It's news to the BBC because it's Baxter (news because he won an Olympic medal, then had it stripped for his Vicks inhaler episode )and it's cycling (news because of lots of medals in Beijing) and the reporter probably thinks that like Rebecca Romero he'll just transfer-over and slot-in.
Perhaps he will, perhaps he won't, it will be interesting to see.
As a successful athlete (well, an Olympic Bronze and world ranking of 11 [see
http://www.alainbaxter.co.uk/biography.html] is as successful as any British skier has been recently...), he's got the determination, the focus, the self-organisational skills and dedication to training...
...like Romero.
She had these professional-athlete skills and proved it was possible to transfer-over from a physiologically-similar power&endurance sport to track cycling, particularly to the individual pursuit where the tactics are simple, because riding a bike fast round a velodrome isn't a skill which takes years to perfect like a golf swing or tennis stroke, let alone something as complicated as a swimming stroke...
So the question is whether Alain Baxter can do it.
- I can see him getting good enough to represent Scotland in the Commonwealths next year, but whether he'll be good enough to be better than the whole host of other cyclists in the British Cycling academy and get to London in 2012, I dunno...
<edit>
Interestingly, Baxter's website links to an article from the Sun (I found it from Baxter's website, I don't read the Sun, honest !)
http://www.thesun.co.uk/scotsol/hom...eaks-about-taking-up-competitive-cycling.html
This talks about the Commonwealths, unlike the BBC piece no mention of the Olympics at all
