Cancellation finally gives Scottish stars some clarity
I am delighted to hear the Olympics and Paralympics have been postponed until 2021. I’ve been saying for the past couple of weeks that it would have been incredibly difficult to stage them this year and indeed the very idea was becoming impossible as each day passed. To push back a little later into 2020 also didn’t seem like the right option. In Britain, we’re pretty much in full lockdown and while athletes can exercise once a day, subject to government guidelines, venues all across the country are shut. They don’t have access to face-to-face coaching, they can’t see a physio and they can’t get treatment. People may not be aware, but our elite Scottish athletes and Paralympians would have been in real limbo if they’d been injured at this time. There would really be nowhere for them to go with that other than the NHS and, of course, they have far more significant priorities to deal with and rightly so. I’ve been talking to athletes and coaches constantly in recent weeks and one of the phrases was to try and keep ‘ticking over’. But when that actually becomes difficult and there is no prospect of competition to achieve standards, then there were all sorts of issues — regardless of whether Japan was somehow okay to travel to at some later date. at last, we have some certainty. The lack of clarity was a definite danger in mental-health terms — frustration building up at not being able to train in the right way or the right environment, frustration at a lack of competition, a fear of not being suddenly ready when asked to be. I am very relieved with this outcome.