Newspaper Coverage

When it comes to newspaper coverage, the 'Herald, has to be the top dog. There is more in the way of results on a daily basis than in all of the rest put together. 'The Scotsman' was quite excellent - but that was in the 70's! It was that paper's John Rafferty who described Lachie Stewart after his Commonwealth Games 10000 metres win as "dewy eyed like a nun at prayer" The 'Sunday Herald' does a reasonable job with results received on the Saturday night and often has a wee feature or two as well. 'The Evening Times' is also good at times (groan!) with detailed results of the massed fields in the Great Scottish Run and Women's 5K but it is not regular and you have to decide for yourself whether it is worth investing in the paper every night on the off chance of something relevant to the sport.

There has been some decent, or at least interesting items in the media over the weekend. On the radio on Sunday, John Beattie and Katie Still dealt with women in sport following a recent survey that had been done and as well as interviewing the surveyor reported and commented on the emails received during the show. Three aspects that I noted were: first that women just like to come along and do sport (play netball and other team games were mentioned) but not commit themselves to a team or to coming along regularly; second, they wanted more privacy in the changing room (this bears out a comment by a woman from the other side of Glasgow that I used to coach in the late 80's that, returning after a ten year lay off, she was surprised that the women were now wearing swimsuits in the showers); and they felt that it was good for adults and children to be able to train together. It's a pity that John's programme is not available for later listening on the internet.

In the 'Sunday Herald' yesterday there was the latest in a series of articles dealing with the place of Scotland in world sport. It started two weeks ago with a long article with pictures saying that Scotland would be nowhere ready to compete in the Commonwealth Games in 2014 because the structure was not in place to attract or develop athletes. Last week there was a long detailed reply from Geoff Wightman, chief executive of Scottish Athletics, saying that oh yes we were on track. He gave many statistics in an attempt to prove his point. Then yesterday, there was an article quoting Liz McColgan saying that we were not unless certain steps were taken in endurance events. Just below that one was a letter from Charlie Bannerman of Inverness, a redoubtable champion of excellence in sport and and a loud cheerleader for the sport. He basically upheld the view that standards in Scottish Athletics are very poor and getting worse and took issue with many of the statistics quoted by Geoff W. The article is worth a read and it can be read online. It's on page 24 of the 'Sunday Herald' sports section.