There's such an endemic bad attitude towards sports and fitness in Scotland. Football has been effectively allowed to take over city centres for so long now. But try organising a one off local triathlon or running event! You need permission from the local police force to pay them for a small presence, and quite often they refuse it. Even though organisers time it so that everything will be finished by 9.30am on a Sunday morning... Some areas are better than others, but you can forget about it in other areas. But football matches are tolerated.
Even park run. A few people complained to the council about the sight of runners on a Saturday morning, even though it took place on a beach with parallel paths providing an alternative to walk on. So the start had to be moved and now there are no toilets near the start. The original start was about 600m from a football stadium, whose supporters regularly take over much of the city centre.
The covid point is that competitive sport and group training has been banned off and on for over a year now in Scotland. Last summer, we had the farcical situation of being allowed to meet strangers in pubs to drink alcohol while swimming and gyms were closed. Only in Scotland. Scotland was the only country in the world to have such a bizarre set up.
It continued for months. National sports bodies pleaded endlessly with the Scottish government to permit some form of limited socially distanced competition, spending funds doing research and putting forwards cases, only to be completely ignored in the arrogant, high handed way that the Scottish government seems to specialise in.
Eventually, after a summer of pubs being open and associated localised spikes in cases, limited number, socially isolated competitive sport was allowed to resume at the end of September, just in time for winter, only to close down again in December.
But football matches still go ahead. We have elite Scottish athletes such as Laura Muir and Jemma Reekie, who are leading Olympic contenders, unable to train abroad in warm weather or at altitude unlike their competitors from the rest of the world. We have others like Eilish McColgan effectively living out of a suitcase as there's no point in her returning home. The Scottish government could have exempted elite athletes from the travel ban in this Olympic year.
At a lower level, I'm a keen runner and I normally take my holidays in winter to train abroad in the sun. I'm really disciplined, but with no group training or competitions allowed, and gyms and swimming pools closed, no sports massage permitted, etc, I've found it impossible to keep up my usyal fitness level. I've been injured trying to train in the cold when I'd normally have benefitted from 10 days in the south of Spain or Tenerife. Goodness knows how people with less discipline are coping with weight control, eating and drinking too much, and so on. It seems a government policy guaranteed to send rates of type 2 diabetes and heart disease through the roof.
This old fashioned thinking makes me wonder if the Scottish government actually hate sport - except that is for make dominated football of course.