Games delay will give Doyle crack at double

Eilidh Doyle knew she was facing a race against time to make the Tokyo 2020 Olympics after the birth of her son two months ago.

Now she feels as though the postponement of the Games for a year means she has won a watch in her bid to win a medal.

Juggling the joys of becoming a first-time mum to Campbell with finding a way to get her body back in shape in double-quick time was a tough ask for Doyle.

Scotland’s most successful athlete, 33, had vowed to bounce back to make the 4x400 metres relay team in Japan this August when she and hubby Brian broke the news of her pregnancy last summer.

The Rio 2016 bronze medallist admitted: ”It was all depending on how I felt.

“We had a plan in place before I had Campbell but you never really know how your labour will go, how you’ll feel after or when you’ll want to train.

“Where I have my physio – where Brian also works – there is a doctor and a pelvic floor expert and they were all working with me to see what I could do.

“It was almost like being an athlete in rehab, assessing how I was and going from there.

“It all went better than what I’d been expecting. Brian was thinking that if I could be running by the end of March, that would be brilliant. That could have allowed me to race at the trials in June.”

It was a blueprint that looked set to put the former European 400m hurdles champion on track for a comeback.

She’d been working on a pilates machine to get the muscles turning over again. Trips to her training base in Pitreavie came next with Campbell in tow and Brian, who’s also her coach, keeping a watchful eye.

It all felt surprisingly easy until the moment came to step up a gear.

Doyle said : “Running was horrendous. I felt like I was in somebody else’s body. That’s the only way I could describe it.

“Everything seemed to be in a different position to before or moving differently. That was weird.

“It was a case of moving forward in every session until I got back to normality. My physio Dave kept monitoring me to make sure I wasn’t going too far too soon.

“I had to keep logging how I felt. They want to challenge me but without pushing it too much.”

After drafting up the route that would have her baton-passing like the Doyle of old, lockdown means they’ve had to rip up the map and find a way of rebuilding sharpness without leaving the house.

Brian’s also a professional physio but isolation at home in Kinross means no trips for Doyle to see specialists or practices with the rest of the British team.

Training has come to a crunching halt in the blink of an eye.

Doyle said: “I won’t be able to run unless I get out and about and use it as my exercise for the day. It will be weird but I’m fortunate that I don’t need to do anything specific.”

With the Games being delayed Doyle now knows there’s a real chance of competing over hurdles in Tokyo instead of the relay being her only option.

She said: “Now we have the time to get my body ready. We don’t have to force it too much.

“It just means I’ve another year so I can simply get ready over this summer and start back training intensively in September for 2021.

“Then it simply becomes like a normal winter. I can get back over the hurdles then.”