Britain's six-time Olympic gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy tipped to announce retirement on Thursday

GREAT Britain's greatest Olympian, Sir Chris Hoy, is expected to announce his retirement on Thursday.

Hoy and British team

GREAT Britain's greatest Olympian, Sir Chris Hoy, is expected to announce his retirement on Thursday.

The six-time Olympic gold medallist has long expressed a desire to end his stellar career at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, but had insisted he would carry on only if he believed he could win another title.

The Scot, however, will be 38 by the time the track cycling begins at the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in July 2014. He has spent the months after London 2012 on a round-the-world trip with wife Sarra, pondering whether his body is still up to the task.

"I wouldn't just want to get on the team to get the tracksuit, turn up and wave to the crowd," he said last year. "I want to go there to win.

"If I believe I can do that and I'm able to do that, then I will be there."

And so, fittingly, there will be no long drawn-out ceremonial tour for Sir Chris; no courting the crowd while others race for medals.

The images of the mighty Olympian with the 27-inch thighs will be the ones that endure.

It is an appropriate legacy for a serial winner; the most successful Olympic athlete in British history, a man with 11 world titles and six Olympic gold medals to his name.

Rather than making a rash decision in the euphoria of 2012, the man who studied mathematics at St Andrews University has taken his time.

This is an athlete who would consider it an insult to turn up in Glasgow if he did not think he could win. It is to his enormous credit. There is also the consideration that a young buck might show up the father figure of British cycling on his home turf.

The timing of Hoy's "major announcement" at Murrayfield Stadium on Thursday therefore seems a typically understated gesture from an athlete who has simply got on with things.

Hoy and British team

After winning his first Olympic gold in the 1km time trial in Athens in 2004, the event was removed from the Games, but Hoy responded by winning the sprint, keirin and team sprint in 2008.

His haul made him the first Briton for a century to win three gold medals at one Olympics. He became Sir Chris, the most successful British cyclist, 2008 BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

Four years later, Hoy was denied the chance to defend his sprint title after Jason Kenny, 12 years his junior, was selected for the sole British place.

However crushing, Hoy maintained it was the "right call". He replied by winning team sprint gold with Kenny and Philip Hindes, and added the keirin, too.

Hoy was emotional as he took his place on the podium after the team sprint, later admitting he had to fight not to "cry like a big baby". He also conceded he had "never suffered" like he did during the final lap of the race.

After more than a decade at the peak of such a physically demanding sport, he can be forgiven for not wanting to replicate that feeling, particularly as he had battled a back injury since the World Championships in Melbourne in April 2012.

Yet his decision not to bow out with an assault at gold in Scotland, in the stadium that bears his name, still comes as something of a surprise.

This proud Scot has real affection for the Commonwealth Games.

He has admitted he would not have found his sport if Edinburgh's Meadowbank Velodrome had not been built for the 1970 Commonwealth Games, and used again 16 years later. It had no roof, and so Hoy moved to Manchester to train when Britain's first indoor velodrome opened in 1994, and the so-called 'friendly Games' have underpinned his career.

Hoy has won two Commonwealth gold and two bronze medals, and his first major international medal came at the 2002 edition in Manchester in the kilometre. It was a breakthrough moment, both physically and mentally, and most poignant for Hoy, who has described the memory of seeing parents Carol and David in the stands.

But by hoping Hoy would sign off with an emotional, if not golden,  farewell in Glasgow, perhaps we underestimated the pride of a man who has thrived on pressure of expectation.

Sir Steve Redgrave, whom Hoy surpassed as Britain's most successful Olympic athlete, can testify to that: the rower was in the velodrome when Hoy signed off his Olympic career with a sixth gold medal in London.

Hoy, of course, continues to insist he barely deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence as Redgrave, whose five gold medals came in five consecutive Games. Who deserves the title of Britain's greatest Olympian is for others to argue, but Sir Chris's medal haul speaks for itself.

And how fitting that those glorious memories of London will be the ones that endure.

Britain's flag-bearer at our home Games last year will remain just that: a powerful symbol of this country's re-emergence as an Olympic force.