Scotland’s best medal chance in the Winter Olympics in Italy is in the curling. Though we also have hopes in the skiing and skating. Our curlers, skippered by Bruce Mouat and Rebecca Morrison come from a long tradition of curling in Scotland, dating back until, at least, 1511.
The first rules were written in 1804 by a group of gentlemen curlers who met in Rev John Thomson’s “tower” at Duddingston Loch in Edinburgh. The earliest club, the Royal Caledonian, was established in 1838. There are now more than 500 clubs and 10,000 curlers. Gone are the hardy days of curling on outdoor ice-ponds and instead, curlers play at 21 indoor ice rinks scatted across the country. Ten nations will be competing in Italy, all of them using curling stones quarried from Ailsa Craig, a rocky island off the Ayrshire coast.
Other games the Scots are supposed to have “invented” are football and golf. The football claim goes back to the Football Act of 1425 when the game was banned by The Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Football Association was formed 1873 ( we conveniently forget that the English Football Association was formed ten years before.) In golf we have a better claim to be the home of the game. Mary Queen of Scots was reported to have played it 1567 and the first rules were written in 1744 at Leith Links.
We still like to think of ourselves as a sporting nation, even though two-thirds of us do not participate in any sport. It’s true that we have one of the highest attendance rates in Europe at professional football matches, but that is hardly active participation. The most popular sports, like football, running, cycling, swimming and golf only involve up to 10 per cent of the population. In an effort to improve on this, the Scottish Budget this year includes £40 million extra for sporting organisations and a “summer of sport” for school children.
The idea is to “cash in” on a surprisingly good sporting year for Scotland. After the Winter Olympics, we will see Scotland’s men’s football team compete in the World Cup in June. We’ll have the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in July. Bob Macintyre is officially ranked one of the top five golfers in the world. Our men’s cricket team has just jetted off to India to take part in the ICC T20 World Cup, and the women’s team will qualify if they beat the USA on Sunday. And this weekend sees the start of the Six Nations Rugby competition with Scotland facing Italy in Rome.
But all this elite sport does not make Scotland a sporting nation. We are still catching up on our own past when school masters would give up their Saturday mornings to coach team games or large firms would have their own football or cricket teams. There’s a particular concern about the lack of sport and exercise among teenage girls and young people from poorer backgrounds.
I don’t suppose we can blame social media. Though actually, we can for a lot of things: obesity, short attention spans, eye problems, poor mental health, anti-social behaviour, bullying, abuse. The Scottish Labour Party this week joined the campaign to have mobile phones banned in schools. It says the UK should follow Australia and France and restrict access to the internet for young people. The Scottish government has so far sat on the fence and said it’s up to individual head teachers to ban smart phones in their schools.
Maybe one day we can get back to experiencing real things, rather than virtual images and reading books rather than screens. This week Scotland lost one its many prolific authors, Allan Massie, who has died at the age of 87. He wrote nearly 30 books, many of them novels set in ancient Rome. He reviewed some 3,500 books for The Scotsman newspaper over a period of 50 years. But he was perhaps best known as a rugby and cricket reporter and pundit.
One of his last books was about politics. In “The Thistle and the Rose” he explored the minefield of the relationship between England and Scotland. He himself began as a supporter of Devolution, voting Yes in the 1979 referendum, but later turned against the idea and became a fervent Unionist.
I don’t suppose he thought much about the “Scottish” sport of curling, but there is one mention in an article of his about the cancellation of the famous “bonspiel” on the Lake of Menteith in 2010. The ice was 7 inches thick but it was too uneven, and in any case, the police called off the event because they feared the weight of the 2,000 players and observers would cause the ice to break. The lake has never been used since for curling, and with climate change it probably never will.
