Local and national government must do more to bring Scottish youngsters in from the cold if sport is to thrive, according to the coach who masterminded the outstanding British achievement at the winter Olympics in Sochi earlier this year.
Soren Gran, the Swede who helped to steer Dave Murdoch, Greg Drummond, Scott Andrews and Michael Goodfellow to silver medals in the men's curling, admits to surprise
at the shortage of ice rinks in the country which invented the sport. "Sweden has twice as many facilities as they have here," Gran pointed out.
He suggested showing that a
desire to change that, particularly in curling where Britain won medals in the men's, women's and Paralympics events, would reflect sport's importance to the nation.
"In Sweden we have so much more winter sport. We probably have more than twice as many athletes at the winter Olympics as at the summer Olympics," Gran added. "It depends where we want to take the sport."
With commercial considerations currently greatly restricting the availability of ice to young curlers, this product of Scandinavian thinking believes the onus is on the politicians.
"If we're going to continue to be a sport where we have privately run facilities, it's always going to be difficult to get young people in because they [the facility owners] still have
to make money," said Gran. "The biggest change here has to be council and government-run facilities. I have a big belief in that and I have to say I'm very surprised that you [Scotland] have not that many of them."
Gran believes that simply-constructed facilities could transform the sporting landscape, noting that building ice rinks could have benefits for another of the sports in which young Scots have excelled
of late. "You should have an ice rink in every city or every village where people can skate and do something indoors instead of being out in the rain," he reckoned. "It's kind of easy in a way because, if you have a swimming pool, you can use the heat from that to get cold in an ice rink, so they are helping each other out."
Gran, a curling specialist, also welcomed the prospect of a newcomer to his sport shaking things up
following the appointment of the former rugby player Graeme Thompson to the post of head of performance for British Curling.
"He's going to drive it his way," Gran said. "The way the sport has to go we need a non-curler, because if we keep it too much to the tradition
we have people who will keep doing the thing they always have because they think it's good enough the way it is because of all the medals they won.
"If we keep the same people coming in where everyone knows one another, it's like everything you want to be friendly. If we're friends and
we want to keep the friendship we maybe moderate our thinking or drive a little bit. That's human
behaviour, but if you bring people in from the outside that's what gives you a chance to develop."
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