THE year just past will go down in sporting history as a supreme paradox: the brightest and yet bleakest of years. In Rio de Janiero, Great Britain became the first nation to surpass the Olympic medal haul achieved as hosts four years earlier, and then repeated the feat in the Paralympics. The 15 track and field Scottish Olympians who competed in Brazil was three times greater than in London 2012, a record 19% of the total athletics team.
The negative was the Olympic movement allowing Russia to participate, despite being proven to have surpassed the infamous state-sponsored and orchestrated doping of the former East Germany. And the president of the world athletics governing body accepting massive bribes to help bury positive tests. Had this been the tentative plot of a novel, it would have been buried in derision by publishers.
Yet the Scottish athletics resurrection has been almost as incredible. Their 15-strong representation matched the record set in London 1908, when there was no three-per-event entry limit. A total of 17 were selected back then but two never competed.
Only 14 Scottish athletes competed in the four Olympics, from 2000 to 2012, and the last Scot to win an athletics medal was in 1988, where there were three: silver for Liz McColgan (10k) and Elliot Bunney (4x100m), and bronze for Yvonne Murray (3k). The bronze which Eilidh Doyle collected with the GB 4x400 quartet was the first since Bunney 28 years ago.
Excluding events in which athletes don't have to go through a qualifying round at the Games themselves (eg marathon, 10k, decathlon, heptathlon, team events etc) Scots rarely reach an individual final - only 46 in all 27 editions of the Games since 1896. Yet in Rio a record five Scots did so: Andrew Butchart and Lynsey Sharp (both 6th), Laura Muir (7), Doyle (8), and Eilish McColgan (13). They were the first Scots to qualify for an individual Olympic athletics final since 1992, when Tom Hanlon (sixth, steeplechase), McColgan (fifth, 10,000m), and Murray (eighth, 3000m) measures up.
The previous best was five individual final appearances by four competitors in boycotted Moscow: David Jenkins was seventh (400m), Linsey Macdonald eighth (400m), Meg Ritchie ninth (discus), and Allan Wells first (100m) and second (200m).
Wells finished 1980 ranked third in the world in both events. Jenkins was the only other Scot in the top 10 (ninth at 400m). Three of the Rio Scots finished 2016 in the world top 10: Muir at No.1, and both Sharp and Doyle at No.8.
Domestic fortunes were also revived in the men's marathon in Rio. Only three Scots had been selected for this event since 1936, the most recent being Fifer Donald Macgregor in 1972. In Rio, all three GB starters were Scottish, and Kilbarchan's Callum Hawkins was first European-born finisher, in ninth place.
Scottish athletics, under head coach Roger Harkins, has built dramatically on a home Olympics in London and Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games. This year, Britain will host the IAAF World Athletics Championships in London. That is a glorious incentive to maintain momentum in what might otherwise have been viewed as a fallow year ahead of the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast. And the world body, who had the guts to exclude Russia from Rio after their scandalous doping behaviour, should do so again if the world's most serial cheats fail to demonstrate the filth of their reeking stables is not fully purged.
Both Sharp and Butchart have proved themselves consummate competitive animals, breaking Scottish records in the Olympic final - something which eluded even Olympic champion sprint champion Wells. Sharp could have settled for chasing Olympic bronze behind androgynous women who had made the medals all but a formality. Too brave, the Edinburgh woman paid the penalty, but would surely have placed better than sixth had she moderated ambitions. There is a lesson there for this year's worlds, though there is the possibility of the authorities overturning the controversial regulations governing unrestricted inclusion of women with high testosterone levels.
Butchart carved a lump from his own national best, with the confidence to join double Olympic champion Mo Farah at the head of the field in the Rio final. Still just 25, there is much more to come from him. He shows all the indications of developing the speed to deliver sub-52 seconds for the final lap which Farah has shown brings championship medals.
Muir, fastest in the world this year, endured the frustration of running that in the "wrong" race. Yet victory in the Diamond League over Kenyan Olympic champion Faith Kipyegon, shows what she is capable of. Like Sharp, she bravely ran for a medal in Rio, and claimed the British record of Dame Kelly Holmes. She has now run the 1500m faster than Holmes on three occasions.
Yet the lesson of previous Scottish success is that it can be short-lived. The outstanding performances of the 1970 Commonwealth Games (4 gold, 2 silver, 2 bronze) was followed four years later by a solitary silver. Having lined up in five finals at the 1980 Olympics, Scots slumped to just two individual finals four years on, in Los Angeles. In the 32 year span from 1984 until Rio, Scottish competitors qualified for only six Olympic finals.
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