Having a Scottish surfer champion to cheer on one day may not be such an alien concept
Andy Murray and Chris Hoy managed to dodge the all-powerful footie tractor beam in their youth
Ihad a mildly mind-blowing conversation recently with a friend who grew up in the former East Germany. We were talking about schools in general and PE lessons in particular. Apparently the East Germans were so ruthlessly committed to maximising their chances of sporting success during the 1980s that nobody got to choose what sport they played. Instead they would be allocated a sport based on their body type. Short and stocky? Weightlifter. Thighs like pistons? Cyclist. Tall and springy? Pole vaulter. What’s that Helmut? You’d rather play tennis? Tough. You look like a pole vaulter. Go and get yourself a pole. Next!
It’s easy to mock, but you can at least see the logic in a system like this, even if it undoubtedly caused thousands of kids to suffer untold agonies during the one part of their schooling that should have been all about fun. Given the extent of the East German doping programme, it’s impossible to say whether this horses-for-courses selection system actually worked or not (I reckon even I could have been a half-decent pole vaulter if you’d pumped me full of anabolic steroids over a period of several years). Still, at a guess I’d say it probably resulted in a significant number of kids going on to excel in relatively obscure sports they might not otherwise have thought to try, becoming world-class fencers or divers or ski jumpers (albeit chemically-enhanced ones) rather than – say – slightly-better-thanaverage footballers.
By contrast, to an alien life form studying these islands from a passing spacecraft, the mass-production of slightly-better-than-average footballers might seem to be the primary goal of our school system; indeed, when viewed from space on a Saturday afternoon, it might look like the primary goal of our entire society.
“They don’t appear to produce the best footballers on their planet,” our mystified alien adventurers might observe, “but per head of population, the inhabitants of these islands certainly seem to devote more time to playing the game, watching it and talking about it than anybody else.”
I have nothing against football, but even the beautiful game’s biggest fans would surely concede that it dominates our culture to the detriment of other sports. If you mostly get taught to play football at school, and if most of your friends play football at the weekend, and if most of the sport on the telly is football, chances are you’ll end up playing football too. All of which somehow makes success in other sports doubly impressive. Not only did Andy Murray and Chris Hoy become world champions, they also managed to dodge the all-powerful footie tractor beam in their youth.
None of the members of Scotland’s junior surf team are world champions just yet, but they certainly did themselves proud in at the Eurosurf Juniors in Portugal last month, finishing 11th overall after a week of competition at Mirante Beach in Santa Cruz. Clover Christopherson of Dunbar made it all the way to the semi-finals of the U18 Girls Bodyboard, while Malcolm Todd, also from Dunbar, finished ninth in both the U16 and U18 Boys Bodyboard.
You’ll struggle to find many column inches devoted to their successes in the mainstream media, of course, not because surfing isn’t an internationally significant sport (there are an estimated 23 million surfers worldwide, and it will feature in the 2020 Olympics) but because we don’t live in a surfing culture. Will surfing ever displace football at the pinnacle of the Scottish sporting hierarchy? Of course not. But might we one day have a top surfer to cheer on? Somebody who could make us all care about surfing in the same way that Andy Murray made us all care about tennis? It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds (and let’s face it, the Andy Murray story sounded far-fetched until it actually happened.)
As demonstrated by their recent Eurosurf success, Scotland’s best young surfers are already doing very nicely, thanks very much, but what’s particularly encouraging is that there’s a little posse of them, all pushing each other to do well. The last time I wrote about Scotland’s junior surf team in this slot, young Ben Larg of Tiree was the focus for winning the U18 boys category at the European Surfing Championships in Norway; the time before that it was Dunbar’s Mikey Wimbledon-hall following a strong showing at the 2016 Eurosurf Juniors in Morocco. Add to the mix the new Wavegarden wave pool that’s due to be built in Ratho, and these kids will soon have the ultimate training facility. The future’s looking bright – as long as football doesn’t get in the way.