Borderers flying flag for region at 2026’s Glasgow Commonwealth Games

That level of involvement, keeping up the region’s history of punching above its weight despite being largely rural and thus relatively sparsely populated and lacking facilities to compare with those in the Central Belt and Scotland’s other larger population centres, is down in no small part to Scottish Borders Council’s athlete support programme.

The council launched that programme in 2007 to support athletes of all ages by organising specialist support, travel and competition opportunities, as well as identifying potential issues and coming up with solutions to enable promising athletes to try to keep pace with their peers elsewhere and bid to compete at the highest levels.

Swimmer Lucy Hope, of Crailing, near Jedburgh, is back for her third Commonwealth Games, having also competed at two Olympic Games, and a new generation of Borders athletes will be making their games debuts over the next fortnight, including Cardrona netball player Cerys Finn, Duns weightlifter Maddie Rosher and Galashiels boxer Lara Brown.

Finn follows West Linton’s Jo Pettitt and Lauren Tait into Team Scotland’s ranks, and Berwick middle-distance runner Guy Learmonth, Peebles mountain-biker Isla Short, Duns badminton player Callum Smith, Selkirk hockey star Sarah Robertson and late Bonchester Bridge archer Kate Murray are among the other beneficiaries of the programme to have represented the Borders at previous games, and plenty more have gone on to compete internationally at sports not included in the games.

John McBay, the council’s sports development manager, is delighted to see the region continue to be represented at the Commonwealth Games, saying: “It is brilliant to see another group of Borders athletes be selected and now be preparing for a games.

“In Lucy’s case, she knows what elite games are about and I know she’ll go and smash it in the pool – she is one of the best athletes to ever come out of the Borders – and to see Maddie, Cerys and Lara getting ready for their first taste of the games is great.

“Lara is the only one we haven’t yet supported through the athlete support programme but we’re looking to do that as she progresses in boxing too.

“The support the programme has given to athletes going back over the past 20 years is difficult to overstate. It can be seen to be little things but, as we have heard from the athletes themselves in this series of interviews over the past few weeks, they have hugely appreciated it and some have said that they wouldn’t have got to compete at the highest levels without it.

“That was the whole point of creating the programme and providing that helping hand to athletes in a rural area like ours, where there can be unique challenges and hurdles to developing and competing at a high level in sport.”

The programme was launched 19 years ago by sports enthusiasts including Galashiels’ Rick Kenney, still chairing it, and Peebles councillor Graham Garvie, and it brought in Gregor Nicholson, also of Peebles, in 2009 to help identify athletes’ needs and tailor support to ensure maximum benefit.

Nicholson joined up after working at the Scottish Rugby Union for much of his career, heading up various departments associated with development and high performance and acting as Scotland national men’s team manager for many years, but stepped back in 2018, with council sports development officer Neil Renton taking over.

Nicholson is equally pleased to see a conveyor belt of talent and progression to major games continue, saying: “From my point of view, a good indicator of how the programme helped local athletes was the four we had at the 2014 Commonwealth Games – Guy Learmonth, Sarah Robertson, Jo Pettitt and Lucy Hope – because our initial focus was to help athletes reach the 2012 Olympics and 2014 Commonwealth Games.

“When Lucy came on aged about 14, she was living in Crailing, and a couple of mornings a week she was going to the pool in Kelso and then to Jedburgh Grammar for the start of school, so we arranged early-morning access at the Laidlaw Memorial Pool in Jed so she could go to school, saving an hour’s travel each morning she trained, and that was a big benefit to her.

“That is just one example of the kind of specialist support the programme provides, and there are many others.

“It has been great to see the programme continue and we now have a steady stream of athletes going to major games, including Lucy still there.

“We actually did a comparison between the Borders programme and Glasgow School of Sport at one stage to see how we measured up in developing young talent and it showed the Borders were ahead in terms of athletes progressing to international and Commonwealth Games. That’s quite something, and it will be great to see another group flying the Borders flag high in Glasgow over the next two weeks.”