As it was announced yesterday that Rhona Howie is switching sports to take charge of Scotland's international bowling squad the woman who delivered "the stone of destiny" declared her past sporting success irrelevant to her new job.
Yesterday's announcement that the gold medal winning skip at the 2002 Winter Olympic curling had been appointed as Bowls Scotland's high performance manager has by no means met with universal approval throughout the sport.
However Howie, who was high performance coach on the British women's curling programme when Eve Muirhead's rink won their bronze medals at last year's Winter Olympics last year, explained that with John Price, the former world champion bowler taking over as high performance coach, is not sport specific.
"At the end of the day I'm not here because I won an Olympic gold medal," she said.
"I am in this job because I've been involved in high performance sport, in a sport where there was no high performance plans in place."
She suggested that her experience in curling as it has moved towards being a full-time professional sport in the past decade, would allow her to help bowls develop more rapidly.
"I was there as an athlete, competed at the Olympic games as an athlete, I then have gone through the sport process of implementing a high performance plan with a sport that had some resistance (within the sport) and it still does.
"My experiences over the years, it wouldn't matter if it was bowls or another sport, high performance is high performance in sport and that is what I'm going to implement.
"It is about making sure that what I bring in can help each athlete and not make it standardised and say you do this or this.
"I want to see where are we at with bowls, what do they do right now, speak to bowlers and get to know them and see if they can have an individualised plan that can drive them forward."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article