Sitting on a track bike on the velodrome start line, I’m transfixed by Chris Hoy’s thighs a few inches from mine. They sprout from his torso like the meatiest of Fortnum & Mason hams. I look down, ashamed. My thighs are Sainsbury’s chicken legs from the Basics range. A fair fight this is not.

It’s a three-lap race and we’re under starter’s orders. And — bam! — suppress your shock, I’m ahead already. The chicken, having been trapped in a shed in Wapping, headquarters of The Sunday Times, for most of its life, is making a dash for freedom. Head down the straight, curving on the bank. Plenty of squawking. This is a Jamie Oliver breakout. But where’s the big guy? Where are your protein-fed, gold-medal Scottish hams now, big boy? Got the cramp?

Hoy, the first British athlete in 100 years to win three golds at one Olympic Games, is behind for the best part of two laps but cruises past me on the third. The big guy stole it back by a whisker. I’d like to think I surprised him, or maybe it was because for most of the loop he was texting his girlfriend with one hand and resetting his iPod to Public Enemy with the other. No-o-o, he’s far too professional for that. The truth is, he’s such a nice guy he didn’t want to humiliate me.

Here at the Newport velodrome, in south Wales, Chris is giving tips on track racing with his fellow Olympian Jamie Staff — they are both members of the new Sky+HD trade team — and Shane Sutton, the GB coach who has helped to transform British cycling from a backwater to a torrent of world-beating talent.

First we’re led out for some “looping and swooping”, accelerating to soar up the steep velodrome corners and then using gravity to power back down on the straights. “Gas on the corners, gas off the straight,” barks Sutton from trackside, punching his fist into the palm of his hand as we ride past. It’s a surprisingly peaceful and rhythmic experience.

Next we’re shown the not-so-simple art of the standing start. Since victory is decided in as little as a couple of thousandths of a second, races are won and lost almost before the first full turn of the crank. Chris mounts up and aligns his pedals, Sutton holds his saddle. “You slice your foot down like a martial art kick,” says Sutton. “It’s like pulling on your Levi’s — you lock your arms, stiff and straight, and your foot slices down the leg hole.”

We try it side by side. Hoy lays down his famous 2,300 watts of power and pulls away like Thomas the Tank Engine on nitrous oxide. I waggle off like a district nurse pedalling to a fainting. Staff, gold medallist in the Beijing Olympic team sprint, is more powerful than Hoy on the starting grid. “Yes, it’s true,” he laughs. “\ I can generate more torque than an F1 car. But I can only hold it for a nanosecond. They can do it for about two hours.”

The secret, apart from technique, is in the Fortnum & Mason thighs, which in Hoy’s case are each 27in in circumference. (He has fan mail — not all of it from women.) Six weeks before Beijing, Hoy scored a personal best, squat-lifting 500lb, more than double his body weight. These days his physique is so good he needs only to top up with a couple of gym sessions a week; the rest of the time he’s on the bike. Once all the post-Olympic fanfare is over, it’s time for what Sutton calls “shutdown” and back to training five days a week, up to seven hours a day.

What makes Hoy different from other first-class athletes is his appetite for training and extremity. “Some people just don’t like suffering,” he says. “They just can’t get down to that last half per cent. Nobody really knows apart from you . . . your trainer can’t see it. It’s down to you — only you can tell. There’s a shut-off people have — they just don’t want to go there unless it’s a competition.”

And so he trains hard. A typical session might include four 500-metre sprints at 100% effort. That doesn’t mean going till he feels a bit red-faced and puffed. It means going so hard that lactic acid streams through his legs, requiring a half-hour recovery. “Anything over 40 seconds at maximum effort is pretty grim. I kid myself there’s just one run . . . I just hone in on the single thing I’m doing.”

The mind games are fundamental to success in an event that can be decided by air pressure or a degree shift in temperature (bikes, like any moving object, go faster through warm air). You do all those years of preparation only to be confounded by something you can’t control. Or worse still, a stupid thought pops up at the wrong time. “You can be the best physical athlete there but put a spanner in the works by letting anxiety get you,” says Hoy. “You can see some guys crumble.”

To help with the sports psychology, the team called on the skills of Steve Peters, a forensic psychiatrist who has worked at Rampton, a high-security hospital. Peters helped the sprint team “keep the chimp in the cage” — isolate all negative emotional reactions before they could wreck the focus on the task in hand. By demanding that the cyclists visualise any setback in advance, he taught them to keep the cage locked.

Despite the tight emotional leash during competition, Hoy is easy company during our morning knockabout, happy to help a track novice — and generous enough not to overwhelm with his jaw-dropping power. The grit and aggression is saved for training and race days. He’s in the running for the BBC sports personality of the year, broadcast tonight, and to my mind he deserves to win.