The night Liz raced into history

Published on Sunday 6 August 2006 00:13

TWENTY years ago last week in Edinburgh, in the finest moment of an unlucky 13th Commonwealth Games, Scotland earned glory on the track when 22-year-old Dundonian Liz Lynch romped home to claim the women's 10,000m gold medal.

Lynch was then virtually unknown outside her home country but is now vastly better known as Liz McColgan, with a string of honours, titles and records to her name including the World 10,000m Championship in Tokyo in 1991. Her Meadowbank time from 1986 remains, remarkably, a Scottish Native and Scottish All-comers record. She also still holds the Scottish 10,000m record 15 years after setting the mark of 30mins 57.07sec.

But it was back in 1986, on a grey and wet Monday afternoon, when McColgan took her first major honour and Scotland's only track gold of the troubled games. She finished more than 12 seconds ahead of runner-up, Anne Audain of New Zealand, with Welsh athlete Angela Tooby in the bronze medal position. Speaking last week about the day she burst on to the world athletics scene, McColgan, now 42 and a mother of five, was in the unprepossessing surroundings of Birmingham's Alexander Stadium for the AAA Under-15 and Under-17 Championships with her Liz McColgan Distance Squad, a far cry from the 25,000 crowd that cheered her round the now dilapidated Meadowbank Stadium.

"It certainly doesn't feel like 20 years ago, and I remember it as if it was yesterday," said McColgan. "I was something of an unknown quantity, but I knew I was in great shape, running for the first and only time without any pressure on me, and I knew I had gold in the bag with 800m to go.

"I was conscious of the huge crowd chanting, 'Liz Lynch, Liz Lynch,' and that carried me home, and the fact the entire stadium waited the 20 minutes of so for the presentation ceremony was amazing, and it was all very emotional."

Asked where her gold, won in a time of 13mins 41.42sec fitted in the pantheon of Lynch/McColgan achievements, she was clear. "Athletically, it wasn't my best by a long chalk, but it got me known, got me top races at world class meets, so that was important, and it was certainly the emotional high point of my career."

The XIII Commonwealth Games had been mired in trouble, financial and political, losing 3m on a budget of 14m - petty cash compared to Manchester's 150m Government lifeline just 16 years later. There was also the grisly sight of the late Robert Maxwell hijacking an event shorn of 32 nations which boycotted the Edinburgh showpiece in protest at Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's refusal to impose economic sanctions on the then pariah state of South Africa.

In the end, instead of the expected record entry of 58 countries and 3,500 athletes, just 26 countries and 1,662 competitors took part in the ten sports of the capital's second Games, which suffered by comparison with the spectacular 1970 Friendly Games.

Asked whether, in the absence of the great distance athletes from Kenya, Ghana and Tanzania, her gold medal was tarnished, the pugnacious Scot was typically robust in her response.

"Absolute rubbish. I beat them all in the subsequent seasons, at World Championships, Olympic Games and at the next Commonwealth Games in Auckland in 1990 when I successfully defended my title and they were all there," says the woman who came so close to a full set of gold medals, just missing out on Olympic glory in Seoul in 1988 when she took silver behind Russian Olga Bonderenko.

Scotland's 1986 Commonwealth Games record in competition was almost as bad as its finances, McColgan's gold the first of only three, the others in the men's bowls courtesy of George Adrain and Grant Knox and the men's doubles badminton pair of Dan Travers and Billy Gilliland. Like McColgan, Travers is putting much of his experience back into his sport, as High Performance badminton coach at the Scottish Institute of Sport.

Now 50, Travers recalls his Meadowbank triumph with affection, reflecting: "Billy and I almost went out in the first round, we were 3-12 down in the third set, but we pulled it round and the rest is history.

"Billy and I are still in touch by e-mail, as he now lives and works in Canada and I must remind him that it's 20 years since we did it," says Travers. "We did it back then despite the system, but now we have some great support systems for athletes, and if Glasgow is successful in getting the Games in 2014, we should be in a position of having some young badminton players, such as Imogen Bankier and Emma Mason on to the podium again, having had got Susan Hughes to a bronze in Melbourne last year."

McColgan, too, is upbeat about the future. "Back in 1986 and beyond, we were left to get on with it, and any success I achieved was as a result of sheer hard work and application, and if I knew then what I know now, I might have achieved even more.

"But we have great programmes for young athletes, and Scottish athletics is certainly coming out of the doldrums, so Glasgow 2014 would be a fantastic opportunity for young middle and long distance prospects like Beth Duff, Nicola Hood, Rebecca and Joanne Duff and Josephine Moultrie."

But can history repeat itself with the prospect of another McColgan galloping to glory should Glasgow play host to the Commonwealth Games in eight years' time?

"My daughter Eilish is certainly a talented middle distance athlete, but she is only 15 and reaching a critical stage of development," says her coach and mother. "Nothing would make me more proud and even that would exceed the emotions I felt at Meadowbank 20 years ago."