AS Great Britain bear down on a record medal haul at the European Championships in Berlin this weekend, many in the Scottish swimming community will turn their thoughts to 2018 when the sport will get another chance to invade the Scottish public conscience.
Four weeks after Tollcross Park opened its doors to the Commonwealth Games and treated the Glasgow crowd to six days of world-class racing, the city was yesterday awarded the right to host the LEN European Championships for the first time four years from now.
Dates and venues have yet to be confirmed but Glasgow will almost certainly stage the main swimming gala at Tollcross and the open-water events at Strathclyde Park, which was a successful venue for triathlon during the Games.
What is unclear is whether Glasgow will bid to also host the diving. Glasgow 2014 opted to outsource their own diving competition to Edinburgh, where it took place in the refurbished Commonwealth Pool.
One apparent certainty is that Scottish, English and Welsh swimmers will feature on the podium with regularity during the pool racing, as the sport has enjoyed a resurgence in this country as evidenced by a series of terrific performances in Berlin.
The latest, and possibly greatest of those came last night when Adam Peaty, from Derby, broke the world record in the 50 metres breaststroke. Peaty had won gold in the 100m already, where Scotland's Ross Murdoch won the first of two silver medals. Such is the thirst for greatness within the breaststroke crop, Peaty said ahead of today's final: "It was not a perfect race due to my final touch, so I can still improve."
Stephen Milne broke another Scottish record in the 800m freestyle, finishing fourth in 7min 50.64sec.
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