Amidst all the success enjoyed by Team GB in the last Olympic/Paralympic cycle its curling programme stood alone.
In no other sport had medals been won in every discipline entered which was all the more remarkable because those collected by Team Murdoch and Team Muirhead were the first since Rhona Martin delivered her ‘stone of destiny’ in 2002, while the wheelchair curlers had also missed out in 2010 after reaching the final at their first attempt in 2006.
Wins at last weekend’s Scottish Championships have earned the Olympic medallists the right to go to their forthcoming World Championships over the next few weeks and seek to secure the necessary points to qualify Team GB for next year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
There is no such pressure on Aileen Neilson and her fellow ‘wheelies’ as they call themselves when heading into their World Championships which get underway as a test event in the Korean city today because they have already accrued the necessary points to know there will be British representation at the Paralympics which immediately follow on from the Olympic contest.
Yet such is the UK Sport system that they have had their funding cut in the interim because of a blip in performance two years ago, a decision that can be defended applying simplistic analysis, yet demonstrates the inflexibility of the thinking that lies behind it.
Perhaps there was something of a hangover from that Sochi success, but at the following year’s World Championships the Scots had been relegated and, worse still, failed at their first attempt to return to the top flight. The algorithms were consequently applied and short-term number crunching out-weighed longer term considerations. No other country has a better record of winning medals at Wheelchair World Championships than the Scots, their haul of five matching that of the mighty Canadians, but in the sport’s short history, no team has previously won a Paralympic medal when they had failed to participate in a World Championship two years previously, so the Scots were no longer considered worthy of support.
This in spite of the fact that they had sensibly, as most who understand sport would see it, taken the opportunity immediately after that medal success in Sochi, to try some changes including at skip to see if they could get even better results, something that carried obvious risks.
For Neilson in particular there was every reason to feel deeply hurt given the sacrifices she had made.
She had used her funding to take a career break from her job as a school-teacher at Bent Primary near Lesmahagow and could not have been blamed if she now felt the time was right to return to it. Instead there have been no complaints as she has redoubled her efforts and sought to turn disappointment into motivation.
“It was obviously difficult losing funding,” she admitted.
“The funding allowed me to be a full-time athlete. It’s different now having to juggle things. However I’m still training full-time. I was keen to do another cycle and hopefully be selected for another Paralympics.
“I think you need that real desire and passion to be able to perform and get the results you want. Funding doesn’t necessarily bring you medals but it allowed me to train full-time. None of the other guys worked but I made the decision so I could train full-time with them.”
Neilson suggests that in seeking to maintain contact with her profession she has even managed to enjoy the best of both worlds to some extent.
“I miss the kids but I’m fortunate because our performance director Graeme Thompson introduced me to the Youth Sport Trust, so I’m involved in that going into schools and I can go in, work with them, wind them up… and then leave,” she laughed.
It has, though, been serious business on the ice in seeking to regain their rightful place among the sport’s elite and, reinstalled as skip, she again chooses to see the setbacks suffered as having contributed to giving her, along with Sochi team-mates Gregor Ewan, Robert McPherson and Angie Malone as well as newcomer Hugh Nibloe, a competitive edge.
“It was certainly intense,” she said of the B division event in Finland that they entered in November knowing they could, as they did, guarantee that Paralympic place by picking up qualifying points, in doing so denying them to rival teams.
“We knew what it felt like to go to the qualifiers and not qualify and we didn’t want to experience that again, so we worked really hard and our coach, Sheila Swan, put a lot of things in place, but we knew this was our last chance and doing it was a huge relief,” said Neilson.
“It’s given us a lot of confidence knowing we’ve done that, having played against a lot of countries who won’t now be at the Worlds but who are strong teams. It showed we could last for that length of time, peak at the right time. We proved we could do it in the qualifiers so that gives us a lot of confidence for the Worlds.”
The World Wheelchair Curling Championships get underway in Pyeongchang today and continue until March 11.
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