AS chairman of scottishathletics, Ian Beattie is granted the final word at tonight’s glitzy awards ceremony at the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow. But he hopes his closing comments and vote of thanks to all those who contributed to a stellar year for athletics in this country do anything but draw a line under an ongoing success story which he hopes will run and run for decades to come.

While a select band of world class athletes at the apex of the sport like Laura Muir, Callum Hawkins and Sammi Kinghorn garnered most of the headlines, Beattie, an endurance runner with more than 100 marathons and 100 half-marathons under his belt, whose other hats include being CEO of Lindsays Solicitors and vice chair of the Scottish Association for Mental Health (SAMH), stresses this was a team effort towards which club runners, volunteers, events organisers all played their part. Now into his second four-year term in post, he looks forward to every one of these stakeholders continuing to take part ownership of even greater achievements during 2018 and beyond.

“We have seen from performances this year that we have a number of athletes operating within the top 10 in the world in their events,” Beattie told Herald Sport. “We have tried to introduce that mentality that if I am in athletics and I am Scottish then I am at an advantage. Rather than ‘I am Scottish, why do we always fail at the final hurdle?’, which is something we have seen in a number of sports.

“But what is important is proving that this isn’t just a very good bunch of athletes, who will disappear again in a few years,” he added. “I’d like to see this happen for the next 20, 25, 30 years, the sport continuing to grow, because the club structure is right, and we have the right people in them doing good things.”

The governing body for athletics in this country was recently recognised as the best in the business for a second consecutive year at the Team Scotland awards. While he feels there is no magic secret, one thing Beattie feels may be transferable to other sports bodies out there it is the imperative to get everyone pulling in the right direction. The world of football, where clubs and governing bodies often appear to be in outright conflict, might be a good place to start.

These are points which he made as part of a scottishathletics delegation, which included Eilidh Doyle, Scotland’s most decorated-ever athlete, para sport stars Sammi Kinghorn and Derek Rae plus John Owens, the president of Springburn Harriers, to represent the club structure. “What I said when I was at the parliament is that the whole sport is working together really well, and that fundamentally is really important,” said Beattie. “All the athletes individually are working really, really hard of course – we can’t underestimate that. Our coaches are working really hard as well, so massive credit to them.

“But one of the things I am really pleased about is the fact our clubs are getting better and stronger, bringing people through the ranks and into the development programmes,” he added. “Some of the volunteers in the clubs are doing great stuff. They are working well with our professional staff and their programmes. Everybody is doing their piece – the time officials put in as volunteers is fantastic too. All we do is just to try to oversee it all.

“Whether other sports can learn from us I don’t know, but I do think there are certain things they could do,” said Beattie. “The focus on the club structure is an important thing. There is no reason why we can’t make sure that, from the moment people come into the sport, there is a culture to be the best they can be at what they do. There is no great secret, just getting everybody across the board working together, with none of the kind of bickering that you sometimes see in other sports. We know it is a tough financial environment but we believe we can do a lot. If you put together good programmes and have a good club structure, you can get results. It is good the Scottish government can see that.”

Beattie is understandably loathed to select individual snapshots of what has been a remarkable year. But as agonising as Callum Hawkins found it to just miss out on a medal after 26.2miles of a world championships marathon, it was almost as agonising for Beattie trying to watch it on a mobile device which kept freezing and buffering whenever he lost signal on a train to London.

“I was watching it on my phone, losing reception all the time,” Beattie said. “And one of the things I thought was fantastic was when Callum was interviewed at the end. He said ‘I am a bit disappointed, I wanted on the podium, I wanted a medal here’. That is the kind of mentality our top athletes are developing and the next step for all of them is pushing even harder to win more medals. Laura has started to pick up medals - two gold medals at European indoors this year – while Eilish McColgan won a medal at that same level too. It’s different class.”

If there is a problem, it is that 2017 has set such a high bar. The next 12 months include an out-of-season overseas Commonwealth Games at the Gold Coast in Australia in April – the athletics selection will be finalised in early December – a World Indoor Championships in early March, and the European Championships in Berlin/Glasgow. “It really is an interesting year,” said Beattie. “It’s always great when we have a Scottish team, so the Commonwealth Games years are always special for us. But we have a number of athletes making it into GB teams now as well, doing really well.

“We are quite cautious, because an April games is quite challenging for a number of athletes, some of whom will have no competitive outdoors action at all. A lot of events at the Commonwealth Games are world class, particularly for endurance athletes. It is not easy to win medals, we have seen that in the past.” Tough challenges then but on recent evidence it isnot un reasonable to expect scottishathletics to rise to them.