DL Shawfair on a tennis march
Captained by Zak Rafih the Danderhall based outfit edged out Gullane on sets won after each club had won their home tie in the fixture leaving points level at 18 apiece.
There were some notable individual performances from DL Shawfair notably from Dylan Weir (who ironically missed the photo call). Dylan won all 12 sets played.
Others to excel were Neil Fraser (19 sets won, 1 lost), Stoyan Ivanov (17-1), Zak Rafih (16-2), Aaron Matthews (15-1), Kevin Soto (15-3) and Craig Nisbet (10-2).
Other teams in the league were Waverley 3, Dalgety Bay 4, Dalkeith 3 and Lomond Park 5.
Zak Rafik said: 'Very chuffed … very excited to keep climbing and see where we can get to/'
Photographed after an away match on the blaes courts at Dalkeith are, left to right: Aaron Matthews, Zak Rafih, Neil Fraser, Craig Nisbet, Stoyan Ivanov and Kevin Soto.
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Times
09-08-2025
- Times
Jonathan Edwards: I was brainwashed, but I needed faith to break world record
If he had not been religious, Jonathan Edwards says, he would never have broken the triple jump world record. 'Unbelievably naive,' he says of treading his path, let alone that runway in Gothenburg 30 years ago almost to the day. 'It was mad. Otherworldly. Without this sense that God is in this and it's somehow what I'm supposed to do, I'd never have tried.' The faith has long been lost — he says he was 'brainwashed' — but the leap remains unchecked as the apotheosis of his event and one of sport's most unlikely stories. Edwards, now 59, is moving on. The past is being wrapped up in boxes as he and his wife, Alison, prepare to move from Newcastle to her native Scotland. Gullane is the destination and golf is now high on the retired athlete's agenda. He is a member of the Royal & Ancient and has just returned from volunteer work at the Open in Northern Ireland, helping with digital and mechanical scoring at Royal Portrush. We discuss how the winner, committed Christian Scottie Scheffler, had questioned the point of it all before concluding that golf was not a 'fulfilling' life. Edwards, too, has wrestled with questions bigger than routine salvos about 9-irons or old gold. After all, in 1988 he was the rookie working in the cytogenetics unit at Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary who caught the attention of the world's media after refusing to compete in the Olympic trials because they were on a Sunday. 'You had this funny little guy who works in the lab who's done the qualifying distance but was not going to the trials. Five TV crews from all over the world turned up at my local church. I mean, it was not that long since Chariots of Fire and the Eric Liddell story was well-known.' Edwards, who had not seen the film which tells the story of Liddell refusing to race on a Sunday, did end up at those Olympics but by his own admission any God-given talent was well-hidden. No athletics prodigy like his friend Colin Jackson, he was 23rd in qualifying in Seoul. Four years later in Barcelona he was 35th. 'Colin was breaking records probably from when he was ten. At an equivalent age I was terrible. There was nothing to suggest I was going to do anything… until I did.' If athletics is a forum for incremental gains, the longevity of four field records is a rebuke to evolution. Edwards set his record in Sweden on August 7, 1995. Mike Powell's long jump mark is four years older; he once told me he did not think it would last until the end of the competition. Javier Sotomayor's high jump record was set in 1993 and Jan Zelezny's javelin best in 1996. Edwards, Britain's only world record holder, has theories. 'In field events the talent pool has just gone and I don't think athletics has kept pace with the professionalisation and commercialisation of other sports. You can go elsewhere for better rewards and probably a better experience in terms of the coaching, social setting and camaraderie.' Evidence of broader problems came when working for the BBC at the 2012 London Olympics and warning the team that Greg Rutherford was about to win the gold medal in the long jump. 'I told them it was coming up when he was in the lead but it was not shown live,' he sighs. 'I sat doing commentary for the BBC for years and they just can't think laterally.' Edwards preferred the predecessor to the over-complicated Diamond League, which had fewer meetings and awarded gold bars to the winners, and doubts that even 'brilliant' athletes such as Noah Lyles and Keely Hodgkinson truly cut across into the global mainstream. This is not grouching from the past but the reality of a sport beset by problems highlighted by the collapse of Michael Johnson's Grand Slam Track league. 'From what I understand there's colossal debts and the athletes haven't been paid, so it won't happen, it's finished,' says Edwards. Johnson's ethos was that head-to-head competition was what people wanted but Edwards believes athletics is a 'demonstration of human potential' and so records matter. He has had 30 years to ponder that point. Still triple-jump trim, Edwards tells me his event was the first where an Olympic medal was awarded, and is no more contrived an endeavour than his beloved golf. 'It's just quirkier than it was because athletics is not as popular now.' That said, the vicar's son still seems almost baffled by his decision to leave Durham University and stay in the North East to become a triple jumper. 'In a very naive way, I thought I'd give it a go and make the best of the abilities God had given me,' he says. 'My father was pushing me, in a good way. I lived in North Devon, overlooking the Bristol Channel, went to private school in the middle of beautiful countryside, and the next thing I'm in post-industrial Newcastle, signing on the dole, thinking, 'What the hell am I doing here?' ' He had taken the post-university plunge because of his athletics ties to the region. He had met a coach called Carl Johnson; a blind powerlifter called Norman Anderson, the former long-distance runner Brendan Foster's physiotherapist, who 'became a second dad to me'; and then forged his alliance at Gateshead Harriers with Peter Stanley, who crucially changed Edwards' technique to a double-arm action. He met Alison at church and they married and had two sons. After a bronze medal at the 1993 World Championships, he went full-time only to suffer a debilitating virus and financial woes. 'Things looked pretty sticky because I was trying to be a triple jumper but was earning no money, so it was fraught,' he says. That bronze had sown a seed of belief that this might amount to something, though, and by the summer of 1995 he was in rude health. Willie Banks's world record of 17.97 metres had stood for a decade, but at the European Cup in Lille, Edwards leapt a staggering 18.43m, only for it to be judged marginally over the legal wind limit. 'I had no board, so it was 18.60 take-off to landing,' says Edwards at his Victorian terraced home in Gosforth, his 1995 BBC Sports Personality of the Year award behind him, waiting to be boxed. 'It was colossal. That was the day I went from a 17.50 jumper to an 18.50 one, something I never thought was possible. Even now I have to pinch myself. I wasn't the one anybody thought would do that.' After Lille, the man formerly dubbed 'Titch' and still lighter than his peers broke the record by a centimetre in Spain, after which Powell approached him and said 'welcome to the club', and by the time he got to the World Championships in Gothenburg expectations were spiralling. He did not disappoint. He broke the 18m barrier in the first round and then extended the world record to 18.29m (60ft), where it has rested ever since. 'I knew that was 60 feet, which was a big deal to me. I didn't believe it would happen but I knew it could. It felt magical. I couldn't quite understand what was happening. I look back and there's an unreality to it because it's so far away from what I'd grown up with. I was never a world-beater.' He would win lots after that, proving a world-beater in 2000 when he followed up his 1996 silver behind the USA's Kenny Harrison with the Olympic title. 'The distance didn't matter then. It was just a relief because I didn't want to be an athlete who had broken a world record and not won an Olympic title.' On his way to his Sydney gold he had a tin of sardines in his kitbag to symbolise the feeding of the 5,000 and remind himself that for all the records and faster-higher-stronger slogans, there was always a higher entity. In 1991 he had sparked more fascination by not competing at the World Championships because it would have meant jumping on the Sabbath, but he was competing on a Sunday by 1993, and after retiring a decade later and fronting Songs of Praise, he began to question more fundamental beliefs. 'The biggest pressure was when I changed my mind about jumping on a Sunday,' he says. 'My parents weren't happy about that. I'd been brought up not to do anything on a Sunday. It was very strict. I never did any schoolwork on Sunday, never revised. I used to try to sneak away and watch The Big Match and on the odd occasion my parents would find me and drag me out. 'Then I started to reason it and come up with my own conclusions. It's not a settled issue in theology that the Sabbath is Sunday and that you can't work on a Sunday. I had freedom of conscience to make that decision. 'My faith and athletics were always very much tied together and when I retired [in 2003] it gave me freedom to ask questions. My horizons were broadened. I didn't just have this cosseted group in Newcastle based around family, friends and church. I was going further afield, working for the BBC, doing documentaries, I got a job on the Ofcom content board. I saw more of life. 'There wasn't a moment where I thought 'I don't believe there's a God anymore'. It makes sense to a lot of people, but it didn't to me and it fell away quite quickly but not traumatically. I think it was a shock to a lot of people around me, mostly my parents — I think it's still a constant source of disappointment.' Scheffler has spoken about how faith helps his sport by making him appreciate golf is not a matter of life or death. Edwards never felt predestined to win medals, but did feel there was something compelling him to try. 'Having lost my faith, I look back and I obviously thought there was a real entity supporting me. There was a power in that and it was my sports psychology. I wouldn't have become an athlete without it. I was 21 and had won nothing. All my mates were going off to work for one of the big five consultancies, as it was then, and I'm going to Newcastle to be a triple jumper. It was a fool's errand to think it might work out.' His mother now has dementia and his father is dealing with that as well as the aftershock of a stroke. Alison, the daughter of a port missionary, has recently qualified as a lay reader — 'we've held our differences very well'. Nothing Edwards says is delivered in a didactic or critical manner, but he says faith was intertwined with the blinkered obsessiveness of sport. 'I was brought up by my parents with the best of intentions, but brainwashed,' he says. 'That's the truth. I was very compliant and eager to please as a young boy. I think athletics is very one-dimensional and you're so focused on performance that you almost become stunted in other areas. 'You're very developed physically but in terms of the broader development of your thought process and the meaning of life, perhaps less so. I was a late physical developer and maybe I was a late emotional and psychological developer. I'm probably an atheist, but ultimately I think being agnostic is the only true position because nobody really knows. 'There are brighter people who believe in God and brighter people who don't, so it's not an intellectual exercise. It's an opinion, a feeling, upbringing and genetics. I love the Dune films and the idea that life's not a mystery to be understood but a reality to be enjoyed. That's where I'm at.' He clearly enjoys his reality, his family, and his ambassadorial role for the R&A — and playing golf, which he says is just as reliant on rhythm as the discipline that made him famous. And he is still the greatest. The closest anyone has come to his mark was ten years ago, Christian Taylor's 18.21m, and while common sense suggests it must fall one day, he will be sorry if it beaten as a result technological advances. 'I don't think World Athletics have got a handle on technology at all and my spikes sit more happily in the 1960s than 2025, that's for sure. Did you see that track they jumped on in Rome? It's a trampoline. I mean if my record had been broken on that, I think it would have been a travesty.' Being better than billions inevitably brings barbs as well as introspection. 'You've got a world record that lasts 30 years and, inevitably, people laugh and say, 'What did you take?' Kenny Harrison's had digs at me on and off, but in a technical event when you get something right you can make huge strides that aren't about being fast and strong. It's effortless.' So the world record remains more 'impactful' than any of the gold medals laying under the bed, and sometimes he gets out the old tape. When comparisons are made, the common conception is that gold matters most because nobody can take medals from you, but Edwards says he was also sent mementos each time he broke the world record. 'Nobody can take my plaques away either,' he smiles. Except the removal men in a box that should be marked 'best'.
Edinburgh Reporter
04-08-2025
- Edinburgh Reporter
Young Midlothian bowlers excel at Ayr ‘nationals'
Bowls Midlothian is celebrating unprecedented success at the Scottish national finals in Ayr. The district returned with a record-breaking medal haul of three golds, one silver and a bronze. The new Scottish champions include Dalkeith's Jacek Goldie who won the under-18 singles title. Jacek was joined at the top of the podium by Jack Davidson of Wallyford who was crowned Scottish under-25 champion. Completing the golden treble was Davidson's club-mate Alex Paterson, who won the Para B7/8 Scottish Champion title. Jack Goldie said: 'Playing in Ayr was a great experience that I really enjoyed. Going there I just wanted to win my first game and anything else was a bonus, so winning my first and second game was really good and gave me a lot of confidence. After winning my next game I thought I had a really good chance at winning the tournament. 'Getting to the final was great and all the support I got from everyone was amazing and it really helped me. Winning the final from 16-3 down was a great moment.' The success story continued with Pathhead duo Morag and Colin Walker in the Mixed Pairs where they claimed a silver medal. The future of the sport was also on full display as Kaitlyn Rodger (Dalkeith) and Alfie Dunlop (Deantown) secured a hard-earned bronze medal in the Scottish under-18 pairs. Further highlighting Midlothian's strength in depth was the under18 triples team of James Amos, Dylan Dalglish, and Ryan Harris, who ereacdh the quarter-finals. Gary Rodger, Acting Bowls Midlothian Youth Match Secretary, said: 'Our Midlothian youths done themselves proud. 'Over and above the ability shown on the green I'm extremely proud of the way our young bowlers handled themselves throughout the whole process, they are a real credit to their clubs and themselves.' David J Kelly, Bowls Midlothian secretary who was present all week,added: 'Having been involved in bowls for a long time, it's the most medals brought back in a single year I can remember. It is a testament to the dedicated volunteers that we have.' The sentiment was echoed by Bowls Midlothian President, Andrew Robertson who said: 'To have this level of success during my presidential year makes it all the more special.' Pictrred left to right are: Alfie Dunlop (Deantown), Kaitlyn Rodger (Dalkeith), Ryan Harris (Polton), Jamie Amos (Dalkeith), Jacek Goldie (Dalkeith) and Dylan Dalglish (Bonnyrigg). Like this: Like Related
Scotsman
31-07-2025
- Scotsman
Scotland's Home Internationals selections put under the microscope
Martin Dempster runs the rule over the sides selected by Scottish Golf for title battles next week Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... After a disappointing European Team Championship campaign, Scotland will be aiming to salvage some pride in the upcoming Home Internationals, which are taking place in England and Ireland. The men and women are heading to Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire to do battle on 6-8 August, with the boys and girls in action at Cork on 5-7 August. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Here's a rundown of Scottish Golf's selections for each event, with the men/women and boys/girls once again competing in a mixed format. Chris Robb, pictured with Ewen Ferguson during a practice round for the Dormy Open in Sweden in 2021, has been picked for next week's Men's Home Internationals after being reinstated as an amateur |Men's Home Internationals The team is missing star players Connor Graham and Cameron Adam as they prepare for the US Amateur Championship at The Olympic Club in San Francisco the following week. US-based Niall Shiels Donegan is in the same boat, leaving the selectors to pick what can only be described as a somewhat patched-up team. It includes Meldrum House man Chris Robb, who beat Graeme Robertson in the final of the Scottish Amateur Championship in 2014 before turning professional, but he's now back in the amateur ranks. Battle Trophy winners Andrew Davidson (Crail) and Jack McDonald (Schloss Roxburghe) have played on this stage before, as has Aldeburgh's Gregor Tait, a two-time Scottish Amateur finalist. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The team also includes last year's Scottish Amateur champion Alexander Farmer (Kilmacolm) and Sam Mukherjee (Gullane), as well as Glenbervie's Ross Laird, who played for Team International in this year's Palmer Cup. New blood, meanwhile, will be provided by The Renaissance Club's Dominic McGlinchey, who topped the qualifying in this week's Scottish Amateur at Gullane, and James Wood, the Bathgate player who won last year's Scottish Boys' Championship. Glenbervie's George Cannon has been named as the reserve for an event that will see Ireland defend the title. North Berwick's Grace Crawford is now one of the experienced players in the Scottish Women's side | Contributed Women's Home Internationals This event marks the start of life for Scottish Golf without having the services of either Hannah Darling or Lorna McClymont after they both turned professional. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It means the main experience is now being provided by former St Rule Trophy winner Jen Saxton (Dunfermline) and North Berwick's Grace Crawford, who emulated Darling by winning The R&A Girls' Under-16 Championship before landing an even bigger victory in the Helen Holm Scottish Women's Open. Royal Troon's Freya Russell has been regarded as one of the brightest talents in Scotland over the past few years, with Rosie Maguire (Pollok) and Abigail May (St Regulus Ladies) both having emerged as top juniors. Australian-based Sheridan Clancy (Lake Karrinyup) and Susan Woodhouse, the East Kilbride player who sprung a shock in this year's Scottish Women's Championship, completing the line up, with Eilidh Henderson (Ladybank) on standby as the reserve. England will be defending the women's title on home soil. Scottish Boys' champion Finlay Galloway will lead a strong-looking side into battle in Cork | Scottish Golf Boys' Home Internationals As was the case for the European Championship, the Scots are heading into battle with a strong-looking side. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It will be led by Scottish Boys' champion Finlay Galloway (St Andrews) and also includes Jamie McDonald (St Andrews New) and Fraser Walters (Craigielaw). McDonald and Walters both played in the European Young Masters in France last weekend along with their sisters, Carly and Stella. Aidan Lawson, the Bruntsfield Links player who won last year's European Young Masters, is also in the side along with Oli Blackadder (Deeside), Fraser Brown (Nairn), Brodie Cunningham (Bothwell Castle), Kiron Gribble (Dunbar) and Kai Laing (Broomieknowe), with Finlay Hazelwood (Carnoustie Caledonia) listed as the reserve. The Scots beat England in a game within the event to lift The International Cup at Conwy last year and will aim to claim the main prize on this occasion. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Stella and Fraser Walters are both representing Scotland in the Girls/Boys Home Internationals in Ireland | Scottish Golf Girls' Home Internationals Hopes are high that a new Hannah Darling or Lorna McClymont will come through over the next year or so and the seven players selected for this event will be aiming to show off their talents in Ireland. Carly McDonald (St Regulus) won the recent Scottish Girls' Championship at Kings Golf Club in Inverness while 12-year-old Stella Walters (Craigielaw) looks as though she is also a star in the making. They'll be joining forces with Jodie Graham (Royal Troon), Erin Huskie (Stirling), Melissa Keay (Ralston), Hannah Ounap (Loudoun) and Kaci Robertson (Nairn Dunbar). Ava Paterson (Tulliallan) is the reserve.
