England's Keri-anne Payne celebrated her recent move to Edinburgh by winning the 800m freestyle at last night's Scottish Gas National Open Short Course Championships at the Royal Commonwealth Pool.
The 25-year-old world open water champion married her fellow Olympian David Carry in September and the pair have set up home in the Scottish capital.
Carry, Scotland's double Commonwealth Games champion from 2006, has retired from swimming, but Payne has joined the Warrender club and is keeping her options open for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
There will be no open water competition on the Glasgow programme but Payne is a threat in various pool events as she confirmed with an 8:34.78 winning time in the 800m final, finishing just over a second ahead of Edinburgh University's Sian Morgan.
"I've been training with Warrender for about a month and a half but I've not done a huge amount," Payne admitted. "At the moment, I'm just taking it one year at a time and I'll see how it goes for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow."
Two Scottish records fell. Falkirk's Charlotte McKenzie, who is still at Larbert High School, won the 50m backstroke in 27.95 to set a new national senior and junior mark, while Mark Tully (East Lothian) took the men's 50m breaststroke gold in a senior best of 27.38.
In a close 50m freestyle race, the top two places went to Edinburgh University swimmers. Richard Shafers took the title in 22.33 and Kieran McGukin was second in 22.48 In the morning heats, Aberdeen's 15-year-old Suleman Butt set a British junior record of 23.20.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article