The day when Reg Harris was forced to settle for two Olympic silver medals When eventually Mario Ghella, appeared, he was being carried by two burly minders, who eventually placed the Italian on the saddle without his feet touching the ground. Casual fans were bemused by the spectacle but experts such as the cycling journalist John Dennis, who was trackside, strongly suspected that Ghella was doped to the eyeballs. Ghella was a precocious talent, aged only 19, and had tailored his season specifically for this race. In the previous spring, the Italian cycling federation had flown him to Africa for warm-weather training. Over the summer, they had sent him to practise at a track in Piacenza because it resembled Herne Hill, being comparatively flat and having long straights. His coach, Giovanni Proietti, had even compiled a dossier of Harris's performances in major races since his world-title win in Paris, detailing his strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, the British squad's preparations for the Games had been desperately inadequate. They had convened for the first time only a fortnight earlier when they met at the house of the cycling journalist, Bill Mills, who lived near Herne Hill and who had offered to put them up for the duration of the Games. They had been forced to race each other for places on the team in the days leading up to the competition. While their opponents were given the best kit and equipment, the British squad brought their own bikes, borrowed tyres from Dunlop and were kitted out with heavy, woollen jerseys designed for the road. Little wonder Harris had lost faith with the selectors and returned home to Manchester rather than train with the squad, a decision that brought about his sacking. Overwhelming public disapproval forced the National Cycling Union to reinstate him but his team-mates were unimpressed with Harris's conduct. "Harris placed himself on a pedestal," Alan Geldard, a pursuit rider, said. Harris had checked into his favourite hotel in St John's Wood rather than stay with Mills. Ghella's entourage delayed the start further by undergoing an elaborate examination of his bike, inflating his back wheel and tightening his pedal cleat, oversights that such a meticulous team would never usually commit. They wanted merely to unsettle Harris. "Reg was no mug," said Annable, who, decades later, would serve as Chris Hoy's mentor at Edinburgh Cycling Club. Once Ghella was strapped in, he walked off and pretended he had something wrong with his bike. He wasn't going to be psyched out. He should not have been competing at all. After he had fractured two vertebrae, his surgeon had warned that Harris might not ride again, yet he had discharged himself from hospital within a fortnight, signing an agreement that waived medical staff of any responsibility over his health. In his progress to the final, Harris had claimed that his wrist still hurt when he pulled hard on the handlebars. Such deficiencies might help to explain why he lost two races to Ghella, with Harris sitting up before the end of the first and getting beaten narrowly in the next. "It was like something out of a movie," Julio César León, the Venezuelan cyclist who had been eliminated in a preliminary round, said. They were of equal standard, but Ghella was shorter than Harris and flatter across the frame, so he had a way of cutting more sharply through the wind in the last 100 metres. Harris's second event, the tandem, began only a few hours later. By the time Harris had reached the final with his partner, Alan Bannister, dusk had settled over the old Victorian venue and prevented a clear view from one end of the track to its opposite. The press wanted the race postponed until the following day but officials refused. In an era when Britons were still restricted to war rations and when every Olympic sport was strictly amateur, the organisers could not afford to host an extra day. As a result, with the photo-finish facility turned off lest the flash-bulb blinded the competitors, fans were divided over who had won after the pairs had crossed the finish line in the same breath. "I was level with them," Shelagh Dennis said. I was 18, I had pretty good eyesight and I swear Harris and Bannister got it. The judges eventually decided otherwise, leaving domestic reporters to file by match-light another tale of great expectation denied. Two silver medals eventually made Harris's the outstanding individual performance from any Briton at London's last Games, but the disappointment of missing gold cut him to the core. "Wins are what you fight to achieve," he said, decades later. Anything less than gold is such a disappointment that I would feel I had a token to mark the failure. A lot of people might feel that to achieve silver or bronze shows distinction. It's all a question of where one's sights have been. Reg Harris - The Rise and Fall of Britain's Greatest Cyclist By Robert Dineen Published by Ebury Press on 5th July 2012, £16.99 Hardback