There are more rivals than the media coverage they receive might sometimes suggest, ranging from Kath Grainger to Imogen Bankier, from Eilidh Child to Catriona Matthew and many others besides, but a case can be made for identifying Eve Muirhead as Scotland's leading current sportswoman.

A case can also be made that she is much smarter than she seems to think.

Forced to choose between disciplines in which she excelled and setting aside what is deemed musical ability but should, I humbly suggest, be re-classified as aptitude for wielding an instrument of torture, this champion bag-piper is also a scratch golfer and pursuing that sport might have seemed the more glamorous option.

Winning the first of her extraordinary four World Junior Championship gold medals when only 16, before doing so as a skip for the first time the following year, she was making that decision at a time when the environment was ferociously competitive.

Rhona "stone of destiny" Martin, world champion Jackie Lockhart -both a rival and Olympic team-mate of Martin's - and world championship finalist Kelly Wood were among several leading skips competing for prizes.

Meanwhile the Scottish women's curling scene was also in something approaching turmoil with strange team selections on the ice and legal repercussions off it, resulting in Gail Munro, another leading skip, suing Derek Brown, the Scottish team manager, over claims that she refused to play in a match.

Yet Muirhead was capable of seeing through all that and making the calculation that curling provided the better opportunity to fulfil her ambitions.

"A handful of golfers make it out of hundreds don't they and I played a lot when I was younger, but I knew I had such a big opportunity in curling and from a young age when I did well at the Scottish nationals at the juniors and at the world championships I had that goal in my head of the Olympic Games," she explains.

"If I'd gone to golf and gone to America for scholarships or things like that I know I couldn't have curled. So I think I made the right decision and I love being able to play golf as a social sport."

In terms of the requirements on ice the capacity to deliver under pressure goes without saying but there is also a need for understanding of practical geometry and instinctive physics, since the sport is all about angles and an awareness of how objects travel over a changing surface, then react on collision.

Analysing where opportunity lies and then assessing the right tactics to put in play also require mental agility.

"I learn new things quickly," she reckons.

"I'd like to think I play to my team's strengths and the opposition's weaknesses and I like to think I'm not bad at pulling off the pressure shots when it matters. You get all the slack when you lose because the skip plays the shot and you get all the glory when you win as well. My team are fantastic. They are behind me 100 per cent and I wouldn't be in the position I am without them."

You might think, then, that someone with such an agile mind might have been one of those annoying kids who excelled in the classroom as well as in the sports arena.

Not so, asserts this "quick learner".

"We had a lot of curling in PE at Pitlochry, but now that rink's shut unfortunately," she explains.

"We used to have a schools league with about 15 schools in it from around Perthshire. We used to travel to Perth every Thursday... skive Maths for a period to get away."

To my suggestion that, like many youngsters, she would have seen that as a real bonus, she laughed in replying: "You're right it is, skiving anything academic I'm there.

"From a young age I was right into sport. Let's put it this way, I'm not the most academically clever person. You can't be good at everything."

Not the most academically clever person? Maybe's aye, maybe's naw seems an appropriate observation begging, as it should, the question of whether this bright young woman was let down by the system?

Those educationalists who believe academia is everything - including that sorry sector of the PE teaching community that desperately wants to be taken seriously by colleagues - will probably think so.

My contention, however, is that Muirhead offers a perfect example of what happens when youngsters are properly provided with the opportunity to identify their areas of interest and strength.

Clearly lucky to be schooled where she was and when, this 24-year-old has become an Olympian and, in Canada, is a superstar.

The message to those with the authority to decide upon Scottish schooling priorities then?

Must do better!!