Article by:
Steve Huntingford
To the casual observer, the worlds of drag racing and ballet couldn't be more different, but they have more in common than you might think, says Royal Ballet star, Steven McRae
“Many people can’t understand someone’s love for drag racing. They think it’s just two cars in a straight line, and it’s over in a flash. But when you actually experience one of those top fuel dragsters going down the strip at 330mph, you feel it with your whole body. It vibrates through you, and you instantly become hooked. And that’s what happened to me.”
As a Principal Dancer at the Royal Ballet, Steven McRae is preparing to star in its production of La Fille mal gardée. But right now he wants to talk about the sport he’s been obsessed with since he was a kid.
McRae grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney, five minutes away from Australia's Eastern Creek International Raceway. And while this hosts everything from touring cars to superbikes, the fact that his father was a drag racer had a big influence.
“My earliest memory is sitting in our normal car at the race track, with massive orange earmuffs on my head," McRae recalls. "If my dad wasn’t racing at Eastern Creek, we’d drive up to Queensland with the race car towed behind on a trailer. We’d leave at about 10 pm on a Thursday night, do a 12-hour drive and get there in the morning. Then we’d have three whole days at the race track surrounded by these incredible cars.
“It really was a family affair,” McRae continues. “I had uncles who weren’t really my uncles, but they’d been family friends for my whole life. Everyone was involved in getting the car prepared, and there were no sponsorship deals; it was purely for the love of it. My parents even had their honeymoon at the race track.”
So was McRae ever tempted to become a driver rather than a dancer himself? “I definitely was, and I still love the sport,” he says. “But I won a scholarship at the Royal Ballet when I was 17, and that would have been around the age that I would have started. Who knows, though. Maybe it’s something that I’ll pursue later in life. I definitely have an obsession with adrenaline, risk and speed, but at the moment my career totally satisfies it.
“I remember my father and me sitting down once and describing to each other what we felt in our different worlds. He talked about the moment at the start of a race, just before he put his foot down the full throttle, where he felt this surge of adrenaline. This total rush from the unknown. And that’s exactly how I feel just before the curtain goes up for a performance. You’ve done as much preparation as you can, but there's always a risk that something could go wrong, and then how do you cope with it. I love that element of anything is possible. The only difference is my dad’s adrenaline rush was over in a few seconds, whereas mine lasts three hours.”
McRae won his scholarship to the Royal Ballet 12 years ago, after taking first prize at the Prix de Lausanne in Switzerland. But it was actually his older sister that started him on his career path. “She did a lot of gymnastics and dancing,” he explains. “And one day she was practising at home for some dancing event, and I said to my parents, ‘I want to have a go’. I was seven years old at the time and they thought I’d last a week, but it’s been a long time since I was seven years old and I'm still doing it.
“They never once questioned it. I mean, my dad comes from this completely different, macho world, and he could have easily said 'you’re not doing that, don’t be ridiculous'. But my parents have always been totally supportive. And all my dad’s friends in drag racing, too. It’s such a different thing, so it’s fascinating for them.
Not that McRae knew much about it himself when he was young. "I’d never even seen a full-length ballet until I came to London to study at the Royal Ballet," he says. "But I did a lot of dance competitions because I’m a competitive person. And then I had teachers that said ‘you could actually pursue this as a career. Before that, I didn’t know it was possible. That you could dance professionally. But once I was introduced to it I thought, I have to do that.”
After 18 months of studying at the Royal Ballet School, McRae graduated to the company itself. But then at 21, he tore his Achilles, putting his career in jeopardy. There was apparently talk that he'd never dance again and that he'd limp for the rest of his life. However, he says he was inspired to prove the doubters wrong by remembering the life stories of his two biggest sporting heroes.
“One is Shirley Muldowney, who was among the first women to drag race professionally,” McRae explains. “People told her 'you can’t do that, you’re a woman. But she proved everyone wrong, becoming world champion three times.
“The other is John Force. He’s in his sixties now but is still racing. And his three daughters, they all race as well. He’s the most successful driver in any motorsport, having won the world championship 16 times. And he now runs one of the most successful teams, but he came from nothing. He was a truck driver living in a caravan, and now he has a multi-million-pound team with all the big sponsors. It’s just a really inspirational story. Every time a door would shut in front of him, he’d find a way around it.
“When I was a kid, my dad would buy me a video every year with the highlights of the season, and I used to watch them over and over again until I could quote every line from John Force’s interviews. My parents found it funny at the time, but his words obviously triggered something in my brain; this guy worked his butt off. So, yes I’m a dancer, but you can find inspiration in anything. For me it's motorsport. I always go back to it.”
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