Leaders: ‘Edinburgh is obvious place for the Sir Chris Hoy parade’

TRYING to make sense of the achievements of Edinburgh cyclist Sir Chris Hoy is something many people have been trying to do over the last 48 hours. Six gold medals – and one silver – have underlined his position as Britain’s most successful Olympian of all time.

Sir Chris already has a knighthood, two gold postboxes in the Capital and will be given the Freedom of the City. The velodrome in Glasgow also bears his name.

The Scottish Government and the council are now rightly considering how to ensure his success has a lasting sporting legacy.

However, in the short term the people of Edinburgh want to pay tribute to their hero and the other Scots such as Katherine Grainger and Michael Jamieson who have made them proud during this 
Olympics.

As Scotland’s capital and the birthplace of Sir Chris, Edinburgh is the obvious place for a homecoming parade.

Yet politicians in Glasgow are now trying to grab the parade for themselves, saying that Glasgow is the “sporting hub of Scotland” and that people in the west are “more vibrant and exciting”.

There is also the argument that the Commonwealth Games is coming there in 2014.

What a load of tosh. This parade is for London 2012 and nothing to do with the Commonwealth Games. And why exactly is Glasgow the sporting hub of Scotland? This year’s Scottish Cup final was contested by two teams from Edinburgh while one of Glasgow’s teams was demoted to the Third Division.

Most of all, this is a parade for Sir Chris Hoy and he is from Edinburgh. Let the celebrations commence here.

There’s still hope

SOME of the statistics in the city council’s five-year economic strategy make for grim reading – 4200 public sector jobs facing the axe and up to 37,000 being frozen out of the jobs market.

And with the Bank of England’s warning yesterday about the poor state of the UK economy, the future starts to look fairly bleak.

But we must remember that not all of the economic indicators are quite so depressing. The Scottish Government’s chief economist, Dr Gary Gillespie, for instance, has just predicted that the nation’s economy will improve next year and be back on track by 2014.

The Capital remains in a good position to recover from the doldrums as long as it continues to nurture the private enterprises on which so many of our future job prospects increasingly rely.