Scott hopes Team Scotland can make big splash again
● Freestyle specialist is aiming high as swimmers look to reprise performance from past two Commonwealth Games
phenomenal. A gold, a silver and another gold in one night of swimming for Team Scotland. If we can start anything like that, it can only be positive.
“In Melbourne, it was phenomenal what they did. And it was phenomenal what they managed to achieve in one night of swimming.
“If Team Scotland were to replicate that, it can only be a positive. I don’t know if there is any pressure on us to deliver a good start, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we have the opportunity. If it doesn’t happen, we can build into it and have a strong finish at least. Every race is different. If we have a bad start, we can have a strong end.”
To do that choices have been made. They involve eschewing some of the life choices open to others their age. Scott says little should be made of that, though.
“I saw a great quote from Robbie Renwick, who did a radio interview,” he said. “They asked him that exact question about sacrifices, and he said ‘they don’t really count as sacrifices when you get to this level’. And he is completely right. Once you get to the level of international swimming, it just becomes habit. It’s not really a sacrifice. It’s what you do. You push away your university friends.
“You tell them ‘sorry, but I have to go to bed at 9:30 because I have to be up at this time’. It becomes a case of that’s just what you have to do to achieve things rather than it be a sacrifice.
“But it’s not all swimming. I love getting away from swimming more than anyone. I’ve got university, which distracts me potentially more than it should. I did the first two years full-time and now I’m doing my third year part-time at Stirling University. They have been absolutely phenomenal at sorting that out for me. What else distracts me? I’ve got a girlfriend and I’m away to the European Short Course.
“I follow football religiously. I’m an Alloa Athletic fan. The last game I went to was the Petrofac Cup final, which we lost 4-1 to Livingston. We had Michael Chopra then. Don’t get me started. I find it quite easy to get away from swimming. The group that I train with are not just swimming mates. We are mates outside the pool as well. So it’s quite easy to get away from the swimming environment. We talk about swimming at the pool and then shut it off afterwards.”
At home it is about Fifa Soccer more than it is about matters in the pool, although the infuriating thing for Scott, who is used to being one of the best, claiming gold at World and European level and silver at Olympic and Commonwealth, is he is not even the best in his own flat at that.
The resolution will be to improve on that but, first and foremost, it is about events in the Gold Coast and Scotland reprising the showings from the past two Games. Proposals have been drawn up to merge some of the core functions of the UK’S four national Institutes of Sport in a move Scottish chiefs believe could drive more high-performance sports funding north of the Border.
Sizeable cuts are expected to monies available to UK Sport to finance Olympic and Paralympic programmes following the Tokyo Games of 2020 due to falling revenues from the National Lottery and shifting government priorities. Hence, economies of scale are now being sought to maintain core support services even if the era of multi-million pound grants into individual sports may be nearing its end.
That, says Mike Whittingham, the director of the Stirling-based Sportscotland Institute of Sport, has created an opportunity to reshape the manner in which athletes, coaches and other staff are assisted – with initial discussions already undertaken with UK Sport chair Katherine Grainger over the plan to pool knowledge and talent rather than maintaining wholly separate streams in each home nation.
“Katherinecameuprecently to meet us and we were able to have a discussion about creating an improved system for the UK,” Whittingham said. “We’re able to influence. But the point we made was that there is an opportunity to create more British operations across the Institutes. Sometimes the English Institute of Sport gets confused with being a British institute, but the Sportscotland one has contributed a lot to the overall system over the years. And early in the new year, we’re going to sit down with UK Sport, EIS, other colleagues, and talk about whether, operationally, we can create a British Institute.
“That wouldn’t mean getting rid of the Scottish or Welsh or English Institutes. But what we want to do is create an A-team, look at who are our best practitioners, where is the best experience across the UK and how we might put that into a new concept going forward.
“It’s early days but it’s about getting a better system.”
With political pressure being applied from Holyrood onto UK Sport to ensure more of the £51 million