I think it’s important to be wary of when the media drum up stories just to cause a storm where one didn’t exist before.

I tried to stay out of this one because think about it…. “SNP want a separate Olympics team” is hardly breaking news when they’ve wanted an independent country for decades.

I say again, the SNP didn’t put this story in the headlines. The media did.

Ryan – athletes routinely use training facillities in other countries – even when they are about to compete against those self same host countries.

The British Winter Olympic team regularly trains outside of the UK. Why do you imagine that Scottish athletics administrators would somehow find themselves shut off from the ability to arrange training regimes in England, or anywhere else for that matter?

If 3 velodromes are deemed adequate for the proportion of the 60m people in the UK who need to use them, why on earth would an independent Scotland need an equal number to meet the needs of 5m? That argument makes no sense, and it’s perhaps telling that it came from Mr Hoy snr rather than the man of the moment, who seems to have a much more nuanced take on things.

The best athletes train at the best facillities, no matter where they are. That’s why Andy Murray is based in Spain, and why the UK Olympic Team goes to Lillehammer rather than Aviemore. I dare say that if Scotland one day has its own Olympic team, her athletes will still go furth of Scotland to hone their skills, just as athletes from outside Scotland will continue to come to use facillities like the National Swimming Academy at Stirling, or, indeed, the new velodrome planned for Glasgow.

“of course Scottish athletes will continue to enjoy success whether they fly the Union Jack or the Saltire.”

I replied there,

“True – if things were down purely to an individual athlete. However, taking into account, for example in cycling, the cost of getting the best coaches, the technical development (aerodynamic socks?, tweaks to the aerodynamics of the bike), the competition to get into the team for particular events where intense internal competition improves overall performance, and a good big’un will usually beat a good littl’un – unless the littl’un invests heavily in a targeted fashion. From a UK perspective the investment in a series of Olympic sports has paid off. An athlete with innate ability will trump a system (Dundee’s Daley Thompson, for example), but a stronger system will generally get better results. ”

And the provision of world class facilities is crucial to that system.

I think that sport and the arts should be funded, partly because I believe the market in both so skews matters that some state intervention is required. For example, the market in the UK in sport is totally dominated by football. That’s where the money goes, the big sponsorship deals, the big TV deals.

In the arts without state subsidies we’d have very little material in translation in the UK (when publishers like Dedalus, Serpent’s Tail, Arcadia, Europa Press, Bitter Lemon Press &c), because the market prioritises Grisham, Dan Brown, &c. OUr culture is enriched by the exposure to other cultures, as well as our understanding of the world (Dedalus , for example, publishes a number of books on Arabian/Arabic (sp?) writing and thinking). Would the market publish in readily accessible paperback form such work, or would it remain the province of the academy, published by academic presses at astronomical costs? I think the latter – and I, for one, would rather have a subsidised book of Arabian literature than a fluffy bunny.