 14 when he started.
“He was fairly new to the sport when I worked with him, he was showing potential as a rider and he’s naturally very strong, but he had habit of crashing.
“He was one of those riders where if he stayed up on his bike he’d win, or he would crash.
“Because he was quite new to the sport he crashed a lot, because he just didn’t have the skill level that the younger years of bike-riding gives you.”
Mr Scripps added that Hayter and Twisk had a quiet determination to always improve their cycling.
He said: “It was never about the result, it was never about what they were doing right there and then, just more about how they’re doing it and how they can improve what they’re doing.
“Often kids have been riding since they were about 10 years old, where the skill level creeps in and there’s a lack of fear.
“Cycling’s quite good in the sense that you don’t have to start too early, riders don’t really mature until their early 20s.
“They’re the lucky ones, I was only a small part of it, if someone else had worked with them they’d have made it as well.
“It was more a question of them rather than me.”
