IF confirmation were needed that sport can spring any number of surprises then Stuart McWatt proved it at the European Judo Open at Glasgow’s Emirates Arena, the biggest judo event to take place on British shores this year.

The Inverurie teenager does not even have a world ranking having competed in so few senior competitions but he rampaged through the field to win bronze in the -81kg category, taking several significant scalps along the way.

A tricky draw paired him with the top seed and world No 21 Laszlo Csoknyai from Hungary in the quarter-finals but McWatt was unfazed and recorded an impressive victory to progress to the semi-finals. The young Scot was then beaten by his compatriot, Owen Livesey, but recovered from that disappointment to win bronze with another superb win over world No 23, Antonio Ciano of Italy by ippon.

McWatt was, understandably, happy with his performance as he prepares for the World Junior Championships in Abu Dhabi in just two weeks time, where he hopes to win some more silverware. “I hadn’t fought at a high senior level before so it was good to go out and beat some of the top players which will give me confidence going into the junior worlds,” he said, before admitting that after seeing how tough his draw was, his ambitions were tempered somewhat. “I wanted to win a few fights and maybe try and get into the placings but then I saw my draw and that I had the No 1 seed in my pool and well, it wasn’t the best. I’m happy with my performance though – I’ve gained a lot of experience so now I need to go back and work on a few things before the worlds but this will definitely help me improve.”

McWatt’s medal was closely followed by another for Scotland, this one was somewhat less surprising though. British No 1 and Commonwealth bronze medallist, Andy Burns, took bronze in the -90kg category by defeating his compatriot, Gary Hall, who was hindered by a shoulder injury. “I was hoping to be in the final today but I think that the 40 points I’ve picked up from this could potentially put me in direct qualification for the Olympics so if that is the case, it’s a good starting point for the rest of the year,” he said, before admitting that fighting a fellow countryman is never an easy task. “It’s so much harder to fight someone you know well. If you fight an unknown, you don’t know what they’re going to do but if you train with someone every day, you know all their tricks, their weaknesses and what they’re going to do. I know he hurt his shoulder last weekend when we were in Uzbekistan and it was touch and go whether he’d come here. If he was a foreign player, I might be hanging off that shoulder trying to take advantage of his injury but when it’s a friend, you don’t want to hurt him any more but you can’t not go out and fight. Every time he was taking his time it was distracting thinking, ‘is he going to carry on’ but I just had to stick to my game plan.”

Burns openly admits that his sole target for the next year is to secure qualification for the Olympics Games in Rio. The Scot, who trains at the National Training Centre at Ratho, was a reserve for Team GB for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and then suffered a serious ankle injury in the run-up to London 2012 which scuppered his chances of making the team so his desire to qualify for Rio could not be stronger. With only six months to go until selection for Team GB is made, Burns admits that he is feeling the pressure. “There’s always pressure, especially when your whole life is geared towards one event that happens every four years,” he said. “All of my family are asking: ‘are you going to go to the Olympics, do we need to book tickets for Rio?’, the questions are always there. They bought tickets for London and I didn’t go. But the biggest pressure comes from myself – I feel that I’m too good to not go to an Olympic Games. That doesn’t mean that I will go – so many things can happen but the way things are going, I feel like I’ll be there or thereabouts when it gets to the end of qualifying.”

Getting the right competition and training schedule is a fine balance to strike and, Burns concedes, the strain can take its toll. But he never forgets what the final goal is and that gives him an extra push if it’s ever needed. “You’ve got to train to be able to perform at tournaments, you’ve got to fight to get competition experience and to collect points but then you’ve also got to get the money to fund it as well,” he said. “There’s around 34 Olympic ranking events in a year and I’m doing just about all of them and there was a period earlier in the year when I did seven competitions in nine weeks. But this is the dream – to be qualifying for the Olympic Games. I think it’ll take my body about a year to recover afterwards but if I’m sitting there with an Olympic medal, I’ll be happy.”