Bankier sticking strictly to studies

UNIVERSITY exams will force Scottish badminton star Imogen Bankier to miss tomorrow night’s Olympic Ball, but the 23-year-old is determined not to miss the boat when it comes to selection for next year’s Games.

Bankier, who is based at the National Badminton Centre in Milton Keynes, will be driving home to Glasgow while many of her team-mates are heading into London for the charity event. Next year, though, she has every intention of joining them for the badminton competition at Wembley Arena – the scene of her greatest success in the sport so far, when she and her mixed-doubles partner Chris Adcock were runners-up at the world championships in August.

There are many Olympic sports where coming second in the world would be a guarantee of a place in the Great Britain team. Such is the competition in badminton, though, that Bankier and Adcock are just one of three pairs competing for what will almost certainly be just a single place.

“To qualify for London you need to be in the top 16 in the world and be the most highly ranked in your own country,” Bankier explained yesterday. “If you have two teams in the top eight they can both qualify, and, if a country has three teams in the top four, they all get to compete at the Olympics. But, at the moment, we’re 15th, Nathan Robertson and Jenny Wallwork are 12th, and Robert Blair and Gabrielle White are 19th, so it’s just that one place for Great Britain.”

The ranking points gained at the world championships have helped Bankier and Adcock close the gap on their 12th-placed rivals but, with the qualification period going on until next May, the competition will be long and intense for some time to come. The next month or so will be a particularly busy time, however, with big tournaments in Denmark, France and Germany counting for a lot of points.

The Danish Open is first up, with Bankier and Adcock meeting her fellow Scot Blair and White in the first round on 19 October. The only time the pairs have met each other so far was in the semi-finals of the German Open in March, when Blair and White won 21-17, 21-17 and went on to take the title.

Britons have enjoyed a fair amount of success in mixed doubles at major tournaments over the past decade and more. Simon Archer and Joanne Goode were bronze medallists at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and Nathan Robertson and Gail Emms went one better in Athens four years later. Bankier added: “Archer and Goode winning bronze is a really vivid memory from when I was younger and then, when I was in the juniors, Gail was a very important figure.

“I definitely grew up aspiring to be as good as she was, and I went on to play her a few times but I never beat her. I still feel I can definitely learn a lot from the way she played, and from Donna Kellogg, who was her partner and Jo Goode’s.”

Bankier is, so far, the best-known member of her family in sporting circles, but all that will change shortly when her father, Ian, succeeds John Reid as chairman of Celtic.

“Obviously with my dad’s ties to Celtic I’d like to get up to Glasgow for a game sometime soon to support him, but it was only recently that I went to my first match. I’ve followed football since I was young, but I was always really interested in badminton from when I first played it when I was nine.

“I do watch a lot of football on television, though. The standard of the Premiership is so good. I was really keen on Manchester United when I was younger, with the likes of Nicky Butt, Paul Scholes and David Beckham, and Peter Schmeichel in goal.

“The game I went to was Celtic against St Johnstone. It was a really enjoyable day out but, unfortunately, Celtic lost.”

The international break this weekend means there are no SPL games for Bankier to attend on Saturday, which is maybe just as well. With that exam coming up on Monday, she plans to spend the weekend revising and, in any case, if she had had any free time, she would have been going to that Olympic Ball.

“It’s unfortunate that I’m not going but I’ve got a second-year exam so I need to get back to Glasgow – it’s in the Royal Concert Hall. I’m doing a degree in social science and politics. I’d like to be a graduate but I’ve not thought about what I would do with my degree in massive detail.”

As a full-time badminton player, Bankier has been able to schedule her studies around her sporting commitments. Unlike this weekend, then, next summer there will be no clash between exams in Glasgow and any more appealing events in London.

n TEAM GB hopeful Imogen Bankier was speaking to The Scotsman ahead of tomorrow’s BT British Olympic Ball, a crucial fundraiser for Team GB in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympic Games. See www. BritishOlympicBall.com for more details.