We haven't always appreciated our great swimmers - it's time with Duncan Scott we did

We Don’t Need Another Hero - remember that thumping 1980s hit? Well, Tina Turner, you sang it, and Bellshill-born balladeer Graham Lyle, you wrote it, but I rather think we do.

Andy Murray has shuffled off the tennis court for the final time. The hole he leaves in Scottish sport and our wee spartan lives is bigger than the giant kit bag on his back, bigger than almost anything. It therefore probably won’t be filled by one man, or woman, capable of enrapturing the entire nation.

What, though, about Duncan Scott? In one sense it’s unlikely. Not Scott’s fault, but as Mark Foster in the BBC box at the La Defense acknowledged, swimming isn’t Big Sport and will only enjoy attention once every four years. But in another sense, why not?

Why not when the crowds this time have been so psyched? The best swimming atmosphere of any of commentator Adrian Moorhouse’s 11 Games. Why not when, if you’ve been watching on TV, the camerawork has been spectacular, and in the underwater shots of that lovely, fresh, clear, sparkling H2O the swimmers have shot through their turns like frisky dolphins - and haven’t they made you want to jump a pool, purely for the health benefits if not Olympic dreams? And why not when Scott has been at the heart of it all?

Okay, maybe not at the absolute heart like Leon Marchant, the French aqua-idol whose christian name has been roared by the packed stands every time he’s come up for air and who could yet have a populist President Macron proposing that the “Marchons, marchons!” bit of the French anthem be altered to his surname.

But if Marchant is “le Baguette” let’s hear it for “le Waspburger”, the nickname I’ve just coined for Scott in recognition of the tasty half-time snack at Alloa Athletic, the hometown football team our man always likes to reference.

That’s right, Alloa. The town with the tropical-sounding name but which, with respect, doesn’t seem like the most obvious breeding ground for a water-based eight-medal Olympian. Indeed, Alloa lost its pool in 2021 and Scott has been determined to oppose other closures, hammering Holyrood over threats to three in neighbouring West Lothian.

The Alloa Advertiser is proudly proclaiming Scott a “Clacks hero”. Good for it and quite right, too, but the towns and cities which have produced outstanding Scottish swimmers weren’t always fully behind their stars.

Ian Black qualified as a superstar back when no one used the term. In 1959 it was being written: “There can be no doubt that he’s the greatest all-round swimmer in the world today.” By that stage he’d struck gold with four European and Commonwealth triumphs and was training hard for the 1960 Rome Olympics.

Or as hard as he could when civic leaders in Aberdeen refused him time in his local pool. “I got no help from them - not a single lane,” he told me when we met. Familiar, sad circumstances for Black who as a pupil at Robert Gordon’s College had those medal successes met with at best indifference and at worst jealousy and spite. “Not one member of staff ever - ever - told me: ‘Well done,’” he recalled. The Scotsman reported how the headmaster “deplored the fuss” surrounding the swimming prodigy as it lent other students “wrong values”. He wrote to Black’s parents stressing Gordon’s was “for education and nothing more” and would strip him of his prefect’s badge. “I was effectively thrown out of the school.”

Bobby McGregor thundering down the Tokyo pool to a silver medal in 1966, captured on fuzzy cathode-ray monochrome, is my oldest Olympics memory. When I interviewed McGregor he told me how his training at Falkirk Baths was cut short after complaints from recreational swimmers. The pool was the regulation municipal 25 yards. This astonished his American rivals and Sports Illustrated was suspicious. The magazine despatched a reporter to tail McGregor at dawn. “He must have thought I was tricking him, that there was a secret Olympic-sized pool just round the corner.”

It’s been tough being a terrific swimming prospect and Scots-born, just like it was for Murray in tennis. He had to venture abroad to progress and while Wilkie grabbed his opportunity in the US, leaving behind the “chlorine and rotten feet” of his council pool in Edinburgh, Black declined his offer, preferring to “stay true to Scotland”.

Black and McGregor have chiming stories of TV following them to meets, organising Grandstand and similar programmes round their schedules. They were the strappingly handsome stars of a more innocent age of minimal live sports coverage when football only came in highlights form. It is much more difficult now for swimming, and for Duncan Scott, to grab a piece of the action outwith the Olympics every four years. But, boy, has he and the rest of the Brits, and Marchant and those guys in the splash-bang “50 free”, all of them sauntering into the rock concert arena like the gods of that world, not done their darnedest to thrill?

Fame came to Ian Black in the form of the very first SPOTY. Bobby McGregor was touted by his agent to replace Sean Connery as James Bond, swam in front of American showbiz royalty and officially opened new Scottish pools (which later closed). David Wilkie was awarded his own TV show.

What, then, for our newly-confirmed, most-decorated Olympian? TV critic Clive James joked that when Wilkie touched the wall at the finish commentator Alan Weeks experienced an orgasm. In Paris Rebecca Adlington avoided that but said this, and she’s bang on: “Duncan Scott is an absolute superstar of swimming and I don’t think he’s had the recognition he deserves.”