Should Great Britain have done better at the Winter Olympics?
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EVE Muirhead and her team became the darlings of Scottish and British sport when they realised their dream of winning curling gold at the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Returning from hip surgery to compete at the games, she skipped the team to a 10–3 win over Japan on Sunday.
Bruce Mouat and his team also did the country proud when they won a silver medal in the men’s competition, agonisingly losing the final to Sweden 5–4 after the game was forced into an extra end.
Both teams saved Great Britain’s blushes at the Winter Olympics as the country went into the final weekend of the games without winning a medal of any colour.
It could be argued that Great Britain is not a winter sports nation, but could it also be argued that we have the geography available to be doing better than we are?
In this part of the world, we have a number of ski resorts available at our doorstep.
Glencoe, Glenshee, Nevis Range, Cairngorm and The Lecht are excellent ski ranges, albeit only available usually between December and April.
Aviemore is also an excellent resort attracting winter sport enthusiasts from around the world.
Given the facilities we have available, should there be more athletes competing at a higher level?
Great Britain had set a target of at least winning five medals won at the previous two Olympic Games.
However, there were some close calls in other events too, with British athletes recording three top-six finishes in other sports.
But when Great Britain are finishing below the medals table behind nations such as New Zealand, who won two gold medals and one silver, and Australia winning four medals, including one gold, should we be setting our sights a bit higher?
Maybe when it comes to winter sports, we should be looking to accommodate funding where we have a better chance of winning medals.
Over £22 million was spent for the Great Britain Winter Olympics campaign, with some sports receiving significantly more funding than others.
It was reported £9.53m was spent on ski and snowboarding, and £6.42m was awarded to skeleton with neither sports producing any medals.
Meanwhile, the four man bobsled team was forced to self fund to compete at the Games and managed to finish in sixth place.
Questions will need to be asked why so much was spent on sports where no success was produced. The skeleton was a particular disappointment for Great Britain, an event where we have usually achieved a lot of success in previous games. Although the sliding events were dominated by Germany, who out of a possible 10 golds in events, they managed to win nine of them.
But let’s take a minute to appreciate what our curling teams have achieved in China.
Curling is a major sport in Scotland and it has been argued that we have perhaps underachieved at the Games since Great Britain previously won gold in 2002.
But there is no doubt both our men’s and women’s teams reached their potential by getting to the final and coming away with medals.
Hopefully, this will lead to more people getting involved in curling and the sport receiving more funding in future.
