Chris Hoy goes electric: ‘Weekend warriors are hardest to convince’

Sir Chris Hoy is beaming — and the reason for the cycling champion’s excitement might surprise some of the sport’s purists.
The six-time Olympic gold medallist has just picked the first finished unit off the production line from Skarper, a start-up that has developed a device which can turn a traditional push bike into an e-bike in minutes.
“I’m really excited to take it home. I genuinely believe this is going to change the way people ride bikes and the way people buy bikes and view their own bikes,” he says.
Hoy, 48, is among the backers of the London-based business, which is aiming to change the way the cycling industry approaches electric bikes.
Skarper’s device is essentially a removable and portable “engine” for push bikes that, once a dedicated disc brake rotor has been installed on a back wheel, can be clicked on and off again in seconds. A gearing system inside the disc was developed with the help of the Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team following a pitch by Hoy.
“This will allow someone with a 20-year-old bike to have an e-bike — and then not have an e-bike — in seconds,” he says. “You can have some knackered old bike you’ve bought on eBay that you’re happy to leave outside your office, that no one is going to look twice at. You take the [Skarper unit] off, charge it at your desk if you want — you take the valuable bit with you. It’s so simple, yet so effective.”
He adds: “It wouldn’t have been exactly what it is without me, which is a nice feeling. I hope people feel that when they try it — that somebody who knows about cycling has played a part.”
It might surprise some to hear that the 11-time world champion is such an enthusiastic advocate for electric bikes, but then Hoy says he has never shared the “sniffy” attitude of some cyclists towards power-assisted riding.
“The ones who are really elite, the ones competing at Olympic level or professionally, get it more easily than the weekend warriors who take cycling seriously as a hobby. They are the hardest ones to convince.
“Elite riders see it for what it is. When you are not training, you want to use your bike to get around but you don’t want to be sweating up a hill. You don’t want to be wasting your legs when you should be resting. I think it takes people like myself, who are associated with elite level performance, to say, actually it’s got its place. You can still race, but e-bikes are a tool to do a different job.”
For example, Hoy says he’ll be using his unit on his gravel bike to pop up and down from his home to the nearest village, while he expects his wife, Sarra, will use it on weekend rides to help her keep up with him.
Skarper began life as an idea from Alastair Darwood, the company’s co-founder. A medical doctor and inventor, Darwood, 32, developed a low-cost ventilator during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The self-confessed “bike geek” wanted to add an e-bike to his extensive collection of bicycles but found those on the market too heavy, unwieldy, expensive and often made with poor quality components. Conversion kits are widely available but Darwood considered them “bulky and unattractive” and, crucially, tricky to remove once installed.
Skarper’s co-founder Uri Meirovich, 43, says Darwood’s “aha” moment was the realisation that every bike frame is fundamentally different but there’s one part that is uniform: the rear disc brake rotor.
E-bikes generally come with either a “mid-drive” motor near the pedals or a hub motor in one of the wheels. “Both of them have an inherent flaw that you need to design a new bike around the e-bike motor,” Meirovich says. “That adds a lot of complexities and costs, and weight.”
“If we connect to the disc rotor and not to the bike frame, we become essentially agnostic to the bike frame. That was the invention.” Skarper has been granted a patent for the concept of driving an e-bike via the rear disc brake.
In late 2020, Darwood, Meirovich and Ean Brown, 60, the company’s chief executive, took the idea to Hoy and Andy Wallis, a bike design expert, and asked “whether this is a good enough idea for us to stop what we’re doing”, Meirovich recalls. “They said, not only is this a good idea, if this is real then I want to be part of it.”
Wallis, now Skarper’s commercial director, says his initial reaction was dismay. “How can I have a design and mechanical engineering background and have been around bicycles my whole life and not have this idea? I was really annoyed that it wasn’t me who thought of it. I think it was one of those things that when you’re in something so deep, you can’t see the wood for the trees.”
Hoy’s initial reaction was that it sounded too good to be true. “To have something you can click onto any bike and turn it into an e-bike, and then take it off again, it’s the eureka moment. When you see it and you try it, you get that feeling too. Within three weeks of the first discussion I signed up to become an investor.”
The idea may have had an ingenious simplicity, but its development was anything but straightforward, Meirovich says. “ There have been moments where it seemed almost impossible. We have basically cut a normal [electric bike] gearbox in half, and we wanted to be able to connect it in seconds and it’s got to be rock solid when it connects.
“We would claim that with the level of engineering we’ve done, when you put it on your bike, it’s a better riding experience.”
Skarper has raised £12.8 million in funding to date. Its units, which cost £1,495, will be sold directly to consumers from its website and via partnerships with independent retailers across the UK including Sigma Sports in London, Pedal Power near Edinburgh and Fit to Ride in Poole.
Meirovich says the company aims to build partnerships with bike manufacturers to develop electric bike motors that easily fit into how they make their traditional bikes at the production stage.
Hoy’s role has gone beyond providing seed capital and a famous face for the business. For example, he pitched the idea during a meeting that convinced Red Bull Racing to come on board to help develop a gearing mechanism inside the disc rotor, something that Skarper has filed a patent for. “There’s no point just endorsing something, the public see through old-fashioned endorsements. The more hands on you are, the better,” Hoy says.
He hopes that his experience of “knowing exactly what a cyclist would want from a product” has informed its development. “If you change the saddle height on my bike by 5mm, I’ll know. That comes with decades of riding bikes.”
Now that the product has launched, he hopes to retain an active role. “Apart from anything, I really enjoy it — it’s been fun being around such a vibrant, excitable, enthusiastic team. I do think it will change the way the industry looks at e-bikes.”
Hoy has been overwhelmed by messages of support since he announced that he has terminal cancer last month in an interview with The Sunday Times.
“I was terrified, it was my first interview, still very raw. I feel like I’ve made huge strides to talk about it, even to come to terms with it,” he says.
When Hoy speaks to The Times about his involvement in Skarper, he’s just completed a talk in which he spoke about applying the lessons from his illustrious sporting career to other areas of life.
These include “accepting change when it comes, maintaining your focus and sticking to what you can control” as well as “looking for opportunity”.
“No matter how scary it can be, change often pushes you out of your comfort zone,” he says. “I apply it to everything I do, whether it’s business or getting a diagnosis you are not expecting. I genuinely believe it’s helped me over the past year.”
He cites being forced to adapt to new events at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing,where he became the first British male Olympian for 100 years to claim three golds at a single Games, as an example. His specialist event, the kilo, had been removed from the Olympic programme after the 2004 Games.
“I was nearly 30 at that point. Do you say, ‘there’s no way I can change now’, or ‘I’ll give it a go’? It was around the time London won the bid. I thought, I can’t give up now.
“I was forced into adapting to two new events. I won three gold medals in Beijing when I never would have chosen to leave the safety of the event I was doing well in.”
Hoy describes writing his memoir, All That Matters, in which he discusses dealing with his diagnosis, as “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write”. The book, as the Times reviewer puts it, deals in the “art of how to make the best of what you’ve got, how to live in the moment and forget about tomorrow”.
“We don’t confront [our mortality] because it’s so unthinkable, but it’s a finite time we have and it’s a shame how much of it we waste — and I include myself in this — worrying about stupid stuff that may or may not ever happen,” he says.
“Even if it does, deal with it when it comes. To ruin the moment, days passing you by, years passing you by, worrying about stuff that may not come to fruition … the big stuff comes along and you can suddenly get some perspective and wish you’d understood it much earlier.
“There is hope — it’s not like I’m delusional, like ‘it’s gonna go away’. The hope is you can get back to living your life the way you were before and find positivity in each day without worrying about stuff that hasn’t happened yet.
“If you can spread the word and sort of get people to apply it to their own lives, hopefully you can help some people.”