What would independence from Great Britain mean for Scottish sport?

DPA/Berlin

The process of disengaging a newly independent Scotland from the rest of Britain in the event of the Yes campaign winning the referendum Thursday is likely to be fraught with difficulty and technical negotiations.

And while the most important of these relates to topics such as currency and European Union membership, the role of sport in the reborn nation is also likely to be passionately discussed.

First Minister Alex Salmond has set the ambitious target of March 24, 2016, for the country to officially become independent from Britain.  Coming less than five months before the summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, there could be anxiety for Scottish athletes.

In the 2012 London Olympics, Scots made up 10 per cent of the British team which shattered several long-standing records and won 13 medals of the 65 earned in total. That included seven Scottish golds, putting a hypothetical Team Scotland 12th in the medal table.

International Olympic Committee vice president Craig Reedie, himself a Scot, said it would be “very, very difficult” to form a new national Olympic committee which would be recognized in time for Rio.

But IOC president Thomas Bach has eased fears, saying Macedonian athletes competed at Barcelona in 1992 under the Olympic flag following independence from Yugoslavia.

“We respect democratic decisions,” Bach said. “You can see from previous decisions we have been taking in similar cases that we are always safeguarding the interests of the athletes.”

Similar precedents include East Timor in 2000 and a lone South Sudanese athlete in 2012.

While the participation of Scotland’s athletes in the Games is unlikely to be blocked, the question of maintaining competitiveness remains.

At the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, Britain claimed only one gold en route to the worst medal haul (15) since 1952.

Finishing a historically low 36th in the medal table, it was clear something had to be done about British sport.

The answer was investing money made from the National Lottery, formed two years earlier in 1994, in elite sport. Controversial decisions, often made on the narrowest margins of success and failure, channelled money to those most likely to win medals. That ignored some mass participation sports but the result of resources invested well was undeniable - Britain produced more and more medals, culminating in the 65 of 2012. The infrastructure behind British cycling, for example, is unmatched.

A split from Britain could cast doubts over the viability of lottery funding. The British government has said Scotland would have no automatic right to remain in the old lottery and ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown was cautious about the impact of a smaller, Scottish lottery.

“The bigger the pool and the bigger the stage, the bigger the number of players, the bigger the prizes and the bigger the grants to Scottish organizations,” he said in summer.

However, the Scottish government has pointed out that Camelot, a for-profit company, have a license to run the lottery for several years to come and could simply continue with the cross-border contest as it is now.

Edinburgh-born Sir Chris Hoy, the most successful Olympic cyclist of all-time and most-decorated Scottish Olympian, publicly warned about the effect of independence on sport, saying the country lacked the facilities needed to compete.

That has changed, to a degree, following the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this year - a new Scottish velodrome in that city bears Hoy’s name - but wholescale change could take time.

Hoy was criticized for his perceived negativity by a small band of independence supporters and perhaps unsurprisingly he refused to declare for Yes or No in a recent Spectator interview.

Andy Murray, Scotland’s global star tennis player and the first British men’s singles winner at Wimbledon in nearly 80 years, has said he would play for Scotland, not the remainder of the United Kingdom, in the event of independence.

But he too, burned by the media reaction to an innocuous England joke before the 2006 World Cup, has not stated a preference despite previously saying he would nearer the vote.

That is the position taken by those involved in the national football team - with polls placing the referendum result around 50-50, it is simply not worth antagonizing half your fans and sponsors in what is becoming an increasingly fractious debate.

Ex-Labour minister John Prescott, campaigning for No, found out last week that football is not an issue taken lightly in Glasgow when his ill-considered joke about merging the Scotland and England football teams, who have always been separate, drew boos from even his own supporters.

In football, and other sports like rugby and golf which were born on the British Isles, Scotland and England have always competed separately rather than together as Britain.

For the fans, it is easier. The overwhelming majority of the Tartan Army that travelled to Dortmund for the Euro 2016 qualifier with Germany are pro-independence, though the minority expressing the opposite view were safe to do so.

Being elevated to a level above the fray possibly aided former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson in stating his view, though it is hard to imagine him being intimidated from voicing any opinion, on anything, he believes should be heard.

“Eight-hundred-thousand Scots, like me, live and work in other parts of the United Kingdom,” Ferguson said just after referendum details were announced. “We don’t live in a foreign country; we are just in another part of the family of the UK.”

But regardless of Ferguson’s wishes, from Friday that family may soon find itself living in foreign countries - in the field of sport, as much as everything else.