The Odyssey & Excellence Of Tigg-Trained Duncan Scott
As Steven Tigg prepares to taker the reins as head coach to Great Britain, here's a feature from the SOS archive in which Duncan Scott and Tigg share their post-Tokyo Games thoughts - which are stacked with eternal relevance to performance and the long haul
In August 2021, in the days after Duncan Scott emerged from the Tokyo Olympic Games with four medals, a gold and three silvers, as the most decorated British athlete, all sports, ever at a single Games, SOS spoke to the athlete and his coach at the University of Stirling, Steven Tigg.
Today, beyond the Paris 2024 Olympics and the announcement that Tigg is the new head coach to Great Britain after the retirement of Bill Furniss, Scott has two golds and six silvers in his Games pantheon:
Craig Lord
Craig Lord
Two medals in Rio as a teenager, four in Tokyo at 24 and two more in Paris at 27. All the while, Tigg has been his guide. As the coach steps up to steer Great Britain's next performance chapter a week after he and Bradley Hay were jointly awarded the Scottish Swimming Performance Coach of the Year award, here's that post-Tokyo feature, reproduced in our archive for subscribers who support our work: it speaks to the work that started in Scott's head the moment he took silver in the 200IM behind a swimmer who would turn out to have tested positive for banned substances twice in his career, on his way to silver behind the swimmer of the Paris 2024 Games, Léon Marchand; and, the feature is stacked with clues as to what we can expect of Tigg on the way to LA 2028, everything in between and as far beyond as his new role takes him and Team GB.
August 15, 2021 - The SOS Sunday Essay
Duncan Scott is still racing, or at least his mind is. It's been two weeks since silver in the men’s medley relay in Tokyo made the 24-year-old Britain’s most decorated athlete ever at a single Olympics but he's re-swimming the rapids of four finals, four podiums, analysing, assessing, dissecting each in turn over and over again.
Each passing medal and milestone was "parked" during the Games, as Scott put it, so that he could focus on the next goal and test and "not get wrapped up in the highs and lows of emotion". He would reflect only when the last race was done.
