As Andy Young pondered her achievements in winning two gold medals in three days at last weekend’s European Indoor Championships, the man who has helped Laura Muir become the most exciting talent in middle distance running drew accurate comparison with the achievements of Scotland’s greatest ever sportsman.

He had already pointed out that when others had been tempted to get over excited in 2014 after she won domestic events in the build-up to that year’s Commonwealth Games, his response had been to temper things and understand that “anything before 2017 would be a bonus.”

“She needed time to serve an apprenticeship, learn the tactics, get the experience of the pressure, of going through heats, things like that, but now she is pretty much the finished package,” he continued.

“Potentially now we have another 10 years of feeling the benefits of that apprenticeship.”

However it is also important to place what Muir is doing in its proper context as she not only starts gathering medals – those two golds in Belgrade were her first at a major championship – but breaks record after record on the way and Young could not have come up with a better comparator.

“In any other era she would have already racked up a whole load of medals,” he observed.

“It’s quite like Andy Murray being up against Djokovic, Nadal and Federer. In any other era he might have won X number of majors by now and it’s the same for Laura, she might have racked up a load of medals while she was serving her apprenticeship, but now she’s faster than them all and they will be looking on her as the one to beat. So if she just keeps doing what she’s doing hopefully there are many years and many medals.

“Even this weekend these weren’t weak fields. They were some of the strongest fields in the Championship. Sofia Ennaoui (of Poland) and Meraf Bahta (of Sweden), both Olympic finalists in the 1500, and again we had the Polish record holder, the German record holder. Some did the 1500, some did the 3K hoping for weakness from Laura in the 3K, like Yasemin Can (the 3000m silver medallist) and Maureen Koster (who finished fourth behind Muir’s fellow Scot Eilish McColgan). These are good, good runners, so that is why she is running these championship best performances, because she has to run that fast to beat these people.

“They are two fast times. The Doina Melinte (1500m) record goes back to ’85. That’s crazy considering there have been Championships every two years. There won’t be a female athlete in the world who isn’t looking at this and going oh-oh.”

The point being that Muir currently looks like a world-beater in a sporting discipline that has global significance and is currently highly competitive.

As he spoke, I was reminded of an old pal who was adamant for many years that Andy Murray was a ‘choker’ and would never win a ‘Grand Slam’, because there were those who said the same of Muir after those Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and there is always an element of subjectivity when assessing sporting achievements and potential.

It may be true that competitors can only beat those they are up against, but one of the factors that sets the best apart is the company they are keeping when they claim their victories.

There is obviously an element of subjectivity in those assessments, but the same sort of considerations need to inform the debate about how public money is spent in supporting sportspeople.

The British medal machine has now reached such a level that countless gold medal winners from the past two Olympic Games would go unnoticed even in sporting gatherings. While, then, those compiling tables will maintain that a gold medal is a gold medal, an ever more discerning sporting public will increasingly recognise that in some cases a bronze medal, reaching a final, or just qualifying to get to a major championship, can be a greater achievement than someone else’s victory, depending on who or what the respective competitors are up against.

That is not to denigrate anyone’s success, it is merely to point out that placing all the emphasis in our spending priorities on the capacity to bring back silverware is to fail to understand what matters in sport.

Those who really get it know that there is an element of gut feel required to sports development, to understanding, as her coach did, that Laura Muir’s early promise would take time to fulfil as she learned her trade.

It is also why some of us shudder when buzzwords like ‘trajectory analysis’ are trotted out by officials seeking to justify funding decisions that often become self-fulfilling prophesies as confidence is resultantly boosted or destroyed, because sport is not accountancy.

We sense when we are watching the very best in action and Laura Muir, like Andy Murray, fits the bill.

Judging who might join them at that level is a trickier business, however, which is why what support is offered needs to be as widely distributed as possible.