This feature started as a tweet late at night, a request for people to suggest their top-five sporting Scots of the decade. The responses came in a blur. Days after the original question was posed, they were still coming. Name after name, sport after sport.
A top-five became a top-20 and then a top-50. Asking for nominations was the easy part. Going through them all, registering each suggestion and then adding to the master-list proved challenging. There’s been about 150 different versions of this top-50. A rower moved up a place, a footballer moved down a place, a person coming in from left field to replace somebody who was in and then was out. All the time, the mind was driven that bit closer to distraction.
How do you construct a top-50 of the greatest sporting Scots of the decade? With great difficulty, as it turns out. It’s tough enough to figure out the chosen ones, but then to rank them in order from 50-1 is a task that tens of thousands of people might try but one that would surely produce tens of thousands of different outcomes. It’s fun, though. There’s no right way or wrong way of doing this. If sport resulted in everybody agreeing with each other then what a dull world it would be.
There are people on this list – not many, but some – who have won precious little in their careers but whose world-class talent demand that they be included. But where? How do you look on somebody whose star shone briefly in the decade but incredibly brightly? How do you rank somebody who excelled for years but in a sport where the competition wasn’t as hot as other sports? Weighting achievement across the sports is no easy business.
Is longevity a pre-requisite, or should there be a place for one-off brilliance? Where do you place an athlete with world championship gold medals compared to one with Olympic silver? How many footballers deserve – truly deserve – to make it? What about those who compete wonderfully but in sports with little following? How do we look on Para-sportsmen and sportswomen and their place in the overall scheme?
There were any amount of real puzzlers. Numerous times there was gridlock when trying to separate two people from the same sport with similar achievements. In that case, advice from an expert from that sport was sought. Normally, it went something like this: “I’d pick X ahead of Y and here are the reasons, but don’t quote me!”
The final list, then. Fifty names from 25 different sports. You may disagree with much of it, but consensus on this kind of thing is always over-rated.