ONE of the real drawbacks of being a field athlete is that they are constantly overshadowed by their track counterparts. It is, admits Allan Smith, a frustration but he aims to make sure that no one can ignore him when he gets to Gold Coast in April for the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
Smith was one of 25 track and field athletes who had their selection for Team Scotland for next year’s Commonwealth Games confirmed last week and he admits that with track events regularly dominating the press coverage, Smith has that extra motivation to succeed at the Games.
“If you win a medal, obviously your profile goes up and that’s what I’m aiming to do,” he said. “I know I am capable of it. It just comes down to who performs on the day.
“With the BBC, field events are rarely on the television so you’ll maybe get one or two jumps or throws shown. I don’t get worked up about it but I do think it needs to change. I don’t see why you’d spend half-an-hour watching the 10,000m when you could have even a small screen at the side showing some field events – you could fly through a whole round of throws or jumps in a couple of minutes if you showed them back to back. It is frustrating when your family and friends are tuning in on the television and they can see you in the background but your event doesn’t get shown. But if you make the final then attention will spike because the potential of you doing something is there.”
The 25-year-old from Paisley is no stranger to winning medals on the international stage having won a European Indoor Under-23 Championships bronze medal in 2013 but it is only recently that the Scottish champion feels like he has cracked the secret of what exactly he needs to do to ensure he performs at his best when it really matters and he will use the indoor season at the start of 2018 to fine tune things before going to Australia.
“I’ve learned that the secret is to stay relaxed because our competition can last for hours,” he said. “It’s about delaying when you want to switch on mentally and when the competition starts, let loose.”
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