Whilst almost all the attention is on the athletes, there are a couple of other key Scottish participants at these Tokyo 2020 Olympics Games, and they will have just as big an impact on the outcome of some of the medal contents over the 16 days of competition as the athletes.

David Menzies, from Edinburgh, will be the Judge-Referee for all bunch and sprint events in the Izu Velodrome next week, whilst Sandy Gilchrist, another well-known figure within the Scottish Cycling community, will be supporting the Irish team as their chief mechanic – more on Sandy’s story can be found on the Peebleshire News website

In our latest #TokyoThursdays feature, we sat down with David to discuss his journey into becoming a commissaire, misconceptions about the rules and some of the changes to the role down the years.

Menzies started in the sport as a rider at Dunedin Cycle Club in Edinburgh in the late-1980s, alongside Sir Chris Hoy and Craig MacLean no less, before graduating into coaching. The senior coach at Dunedin, Ray Harris, also coached the Scotland Women’s squad before Menzies took over as coach in the early 1990s.

“It was really by accident than anything else,” Menzies told Scottish Cycling. “I had been involved in cycling for a while. I was then appointed as the Manager for Commonwealth Games Team in 1998.”

The Edinburgh-native was Scotland’s youngest team manager at the time, being only 27 – with a team that included the aforementioned Hoy and MacLean on the track, as well as champion riders and future broadcasters, Brian Smith and Richard Moore, on the road.

Launching a protest was permitted back in 1998 and this was the catalyst for Menzies decision to start in the commissaire role, as he explained:

“Through the Commonwealth Games I got involved in commissairing, as I thought, if I’m going to go and argue the case for our riders in relation to any issues, I better well know the rules!”

Although not being implemented until a few years later, the London 2012 official noted similarities between his thought process and that to which was attributed to British Cycling years later:

“The rationale behind it was a bit like the marginal gains. If you know how the commissaire’s think then you can put across a far more coherent argument if you need to.”

However, with an increase in funding it meant that David had a choice to keep coaching or return to his day job, as he explained:

“After that point it got a bit more serious in terms of coaching and National Lottery funding coming in – I ended up going back to my day job as a chartered accountant, but I continued with commissairing and so that’s what naturally what I did more of.”

That decision took Lothian’s Menzies to now be a commissaire at his second Olympic Games. Of that, he joked:

“I feel a bit poacher turned gamekeeper in many ways from that!”

One facet of the job of officials in most sports, be that umpires, referees or commissaries, is that athletes and coaches can often have misconceptions regarding sometimes basic rules, which can cause issues for the officials, as Menzies explained:

“Even at the top level, there’s still an awful lot of misconceptions out there that often may lead to the confrontation that you see between coaches and ourselves.”

When asked for the most common misconception that riders and coaches have regarding rules of the track, Menzies was relatively swift in his answer:

“One major thing is around the sprint and the sprinters lane. The number of times I have had a rider or coach come up to me and say, ‘they came out the sprinters lane therefore they must be disqualified’. When, nowhere in the rules does it say that; it says you have to hold your line. Once you are in the sprinters lane it just says to hold your line – it does not say that you can’t come out. That’s the most obvious misconception that we have.”

Track Cycling has seen somewhat of an exponential improvement in equipment in the last decade or so, and the UCI are explicitly trying to make the Olympic Track meet fair by enforcing much stricter rules on what equipment nations can use in Tokyo, as he explained:

“Perhaps because of the innovations we’ve seen, there is an awful lot of scrutiny on equipment. We now have a brand-new innovation routine, which means that every piece of equipment that is ridden in the track events, has to have been ridden at least once at a Track World Cup and everything has to be registered with the UCI.”

However, the verification process that comes with these new rules is incredibly detailed, and takes the best part of a working week to sort:

“Every nation has to declare what they will be taking to the Izu Velodrome and the UCI Equipment Unit checks if it is ‘commercially available’. That’s all done before Tokyo, so once we arrive, every nation is given a slot in the four days prior to competition to come along and bring every piece of equipment that we will check against the list we have. It will be scanned and given a sticker for the technical commissaire to verify before every ride on track.”

With the tightest of margins deciding medals, and often funding attached to them, officials must be vehement in their inspection, as Menzies described:

“We recognise that these events are won and lost in thousands of a second. So, technology can make that big difference, so there is a lot of effort going into verification of equipment.”

Being on the biggest stage, at the Olympic Games in Japan, is a marked change from his last assignment at the UCI Nations Cup in St Petersburg, but the Scottish commissaire is hoping that he and his fellow team of 22 officials avoid attention inside the Izu Velodrome next week.

“We’re not there to make our mark, we’re there to be in the background. If we are the headlines out of a competition, then I don’t think we’ve done a good job in that situation.”

With that in mind we wish David and his team the best of luck, and lowest of profiles, for the track events, which start with the Neah Evans and Katie Archibald in the Women’s Team Pursuit on Monday. That being said, we thank him and his fellow commissaires, at all levels of our sport, for the work they to allow competition to happen.

If this article has interested you in becoming a commissaire, you can get involved here.