THE sound of applause and cheers in what is normally a rather quiet wee corner of the world served as a reminder that the town associated with Scotland’s greatest sporting feats was helping to host a major event on Sunday and, given that more than a few friends were taking part, full attention was in order.

My 30-yard walk to the top of the street was almost immediately rewarded by a sighting of Herald Sport’s design king Gordie Stevenson, fair fleeing along Dunblane’s Doune Road and, as it turned out, on course to finish in a sub-three hour time for the first time in 12 years.

Better still, in his 50th year, our man out-ran a couple of very notable fellow competitors of similar vintage – Zola Budd, the American media’s pantomime villain of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and Liz McColgan, who beat the likes of Allan Wells and Eric Liddell to be ranked as Scotland’s greatest athlete of all time when we put together The Herald’s ‘100 Greatest Sporting Icons’ list at the start of this year.

Seeing two of the most written about athletes of the last 30 odd years running in the same field as people I regularly tag along with on Saturday mornings and Monday evenings was, meanwhile, another reminder of just how democratically all-encompassing this particular sport can be, the last of the 4304 finishers eventually crossing the line more than five and a quarter hours after race winner Andrew Lemoncello.

Gordie’s account is of a highly enjoyable race, albeit there were teething troubles in terms of the logistics at the start, where a two-mile tailback on the motorway caused considerable pre-race consternation; the middle, where congestion at underpasses would have interrupted the rhythm of serious runners; and the end, with more of the same as participants funnelled past the finish line twice, having to complete a couple of loops of the same terrain at the close of the race.

Organisers should act on the feedback they receive from that, not least because it always seemed very odd that, given the vast sums of money made from such races, they had been unable to identify a route that avoided such a demoralising impact on runners reaching a point of the course where they watched others finish while they still had many miles still to run.

Yet the overall impression was of an event that engaged positively with both the local and the running communities, in turn providing the sort of stimulus to get more people active that merely watching elite sport can ever achieve.

What makes that all the more odd, then, is that while more and more public money is spent on trying to win medals at elite level, events such as this are privately run enterprises.

That, in turn, has had a curious impact on how another of Britain’s great runners of yesteryear is viewed by the running community.

Invited, last year, to join the Facebook forum ‘I was, or am a runner,’ it has been impossible to avoid noticing the mixed nature of the response whenever there is mention of the name of Brendan Foster, an Olympic hero and founder of the ‘Great Run’ series of which Stirling is now a part. As with the likes of Sebastian Coe and Mo Farah, who have become controversial for other reasons, he has his devotees who will hear no ill of the great man.

Many others, however, have a real problem with what they see as his relentless plugging of his company’s events when performing as an athletics commentator for the BBC.

My own view is that if these mass participation events are to be staged with what many consider to be exorbitant fees charged to those who are simply running around public roads, then I would rather that it was Foster, probably the first runner to impose himself upon my consciousness with his tortured expression and running style back in the seventies, who was cashing in than some faceless entrepreneur.

However, with evidence having been provided that elite sport does not, in itself, inspire activity in a country that still has significant health issues caused by inactivity, this is another opportunity to examine our priorities.

On the one hand we are spending more and more public money on staging events that are only geared towards members of the public watching elite sportspeople who are only able to call themselves full-time because they are funded from the public purse.

On the other, we have rights being issued to stage events on publicly owned facilities that are a licence for the commercially astute to make money from events that are of considerable benefit to public health.

Something in all of this does not add up as Joe Public pays handsomely for the right to use his or her own facilities while also subsidising those who want to be given the privilege of training and playing full-time without having the capacity to earn the right to do so.