The 10-year anniversary of Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games is upon us. Former Team Scotland and Great Britain athlete Ross Murdoch sits down to look back over his dazzling career, and his stroke of victory at his home Games that made him Scotland’s heroic underdog.
Ross started swimming at a young age, and he was put into swimming lessons and club swimming whilst in school. “I felt free” he says. He speaks candidly about his hyperactive personality and his lack of ability to concentrate in school. For Ross, swimming was something that helped him find purpose and focus that he could not get from the classroom.
“School didn’t mean anything to me, and I didn’t mean anything to it” he chuckles as he reflects on his early academic career. For Ross as a youngster growing up, being an athlete meant more to him than studies ever did, and despite never being “the biggest or the toughest” amongst his peers, he says, “standing on the blocks finally gave me an even playing field with the rest of the guys,” that he felt he never got to experience when sat at a desk in school.
It was at the end of high school that Ross made the decision to take his sport seriously. In an affectionate reference to his dad, Ross remembers how he was told, “stop going camping with your pals and start doing some morning training”. His mother, he recalls, was more nonchalant with her advice, telling him to do “what makes you happy”. Ross credits his parents just as much as his coaches for his development in swimming, and notes that their laid-back attitude to his swimming compared to some of his peers’ parents, made all the difference to his enjoyment and longevity in the sport.
In 2011, Ross won his first major medal at the Inverness short course Scottish Championships in the 50m Breaststroke, performing a personal best of 27.92 seconds. “From there I had already set the goal of going to Glasgow 2014, but nothing about my career before that point said ‘yeah, that guy’s going to be a swimmer’” he recalls.
In 2012 at the British Gas Swimming Championships, Ross made another shockwave in the pool, obliterating his previous personal best for the 200m Breaststroke by 7 seconds, finishing 7th overall in his field. was selected for the European Junior Championships and went on to compete in his first major senior event in 2013 at the senior world championships.
After qualifying for Glasgow 2014, Ross recalls thinking “if I am capable of doing this, given the cards I have been dealt throughout the year, training through the trials, I can do anything”. Rob Greenwood, his coach at the time told him not to taper or shave (a common strategy for swimmers to drop any excess drag or friction in the water) for Commonwealth trials. This meant Ross was training through the trials, and despite qualifying easily, he knew that was nowhere near his top performance.
“…if I am capable of doing this, given the cards I have been dealt throughout the year, training through the trials, I can do anything.”
Ross Murdoch
July 2014 came. Ross says that he felt “bulletproof” running up to the Games, not because he knew he would win, but because he had never been a consistent gold medal athlete, and therefore, put crudely, he had “nothing to lose”. The 20-year-old had, at that point, only had the goal of becoming a Commonwealth athlete. “That for me, was enough” he says.
In qualifying, he broke the Commonwealth record, and stamped out any complacence that gold medal favourite and 2012 Olympic silver medallist Michael Jamieson held for the event. The eyes that were focused on Jamieson to steal the gold, were traversing over to the fresh-faced newcomer.
Ross’s goal for that 200m Breaststroke final was a medal of any kind. He says that in hindsight, this was “potentially a bit of a soft target”, but that he didn’t have any experience to go on due to his young career and lack of elite race experience. He insists that he loved his own ‘blissful naivety’ and would create the same goal for himself if he had to go back 10 years and do it all again.
“I just wanted to do it for me” he says, remembering how he struck gold and decimated the British record in the final, pulling away from his competitors in the last 50 metre stretch.
Ross barely knew it himself when he inspired a new generation of swimmers with his victory, and almost a decade on, his stunned face is still plastered into the minds of those who watched him as one of the iconic moments of the Games.
