How elite facility is adapting to keep top swim stars at peak in troubled waters
Steven Tigg should have been at a warm-weather camp in Tenerife preparing Scotland’s swimming royalty for a crack at the Olympics.
Instead he spent his weekend constructing a trampoline for his three- and- a-half-year- old daughter Heidi who has no nursery to go to. These are surreal times indeed.
“It is a bit like living in a movie,” Tigg tells down the phone.
As head performance swimming coach at Stirling University, he devotes hours upon hours of his time to helping the likes of Duncan Scott and Ross Murdoch shave a second off theirs.
Olympic organisers remain adamant that the results of their labours will be put on show in Tokyo from July 24.
With every hour that passes, though, another voice – USA Swimming and UK Athletics the latest – joins the calls for the Games to be postponed, like so many other sporting events have been.
On whether the
Olympics should even be going ahead, Tigg said: “It’s really difficult.
“When I look across the swimming community around the world, one of the things about the Olympics is the fairness and equality.
“And there are a lot of people and athletes who can’t get access to anything.
“It’s scrimping around trying to access any sort of training facility, running track, footballfootbal pitch, whatever it is – it isis mas ma s s i v e l y disruptive.
“And i f that brings intoi question the integrintegrity of the Games ititselse f then that ’ s somsomething that really has to be considered.
Logistically, I can’t see how it can go ahead. I think it will at some point. But there is life beyond an Olympic Games.
“One of the things that I think is important to the athletes and we’ve reiterated to them is that they’re more than enough without it.
“So they’ll certainly be mmore than enough with itit, whether it happens or nnot. There are bigger and mmore important things tthan the Olympics in life aand hopefully there is aanother one if this one ddoesn’t go ahead.”
House music echoed tthrough the bbuilding in
22018 when
v i si ted a training session on the eve of the Europeans as Scott, Murdoch and
Co put on flippers and tried to beat each other’s times for a length of the pool.
This past week? Only the faint repetitive noise of single strokes breaking the surface of the water.
Tigg said: “It’s probably one of the most surreal experiences I have faced, not only as a coach but as a parent, having to adapt day to day.
“Following all the guidance that has been given out by the Government about how to keep people safe and how to stop the spread of the virus has been the most important thing.
“And at the same time we’re trying to look after athletes who have got lots and lots of questions that we just simply can’t provide any answers for. “Normally in sport we work with a high degree of certainty around dates and timings and at the minute that’s just not there. It is just pretty much trying to take one day at a time and literally operating in 24-hour periods.
“We have got limited access (to the pool) but under rea l ly st r ict