No place like Frome as Mrs Doyle suggests she will, she will
Hurdler plots bid from English base with Rio medal the target following 2012 woe
PUT on your best Lloyd Grossman voice as you ask who would live in a house like this? Just like any ‘Through the Keyhole’ contestant, a few telltale signs are visible if you look closely enough. For a start, this modest, yet comfortable little place is located in the rolling countryside on the outskirts of Frome, a manageable distance from the University of Bath sports village where many of Britain’s best athletes and swimmers are put through their paces. A perfect pad perhaps for a newlywed couple, the house’s third occupant is in fact a large, friendly rottweiler called Ben who – judging by the fact he is looking pleadingly up at me with a tennis ball – is used to getting regular exercise in the fields and meadows which surround this place.
The garage is the man’s domain, although it has been turned into a bespoke, state-of-the-art treatment room rather than a man cave. But it is the woman of the house we are really here to see, and while nothing is on ostentatious display, if we looked closely enough we could find two Commonwealth silver medals and a European gold, not to mention a telltale wristband in the colours of her beloved Hearts.
In case you haven’t guessed it by now, we are at home with the Doyles – Eilidh, Scotland’s world class 400m hurdler, whose maiden name is Child, and her new husband Brian, a former athlete turned soft tissue therapist who offers professional treatment to his wife and selected others including Hull City and Scotland player Shaun Maloney. The pair married in Glenskirlie Castle in Stirlingshire late last year with guests including Lee McConnell and Allan Scott, the hurdler – as opposed to Scott Allan, the former Hibs player, now at Celtic, as was erroneously reported. “I’m not sure that would have gone down well,” Eilidh jokes.
You might not guess it from their quiet, down-at-heel existence – daytime TV is on in the living room, while the pair ventured out recently to take in the high-octane thrills of the Jungle Book – but this is the nerve centre for an audacious bid to bring back an Olympic medal. While the wedding festivities had an impact on her season – the indoor campaign was quietly shelved, despite entreaties for her to participate in the Glasgow Grand Prix – Doyle’s season commences in earnest at the opening of the Diamond League in Doha on Friday. She is delighted with how she has been going in training but only when she has a few competitive outings under her belt will she start to get a barometer on how she currently measures up to the likes of Jamaican Commonwealth Games champion Kaliese Spencer and double World Champion Zuzana Hejnova of the Czech Republic. A sixth-place finish at last year’s World Championships in Beijing was a disappointment, even though she finished ahead of Spencer.
“We are kind of going the same course as 2014, in at the deep end,” said Doyle. “If you race these girls all the time, then you have not got the same pressure when you go in against them in the big championships. But you know yourself by the target times you hit in training and how you are feeling whether you are going well. I have, touch wood, had a really good winter, I’ve not been injured or ill and everything has gone really well. But you just want the races to show that.”
While London 2012 will forever be hailed as halcyon days for sport on these islands, it has never been Doyle’s favourite topic. She ran 56.03secs in the semi, failing to advance to the final, and generally deriving so little enjoyment from the experience that she employed the services of a sports psychologist called Mike Cunningham. She has visited him ever since.
“My memories of London 2012 are positive now, but at the time they were pretty negative,” said Doyle. “I didn’t run well, although I was never someone who you would have expected to win a medal. It was one of my slowest races of the season and I felt completely overwhelmed by it all. I remember being in the warm-up area, I had set up hurdles to jump over, then one of the Russians started changing them around. I was like, ‘Oh well, I’ll just let her have them’.
“I didn’t even enjoy competing in it, even though it was what I had dreamed of doing since I was a wee girl,” she added. “I started thinking, ‘Why am I not enjoying this?’ I had lost that edge, that enjoyment for it, so that was when I started speaking to my sports psychologist, and I have spoken to him ever since.”
An emotional Commonwealth silver in Glasgow, immediately followed by European gold, was the end result of this period of introspection. Her passport for Rio won’t be rubber stamped until she runs an Olympic standard this year, and finishes in the
My memories of London 2012 are positive now, butatthetimethey were pretty negative. I didn’t run well, although I was never someone who you would have expected to win a medal. It was one of my slowest races of the season and I felt completely overwhelmed by it all