After Tokyo miss, wake-up call sets Lee on road to Paris
An Olympic debut in Paris this summer is so close that Lee Morton can practically smell the café au lait and croissants.
A handful of tune-ups remain for Great Britain’s men before, bar the unexpected, a formal invite should be issued to patrol the midfield on the blue baize of the hockey field in the French capital.
The 28-year-old Glaswegian knows selection day is coming but he is not losing any sleep or tipping over with undue excitement.
“You just get so engrossed in the day-to-day training,” he reflects. “You don’t – or you try not to – give it as much thought as you probably should.”
It is the stuff of his boyhood dreams, to swing his stick on the greatest pitch of them all. Yet these were ambitions cruelly killed off and buried before unexpected resuscitation came. In 2020, when Covid forced Tokyo’s Olympics back to summer 2021, Morton had packed up his kit bag and wandered off into a personal lockdown.
He previously played part-time, supplementing his stipend from Great Britain Hockey by coaching at a school near London. The goalposts were moved as budgets were trimmed. Fewer full-time contracts were on the table and everyone else was seemingly to be cast into the cold.
“Trying to get into a squad that had to cut players was nigh on impossible,” he reflects. “I ended up going down to the Elite Development Programme (EDP), which is a great programme, but it’s full of 17 to 20-year-olds.
“I was 25. So I’d turn up to training and a lot of these people are chatting about their school homework and I’m a guy that coaches at a school.”
Mentally, it tied him in knots. “There was a stage coming up to Christmas, where they said, ‘Right, there’s going to be a five-day training camp through the festive period. Can you come?’ That’s when I had planned time back with my family.
“So I basically said to the coach, ‘I am not going to go to Tokyo. And after Tokyo, I will not be in the EDP programme because I’ll be 26. So why don’t I just give up my place to someone younger that’s going to benefit more by taking it?”
Morton walked away, with regrets. Thoughts of Paris were pushed far from his mind. Even turning out for Scotland brought little enthusiasm.
Yet he impressed for his club, Old Georgians, enough that a new GB coaching regime brought him back and the chance was gleefully seized.
“It was probably the best thing that could happen,” he admits. “Because that gave me the wake-up call that I needed.
“I got myself into a place where all I focused on was hockey, working hard, basically just running myself into the ground and listening to the coaches. And it’s led me to where we are today.”
Which is as the holder of over 100 international caps and a shot at taking on the likes of Netherlands, Germany, and opening-day opponents Spain in less than three months’ time.
“It’s 2008 since the last male Scot went to the Olympics,” Morton states. “My incentive as much as it is personal, it’s to show that as Scottish athletes, we are good enough to be able to make it.”