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‘The stone of destiny’. Team GBcurling as a site for contested nationaldiscourseIrene A. Reid aa Department of Sports Studies , University of Stirling , Stirling, UKPublished online: 11 Mar 2010.
To cite this article: Irene A. Reid (2010) ‘The stone of destiny’. Team GB curling as a site forcontested national discourse , Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 13:3, 399-417,DOI: 10.1080/17430431003587954
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17430431003587954
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‘The stone of destiny’. Team GB curling as a site for contested nationaldiscourse1
Irene A. Reid*
Department of Sports Studies, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
Over the last two decades social scientists have examined the relationship betweensport and expressions of nationhood in different national contexts. Research about sportin Scotland has contributed to this broader scholarship. Although Scotland is a semi-stateless nation it is an anomaly since in certain sports it has autonomy on the globalstage. Much attention has been given to the ways in which these sports mediateexpressions of Scottish nationhood but research has rarely examined the ways thatScottish/British national identities are manifest in relation to British sports teams. Thisessay examines newspapers’ coverage of the 2002 Winter Olympic women’s curlingcompetition. The event was won by Britain, but the team were all Scottish and curlingis regarded as a Scottish sport. In broad terms the analysis affirms that global culturalpractices such as Olympic sports offer the terrain in which to play out the contestednational discourse of stateless nations.
Introduction
International sports events can provide a compelling exhibition of national sentiment,
loyalty and symbols that crystallize what Anderson called the ‘imagined community’.2
This relationship between sport and nationhood has been an important theme in some
sociologies and histories of sport, with much of the attention focused on media narration
and representation. This essay builds on this broader scholarship to examine the hitherto
under-explored representations of nationhood that are associated with Britain’s Olympic
sport. The essay presents an analysis of newspapers’ coverage of the 2002 Winter Olympic
women’s curling competition to reveal how Olympic sport exemplifies the contested
national identities associated with the UK state and its component (stateless) nations in the
twenty-first century. In broader terms the analysis presented here affirms that global
cultural practices – including sports events – offer the terrain for distinctive local/national
communities to resist symbolically the complex and homogenizing forces of globalization.
At the 2002 Winter Olympic Games the team representing Britain in the women’s
curling competition defeated Switzerland to win an unexpected gold medal. The final
match was a closely fought contest during which both teams exhibited the skills required to
compete at elite level, even in a sport that does not have a high global profile. The success
of the Team GB curlers was notable for other reasons. First an all-Scottish team represented
Britain in the global arena of the Olympic Games. Second curling has been recognized as
Scotland’s game3 and the Olympic victory generated particular interest in Scotland even
though curling sport does not usually attract much media attention. Third, it was
noteworthy that a group of women were the central figures in this event since Scotland’s
ISSN 1743-0437 print/ISSN 1743-0445 online
q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17430431003587954
http://www.informaworld.com
*Email: [email protected]
Sport in Society
Vol. 13, No. 3, April 2010, 399–417
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women have often been neglected from accounts of sport and nationhood.4 The women
curlers therefore epitomized ‘women of interest’ who have been marginalized in accounts
of Scotland’s national story.5 Most important however, the combination of factors – the all
Scottish team, the regional popularity of curling within Britain (predominantly in Scotland)
and a British victory on a global stage – makes this an attractive case study to examine
the contested nationalist imaginings – Scottish or British – present in media accounts
of the victory.
Sport in Scotland and the UK: a site of contested nationhood
Nationhood has been a recurring theme in studies of sport in the social sciences.
The body of established research around this subject has included the myriad ways in
which different communities use media sports and sports spectacles as part of the
discursive construction of nation-ness.6 Sport is one of a number of cultural practices
which have at least two important roles for nations: (i) they represent the nation to the
rest of the world; and (ii) they mobilize national sentiments amongst the citizens within
the nation. This discursive construction and representation of the nation through sport
is acknowledged here, but it is important to consider what kind of nation is being
represented, since nations and their expression as nationalism are complex and
ambiguous concepts.7
Interest in nations and nationalisms has emanated from different academic disciplines
including sociology, history and political science. The theoretical and conceptual
frameworks developed by these established disciplines have informed studies of sport and
nationhood. The typologies of nations and nationalism used by political scientists tend to
assert that ‘nationalism is about politics’ and specifically is the ideology of ‘nation-
states’.8 Some sociological assessments of nations share this approach, including Ernest
Gellner who contended ‘nationalism does not arise for stateless societies’.9 Fundamental
to these statist approaches is the definition of the nation as a political and economic
formation, the nation-state. Although relevant, such definitions are often limited when
examining the different nationalisms associated with cultural practices such as sport.
The key limitation of statist definitions of nations is that there are communities which
are not states but they use sport to express collective identities that are national.
The nationalisms of these stateless nations are explained more cogently by social and
cultural – rather than political – theories of nations and nationalism. It is a sociological
perspective of nations and nationalism that underpins this analysis. The nation is
understood as a socially, culturally, historically rooted, but constructed, entity that is
expressed by ‘a named human population . . . sharing common myths and memories, [and]
a mass, public culture’, and perceived historical continuity.10
For analytic purposes distinct national identities tend to be isolated in examinations of
nationalist discourses, but we should not exaggerate the primacy of this component of
identity in people’s everyday lives.11 National identity, like other dimensions of identity,
is not a ‘thing’ that we have or don’t have but rather ‘a social space in which matters of
structure and culture come together’.12 In this way nation and national identity are
understood as conceptual categories connected with social praxis.13 That is to say, the
nation is concerned with human action and meaning, that is reflected through a variety of
practical contexts that ‘structure perception . . . inform thought and experience . . .
organise discourse and political action’.14 As a ‘category of practice’15 national identity
often becomes pre-eminent when a named national community is able to make sense of
ideas about their nation through a collective social or cultural experience. International
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sport seems to be one such focal event when a national team or nation’s representative
carries the ‘burden of national expectation’.16
Central to the discourses of nationhood that engulf international sport is the idea that
other social differences or cultural schisms within a nation (e.g. gender, class, region,
ethnicity) are either submerged or subsumed in the interests of a unified and homogeneous
community. In practice this unity is never the case as a variety of studies concerning sport
and nationhood and ethnicity have demonstrated.17 Internal social divisions within a
nation may appear diminished as individuals from different groups get behind their
representatives; however this unity is often transient or temporary and does not last beyond
the specific occasion or tournament.18
These broad themes are evident in previous studies that have considered the ways in
which nationhood in Scotland is articulated in relation to sport.19 The general arguments
evident in these commentaries reveal the different ways in which sport helps to sustain the
idea of Scotland as distinctive imagined community.20 Of course being Scottish is a
diverse identity category, a point that has been acknowledged in a number of studies.21
However another important dimension of national identity in Scotland is that as one of the
constituent nations of the UK many Scots acknowledge a dual national identity that is both
Scottish and British.
Over the last two decades social scientists have tried to define the sort of national
community Scotland is. Various terms have been used but whether it is an example of a
stateless nation, a nation-within-a-state, or a nation-without-a-state, Scotland is one of a
number of nations ‘(not regions) which do not have the full panoply of statehood as
measured by having a seat at the United Nations’.22 Under the terms of Union Scotland
retained and developed a high degree of autonomy within the UK state, the repository for
which is Scotland’s distinctive civil society.23 Civil society – ‘the space between the
household and the state’24 – is comprised of a network of social organizations and
institutions that in Scotland is fundamentally distinct from that in England, and from the
political structures of the UK state.
It is in and through its distinctive civil society that the idea of Scotland as an imagined
community is experienced and given meaning. The idea and aspiration of Scotland the
nation is embedded in civil society through which a heritage of myths, prejudices and
illusions are sustained; this idea of Scotland is different from the idea of England, Great
Britain and the UK. In Scotland sport is an important part of the network of civil society
that brings together the structure and idea of Scotland as a nation. The autonomous
structure and distinctive culture of modern sport has made it a key part of the terrain where
the idea of Scotland has some objective reality. Sport is therefore a crucial cultural site on
which the idea of Scotland as a nation is discursively constructed and nationhood is both
represented and contested.
A central component of Scotland’s national discourse has been to delineate the
distinction between its status as an autonomous, distinct component nation of the state and
the UK as the state. Sport has contributed to sustaining this distinction and this operates in
a number of ways. A crucial element is that sport in Scotland is a symbolic counter against
the perceived homogenizing Anglo-centric discourse of a unitary British national identity
that is aligned with the political state. Embedded within this is a cultural disassociation
from England and an awareness of the distinction between the nation (Scotland, or
England) and the state (the UK); it is important that this distinction does not appear to be
recognized by England.
Most studies of sport and national identity in Scotland have tended to concentrate
on events where Scottishness is the dominant national identity expressed, particularly
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surrounding the men’s national soccer team. Some consideration has been given to the
dual Scottish and British national identities manifest through sport, but this has been a
minor consideration in work that has examined sport in Scotland, more specifically
Highland, society, and in the late-nineteenth early twentieth century.25 In contrast there
has been comparatively little academic scrutiny of how the discourse of dual national
identity (Scottish and British) becomes manifest when representatives from the constituent
nations of the UK state compete as part of a British team in a global sports event.
Scotland is not unique in using sport as part of the social space to articulate national
sentiments that contradict the apparent unity of the nation-state. There are other
autonomous communities, or stateless nations, incorporated into larger states that also
express their collective national consciousness on the sports turf.26 What is unusual in
contrast to these other stateless nations is that in certain sports Scotland and the other
constituent nations of the UK state are recognized as separate, autonomous nations by a
number of international sports federations; they are therefore able to compete on a global
stage in their own right, rather than as part of a composite UK team. Soccer is the most
global sport in which Scotland has this status, but the national team has had little
international success.27 In contrast curling teams not only compete in the international
arena as Scotland, but have enjoyed considerable success. Moreover as curling is
relatively unknown in other parts of the UK, its inclusion in the winter Olympic Games
programme provides an interesting opportunity for Scotland to mark its national status on
the global stage.
Newspapers and nations in Britain
The evidence discussed here was drawn from a range of tabloid and broadsheet
newspapers published in Britain. Studies of media, sport and nationhood are often framed
by the boundaries of nation-states and it can be convenient to speak of the national press.
This however assumes the state and the nation are a coherent entity that can be depicted
through a ‘national’ media. This conceptual coherence is rarely accurate since it elides the
difference between the state and the nation previously outlined.
The cultural conceptualization of a nation is important when inspecting the media
narration of nationhood associated with Britain. With specific reference to newspapers a
division can be made between the British press and indigenous national (i.e. Scottish)
titles. The idea of the British press carries an implied representation of a homogenous
British national community but this tends to be dominated by an English – even London –
perspective. The indigenous national press is more Scottish in orientation, and it is
‘not forgetful’ of the state/nation differentiation,28 even though the national discourse
tends to be portrayed through the perspective of that region of central Scotland that
includes the main cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.29
The media/nation problematic has been identified in studies of the press in Scotland.
The distinction has however been blurred with the emergence of a third category of
newspapers circulating in Scotland. Descriptively identified as kilted or tartan editions,
Law defined this third newspaper category as ‘the interlopers’; that is, Scottish editions of
British newspapers that have some specifically Scottish content under banner titles like the
Scottish Sun, the Scottish Daily Mirror, or the Sunday Times Scotland.30 In a study of
British, Scottish and interloper newspaper titles Law revealed disparate evidence of
nationalism in the selected publications. He noted in particular that national identity
tends to be ‘more explicitly enunciated’ in the Scottish press in comparison with British
402 I.A. Reid
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newspapers which tends to have a more understated flagging of the nation that is implicitly
British.31
The press, like sport, is part of a relatively autonomous civil society in Scotland that
is a signifier of, and repository for, Scottish national identity. Stated simply, Scots
understand and experience Scotland as a nation within the larger UK state through cultural
institutions and practices like the media and sport. Previous research about sport, Scotland
and nationhood has usually concentrated on settings where Scotland is represented in its
own right, most notably in soccer, but to date limited attention has been given to the
national discourses associated with other sports. The case of Olympic curling presented an
opportunity to examine in the context of sport the dual identities that may operate when
athletes from Scotland, a stateless nation, perform in the global arena as part of a British
national team.
The material used for this case study was drawn from newspapers published in the UK
during the period of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games (9–24 February). This period was
therefore the main focus for collecting press reports, however most coverage of the curling
competition was concentrated between 18 and 23 February when Team GB curlers
emerged as medal-contenders. Additional reports were collected until 28 February 2002,
two days after the British Olympic team returned to the UK. In total 228 separate
newspapers reports were collected and examined through critical textual analysis:
107 of the reports were from the indigenous Scottish press, and 121 reports from
British titles. The British newspapers examined were The Times, The Sunday Times,
The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, Daily Mirror; the Scottish newspapers are
identified as: The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday; The Herald and Sunday Herald;
Daily Record and Sunday Mail.
The newspaper reports were collated retrospectively using the online database
Lexis-Nexis (now Nexis UK). The retrospective collection of material presented two
problems. First, it was not possible to examine fully how ‘the accumulation of meaning
across different texts or images’ – intertextuality – contributes to the encoding and
decoding of discourses of nationhood.32 Specifically the Lexis-Nexis database provides
only the written reports but does not include photographs or other images. Second, the
retrospective collection of material using the Lexis-Nexis database resulted in inconsistent
access to the Scottish (interloper) editions of British titles. It was therefore decided to
exclude these titles from the material collated and concentrate on content from Law’s
categories of the British press and indigenous Scottish newspapers.33
The interrogation of the collated press reports used critical textual analysis. In keeping
with other studies that have used this approach critical textual analysis was ‘a means of
understanding how events are given cultural meanings’.34 Fundamental to this is the
premise that ‘political assumptions, ideology, social values, cultural and racial stereotypes
and assumptions’ are implicit in media narratives.35 The analysis focused on press content
(articles, letters, opinion columns, reports, television reviews) surrounding the Olympic
curling tournament, curling and the Team GB curling competitors; the interrogation of
material identified and critically analysed language, vocabulary, technical devices and
symbolic rhetoric that are recognized with: (i) the construction of nations and nationalism
generally; and (ii) the discursive formation and meanings associated with the idea of
Scotland as a distinct and separate national community.
The analysis revealed that a variety of techniques and devices were used by the media
to conceptually construct and reinforce the collective us/other dichotomy through
Olympic sport; three of these techniques in particular were prominent in press coverage
of the 2002 Olympic curling event. First the overt naming of the curling team as British
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or Scottish and the nation as Britain or Scotland; second the use of semantic pronouns (e.g.
our, us, we) framed a message of collective national experience against those who do not
belong (e.g. you, them, they); and third, allusion to myth-histories that sustain or affirm
collective social relationships, resentments and conflicts between particular national
communities. These techniques were woven throughout the media’s narration of the
curling competition, and used in different ways, drawing on different content, by the
Scottish and British press to construct the idea of the distinct national communities –
Scotland and Britain.
Five key narrative tropes emerged from the textual analysis and are considered in the
remaining sections of this essay. The first trope considered the media’s account of the
Olympic curling tournament emphasizing the unfolding story of an unexpected medal for
the nation. In this trope the nationhood of the curling team is identified through the use of
both British/Scottish markers. The second key trope to emerge concerned the ways in
which ideas of the national other was a problematic construction around Team GB curling
particularly in the British press. Here this relatively unknown sport was positioned in
relation to the nation’s more familiar sports to construct the image and meaning of the
nation and its other; it was essentially through this narrative that cleavages in delineating
the nation and state began to emerge. These cleavages in the narration of the nation were
exposed as the British press depicted the Scottish sport of curling as unusual, and implied
the women were ordinary. Interpreted in Scotland as an attack on the nation, the final
sections of the essay consider how the Scottish press responded to defend national
integrity and, in a clear shift of emphasis, Team GB Olympic sport became a metaphor for
the expression of Scottish nationhood.
Unexpected Olympic champions: the road to curling gold
As the 2002 Winter Olympics approached, the British and Scottish press noted that the
curling events were amongst the few sports in which ‘Britain has realistic medal shots’.36
It was the all-Scottish men’s curling team, not the women, that was considered to have the
better chance of winning a medal.37 As the curling competitions unfolded the Team GB
men, led by experienced curler Hammy McMillan, fell short of these pre-tournament
expectations. When they lost their third match in a row the press began to focus on the
prospect of failure: The Times advised its readers, ‘the end looks nigh now for McMillan
and the Great Britain team’ and the following day reflected on the ‘depressing succession
of sorry failures’ of British competitors who had under-performed, including
‘Hapless Hammy McMillan’.38
Scottish curlers have a good record of success in international competitions such as
the World Curling Championship; however this record was ignored by press in their
assessments of the men’s curling team. Instead comparisons were drawn with other sports,
in particular soccer, as newspapers constructed a sport-nation narrative that emphasized
expected Scottish failure. In Scotland, one national broadsheet reported that ‘our women
curlers’ were faring ‘better’ but ‘McMillan was fulfilling the historical duty of Scots by
failing to reach the second phase’.39
This commentary was less evident in other Scottish newspapers. However, the implicit
comparison with the failings of Scotland’s national (male) soccer team would have been
familiar to Scottish readers.40 This narrative of expected Scottish failure was even evident
in some British newspapers as they reflected on the unexpected victory by the British
women; for example The Guardian noted ‘being good losers is a source of national
pride’.41
404 I.A. Reid
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The media predilection for the failings of Scotland’s national soccer team in
international tournaments is often accompanied by calculations of how a lost cause might
be retrieved by a glorious last stand, or the results of other nations. This pattern was also
evident in press coverage of the Olympic curling competition. During the round-robin
phase of the tournament the British women won five of their first seven matches; a win in
one of their remaining two matches (against the USA and Germany) in this phase of the
competition would have guaranteed a place in the semi-finals. The British women lost both
matches, but there was still a chance of qualifying for the semi-finals. This possibility
depended on a series of circumstances; first it required Switzerland to beat Germany in the
final game of the round-robin stage of the tournament. If that happened, the British,
German and Swedish women’s teams would have to play each other once again to decide
which team qualified for the last semi-final place. The British skip (captain) Rhona Martin
admitted, ‘All we can do is hope for a reprieve’42 but seemed to think this was unlikely:
‘People are saying it’s not all over, but it feels like the end of the road. We can’t rely on the
Swiss. They’re through to the semi-finals and they don’t owe us any favours.’43
It is a matter of record that Switzerland defeated Germany, and the result confirmed the
British women’s place in the play-off. Victories against both Sweden (6-4) and Germany
(9-5) secured the semi-final place, which was depicted as an ‘extraordinary comeback’44
and ‘unexpected second chance’ of playing for an Olympic medal.45 The press reports
carried a note of caution however, since in the semi-final match the British team would
play Canada, represented by the 2001 World Champions who were ‘the gold medal
favourites’.46 In the round-robin stage of the Olympic tournament Canada had a decisive
9-4 victory over the British women; therefore newspapers left their readers in no doubt of
the challenge.
The results of the Team GB rink’s remaining games in the 2002 Olympic curling
tournament are now part of British, and Scottish, Olympic history. In a tense semi-final
match Britain defeated Canada 6-5; the victory was secured with the last stone of the tenth
end. Once again the press depicted this achievement as an incredible revival reminding
readers the ‘all-Scottish team . . . went to Salt Lake City without high expectations’.47
Having caused ‘a major upset’48 in the curling tournament by beating Canada in the
semi-final, the subsequent victory over Switzerland in the final not only secured the first
Winter Olympic gold medal for Britain since 1984; it was, according to media narratives, a
glorious, but unexpected moment in British national Olympic history.
Team GB curling and the nation’s problematic ‘other’
In a straightforward way ‘the other’ in sports contests is the nation that has been most
successful in a particular activity. From a sociological perspective the other has a different
resonance. National identity is said to be rooted in a shared belief of ‘deep, horizontal
comradeship’49 amongst a particular group of people. This shared sense of sameness and
belonging serves to demarcate people who perceive themselves to be a national
community – the collective us – from those who identify with a different set of ideas,
symbols, myths and practices, and are perceived to be the collective them, or other.
The overt marking of nations and the use of specific semantic devices were two of the
techniques that contributed to the marking of the collective national other. However, the
textual analysis revealed a third technique that was used to construct the narration of
nationhood around the curling competition; the incorporation of myth-histories that
contribute to, and sustain ideas of, the nation and its others. The objective of this technique
Sport in Society 405
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is to construct symbolic reminders of a named community’s perceived common bonds of
experienced identity when confronted by a shared ‘enemy’.50
Two interconnected dimensions of myth-histories are usually evident in the
myth-histories constructed around sports contests. First the immediate sports contest
between particular nations is connected to their previous sporting encounters; second these
sporting encounters are conflated with social, cultural, political and historical relationships
– past and present, real or imagined – between the nations concerned.51 In this respect the
2002 Olympic curling tournament presented a challenge for the media, especially the
British newspapers’ narration of nationhood. The problem, simply stated, lay in an apparent
lack of awareness of which nation was to be sustained through the selected myth-histories.
As the dominant force in world curling the Canadian rinks were regarded as gold
medal favourites in both the men’s and women’s Olympic curling events. Canada’s status
as the most successful nation in world curling makes it the archetypal other in the sport,
comparable to that of Brazil in soccer or New Zealand in rugby union. However neither the
British nor Scottish newspapers went beyond this conventional sense of the other when
referring to Canada in their coverage of the Olympic curling competition. A combination
of factors may explain this. The status of curling as a minority sport and its low media
profile throughout Britain, and the absence of an established Olympic history for curling
should be acknowledged. More important perhaps was the absence of the intense rivalry
between two nations (Britain and Canada) that regularly contest international competition
in the sport. The Olympic Games is the only international curling event that requires a
team representing Britain; therefore there is no relationship between Britain and Canada in
international curling: the rivalry is between Scotland and Canada. This appeared to negate
opportunities for the press to construct myth-histories of Canada as other during the
Olympic curling event.52
There is however another explanation for the neutralized identification of Canada in
the British and Scottish press narratives. That is the established social ties that connect
these nation-states including the established patterns of British emigration to Canada and
Canada’s place within the Commonwealth. In a global socio-political context these states
have tended to work as ‘allies’, rather than as protagonists. This relatively benign
relationship therefore limits the usual myth-histories of difference and conflict which the
media draw upon to construct a national discourse of the other.
If Canada offered a limited agenda for the media to construct myth-histories of other
in Olympic curling, the contests with Germany provided more fertile opportunities.
The Scottish press was relatively neutral in its coverage of the matches against Germany,53
but in the British press Germany was portrayed as the national other, although this
construction was problematic. Following the defeat by Germany in the round-robin stage
of the tournament one broadsheet complained, ‘Of all the countries to halt their progress,
it had to be Germany who proved too good when it really mattered’.54 This representation
of Germany-as-other continued in previews of the play-off match:
There’s only one familiar old problem. First, Rhona Martin’s got to beat the Germans . . . Thewomen’s curling team skip knows that victory over our old adversaries . . . will guarantee herall-Scottish quartet a place in Wednesday’s semi-finals.55
These quotes illustrate how the explicit naming of the national other (Germany,
Germans) combined with semantic devices (our, us) reinforced the imagined collective
bonds of nationhood. However such phrases as ‘it had to be Germany’, ‘our old
adversaries’, and ‘the Germans return to haunt us again’ are more subtle references to the
socio-political relationships between Britain and Germany that were marked by the wars
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of 1914–18 and 1939–45. These allusions to a shared ‘British’ history were however
connected to a different myth-history of nation and other. The point is evident in
The Express where Martin Samuel opined:
Just when we get the beating of them at football, the Germans return to haunt us again . . . inthe sport of women’s curling. Fair enough, it is not exactly a World Cup penalty shoot-out, thesurrender of a two-goal lead or Andy Moller celebrating in front of a distraught crowd atWembley.56
Two points are important here. First the construction of Germany as the national other
is being constructed around allusions to sporting conflicts with Germany rooted in soccer,
not curling. Second, this conflict (or myth-history) concerns England’s national soccer
team and its relationship with Germany; this would have limited power in constructing
Britain as an imagined community. On the contrary; to a reader in Scotland, Wales or
some in Northern Ireland, this type of commentary illustrates the inability or even failure
of the British media to recognize the distinction between Britain as the state that comprises
four nations, and England as one of the constituent nations of Britain. There may be many
Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish people who would be, at best, neutral observers of soccer
contests between England and Germany while others might take pleasure in a German
victory. The ambivalence or distorted pleasure at German victories over England on the
soccer field is explained, in part, by the socio-political, cultural and historical relationships
that each of the Celtic home nations has with England and that nation’s apparent
hegemony in the British state.
The erroneous representation of England and Britain as synonymous is a customary
feature of nationhood narratives in the British media. Although this conflation of one
nation (England) with the state (Britain) is often implicit in media reports, it may be
recognized in each of the other constituent nations as evidence of England’s assumed
primacy or superiority, and their own submerged or subordinate national status.
In Scotland this carries a particular resonance in understanding nationhood. Although
many, but not all, Scots acknowledge their dual identity that is Scottish and British, it is
‘known’ England is not the same as Britain/the UK. The media’s erroneous fusion of
England/Britain therefore invigorated certain expressions of Scottish nationalism that are
saturated with a cultural disassociation from England and English pretensions of
superiority. In this context Anglo-Scottish relations, past and present and real or imagined,
were mobilized to position England as Scotland’s national other. As the next section
illustrates, this perception of England as Scotland’s national other emerged as the
prominent narrative of nationhood in Scottish press coverage of the 2002 Olympic curling
event.
In defence of our women, our sport, our nation!
This case study did not set out to examine how media narratives of sport reproduce
gendered ideologies that privileges men and subordinates women.57 Nevertheless it was
evident that the media commentary was infused with the language and tone that has
naturalized the pre-eminent status of men’s sporting practice, and women’s subordinate
place within that cultural sphere. It was a particular dimension of this gendered
commentary that triggered the narrative of England as Scotland’s other in the Scottish
press, and exposed the sense of distinct nationhood that is embedded in Scotland’s
collective consciousness.
The catalyst that unleashed the England as other narrative was a specific commentary
in one British broadsheet that concerned the physical appearance and perceived
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attractiveness of the British women’s curling team. Writing in The Times Simon Barnes
suggested that sometimes sport is about people who appear ordinary but are in fact
extraordinary in their sporting endeavour. Making this point Barnes opined, ‘St Rhona and
her cherubim looked like the wives of electricians’.58 The article was, however, infused
with language, metaphors, stereotypes and a tone that derided Scotland, its people and
culture:
She [Martin] looks like someone who is used to sweeping and wouldn’t turn her nose up at aplate of neeps [turnips] and tatties [potatoes]. You would not pay her a second thought if yousaw her in the pub, sinking a few Bacardi Breezers on a gurruls’ [girls] night out.
Curling seems to be the sport of choice in all the really cold suburbs. And perhaps somepeople have a slightly patronising tinge of contempt when they watch this odd ritual oftransparently ordinary people sliding and sweeping in the stones: anyone could do that.59
Although most Scots would not have read Barnes’ column, his comments attracted the
attention of other media outlets in Scotland; radio programmes in particular highlighted
the comments in reviews of daily newspapers and in news bulletins throughout the day.
This in turn generated comments from listeners who expressed their objections through
text and email messages. Over subsequent days the matter was picked up in Scottish
newspapers and linked to other comments in the British press that ridiculed curling as well
as those who played this strange sport. The narratives that developed in the Scottish press
in reaction to Barnes’ initial comment sought to defend the attack on Scotland’s women
and culture.
Other British newspapers also carried reports inflected with derogatory remarks about
the women curlers and linked these to a narrative that ridiculed curling as a sport. Another
broadsheet described ‘a small group of unsmiling Scottish women in grey tracksuits
moving polished rocks about’.60 In The Express a review of television programmes
described curling as ‘the business with the big kettles and the target and a couple of people
with mops wiping the floor clean . . . played by people who look less like Olympians
and more like librarians’; the review concluded the Olympic curling competition was
‘compulsive viewing’ but it wasn’t ‘real sport’.61 Another tabloid implied that these
sportswomen did not meet the image of preferred femininity suggesting, ‘all the
competitors look like Bolton centre-half Colin Hendry’; it continued: ‘It’s not surprising
that the only people in the “British” team are Scots, with names like Hammy, Dougal and
Morag, who are too fat and unathletic to take part in proper sports.’62
Using humour to explain what is unusual and sensationalized reporting are common
techniques in the tabloid press. These British newspaper accounts of the Olympic curling
team and of the sport fuelled the narrative of England as other. Anglo-Scottish relations
had not been helped when English presenters on the BBC’s television coverage confused
the nation and the state. The Scotsman noted evidence of ‘marked symptoms of insidious
imperialitis’ when one presenter declared ‘a British success story is turning into a Scottish
failure’.63 The women were ‘British’ once again after they secured the medal, further
evidence for Scots that England is selective in remembering the state/nation distinction.
This separation of Scotland from Britain in this way can be a more subtle dimension of
England’s patronizing attitude towards Scotland.
In Scotland a strong sense of national identity is recognized and shared by many
people.64 This national identity is used to define what is ‘distinctively ours’ and is
defended from external challenges.65 In Scotland the utterances in the British press about
curling, the appearance of the Scottish women and stereotyped comments about other
aspects of Scottish cultural life in the British press were understood as such a challenge;
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it was a symbolic attack on our women, our sport and our nation that the Scottish national
press set out to defend.
The Edinburgh-based broadsheet The Scotsman was unequivocal in its criticism of the
British media commentary calling it ‘an inexcusable . . . litany of patronising and at times
downright abusive coverage from press and television’.66 The matter also incurred the
wrath of correspondents to the letters pages of the press, with one claiming:
I have just consigned the Guardian . . . to the rubbish bin, having encountered within it themost offensive load of sexist . . . verging on racist, patronising, dismissive, nonsense it hasever been my misfortune to pay good money to read, posing as a response to the ‘GB’ ladies’curling gold medal.
In seeking to denigrate Scots women curlers in particular and, one observes, Scots curlers ingeneral, they actually defame a much wider body of people.67
In The Herald columnist Vicky Collins offered a measured defence of Scotland’s
national interest.68 She reflected on the ‘English prejudice’ that had ridiculed curling, this
Scottish game, and its status as a sport, but Collins offered a distinctively Scottish reading
of the achievement. For example, she acknowledged Rhona Martin ‘did resemble
[Colin Hendry]’ since she had ‘the same strong Scottish outdoor face that looked as if it
could be hewn out of granite and a determination in her character to match’. Like Simon
Barnes, Collins recognized the ordinariness of the Olympic champions, but she offered a
specific framework of myth-histories about Scotland’s character, society and people that
emphasized the importance of community and quiet, unstated resolve:
Their restraint and quiet resolve epitomised a traditional small-town Scottish attitude familiarto viewers here, but which seemed laughable to the London media who now expect sportingheroes to look and act like other celebrities.
These perceived qualities of Scottish character and society may or may not be
accurate. Nevertheless they are embedded within a national myth which believes Scotland
is built upon an inherent egalitarianism, a deep sense of community and social inclusion,
making it different from other nations including England.69 In contrast to the stereotypes
of Scotland in the British press that had caused offence, Collins mobilized another set of
stereotypes infused with the semantic signifiers of our people and place that is markedly
different from the national other – England. These sentiments were reiterated in letters to
the Scottish press. One correspondent applauded the ‘modest women’ who displayed
‘skill, sportsmanship, and dignity’, concluding: ‘When one looks at the behaviour of the
loutish grossly overpaid sportsmen who strut the world stadia and nightclubs, one is
greatly reassured by the sight of true Olympians emerging from small town and rural
Scotland.’70
Marking the nation’s boundaries and character in this way appeared to have some
resonance for Scotland’s collective sense of itself, but this self-image is problematic.
Scotland is not a homogenous national community, and any single investigation of the
relationship between sport and Scottishness can explore a nominal notion of national
unity. It is nevertheless instructive to consider how the imaginings of one national
community were mobilized when it was challenged by its ‘auld enemy’.
The Stone of Destiny
This case study was initiated by the words of Mike Hay, the Team GB curling coach at the
2002 Winter Olympics. Hay described Rhona Martin as ‘the girl who threw the stone of
destiny’ and this metaphor was repeated in a number of newspapers in the days
immediately after the British women’s curling team won Olympic gold.71 When Rhona
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Martin delivered the final stone in the 2002 Olympic curling final it was, at one level, a
moment of personal destiny as some newspapers noted. However Hay’s description had
a distinctively Scottish resonance, even though the achievement occurred for Team GB.
The achievement of this woman, and her team, was conflated with a potent symbol of
Scottish nationhood: the Stone of Destiny. This symbol offers an interesting myth-history
to conclude this analysis of British Olympic curling as a site for contested discourse of
nationhood.
The Stone of Destiny is described as the unofficial fourth ‘Honour of Scotland’. It is
essentially a lump of rock once used for the enthronement of Scotland’s ancient kings and
queens. It was stolen by the Hammer of the Scots, King Edward I [of England] in 1296
during the Wars of Independence between Scotland and England and thereafter kept under
the Coronation Chair located in London’s Westminster Abbey. On 15 November 1996 the
Stone of Destiny was returned to Scotland in a staged ceremony authorised by the
Conservative-led British Government and its Secretary of State for Scotland. The return
of the Stone of Destiny, an ancient and mythic icon of Scottish nationhood, may have
been symbolic. Within 12 months, however, a more explicitly political expression of
nationhood began to unfold when Scotland voted to establish a parliament with devolved
powers; the Scottish Parliament was established in May 1999.72
It was in this evolving and invigorated national political context that five Scottish
women won an Olympic gold medal in curling, one of Scotland’s sports. The overt
national flagging of the Team GB curlers as British and Scottish was evident in the press,73
but when the gold medal was secured the Scottish press was deliberate in enunciating them
as Scotland’s Olympics champions. For instance Scottish press reports were infused with
comments from politicians (and popular celebrities) that celebrated the Olympic victory as
Scotland’s. Michael Russell, at the time Scottish National Party (SNP) spokesman for the
arts, broadcasting and culture asserted, ‘the gold-winning Great Britain team consisted
entirely of Scots’.74 Scotland’s First Minister Jack McConnell (Labour Party) was another
politician who congratulated the women and emphasized they were ‘Scotland’s local
heroes’.75 The Scottish tabloid Daily Record took the analogy further in its explicit
flagging of the medallists’ national identity. Drawing on the imagery of the popular 1997
Hollywood film about William Wallace (one of Scotland’s historic national heroes) it
declared ‘Congratulations to Rhona ‘Braveheart’ Martin for skippering the Scottish – yes
Scottish – curling team to Winter Olympic glory’.76
In late-February 2002 when the Olympic curling champions returned to Scotland,
Rhona Martin’s curling stone of destiny temporarily became analogous with Scotland’s
ancient symbol of nationhood. There was some irony in Scottish press reports that noted
the curling stones used in international competitions, including the Olympic Games, are
‘hewn less than 40 miles from [Martin’s] home’.77 The important point however, in terms
of the discursive formation of nationhood, was that ‘once again’ another powerful
organization was holding on to Scotland’s property: ‘the stone of destiny with which
Martin had so gently captured our hearts . . . is still the property of the Olympic
Committee’. Then, referring to the ceremonial return of the Stone of Destiny to Edinburgh
in 1996, it observed: ‘And to think it is now likely to be gathering dust in some darkened
corner when it should have been piped in here while laid out on a velvet cushion before
being carried in state back to Dunlop.’78
National symbols such as the curling stone that secured an Olympic medal or even the
Stone of Destiny may be politically benign, but broader social and political circumstances
render them collectively meaningful and powerful. With the 2002 Olympic curling gold
medal in the bag, one Glasgow-based newspaper might have taken the narrative of national
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victory further, asking if Scotland should have its own Olympic team.79 The question was
an interesting but hypothetical one since the International Olympic Committee recognizes
the Olympic association of Britain, not its constituent nations.
Conclusion
This essay has illustrated through one case study the ways in which media narrations of
international sporting occasions construct and sustain ideas of nationhood in the UK.
Central to the thesis presented here is the assertion that the expressions of nationhood that
surround sports are cultural, rather than political, expressions, and nations are cultural,
rather than political, categories. Nationhood must therefore be recognized in terms of the
content and context (social, cultural and political) of particular types of nations that are
sustained by and through cultural practice like sport.
Focusing on a distinctive Scottish sport – curling – on the global sports stage – the
Olympic Games – the analysis has considered how media narration represents the
state-nation-identity axis in the UK. At one level the structure of Team GB appears to be
aligned with the idea of a unitary imagined community. This is represented in popular and
formal discourse concerning Olympic sport as the UK (i.e. British) state. However the
analysis has demonstrated that rather than providing the cultural terrain on which a unified
British national community was established, the 2002 Olympic curling competition
provided the terrain where the national imaginings of Scotland, one of the constituent
nations of the UK state, could be profiled. It has been argued that media coverage of the
Team GB Olympic curling success in 2002 transformed from straightforward reporting
about a relatively minority sport in the UK into a powerful narrative of contested
nationhood – Scottish versus British.
Four key components were identified as central to understanding the contested national
discourse that emerged: (i) the distinction between the British press and the indigenous
Scottish newspapers; (ii) the different ways in which conventional techniques and devices
for coding nations (e.g. naming nations, semantic pronouns, myth-histories) were
incorporated in the media narration; (iii) the cultural distinctions between Scotland and
England that delineate the state-nation-identity axis and which have been shaped by
allegiances are socially, historically, culturally and politically grounded; and (iv) the place
of sport and the media in Scotland as part of civil society, the institutional repository that
brings together the idea and structure of Scotland as a nation. Taken in isolation these
components cannot provide a comprehensive explanation for the contested discourse of
nationhood embedded in the media’s narration of Team GB’s curling success. However, in
combination these elements contributed to, and sustained, the construction of a narrative
that became a metaphor for Scotland’s sense of nationhood within the UK. Moreover this
case study serves as an instructive reminder that nationhood is a negotiated and contested
construct that is given meaning within changing and specific social, cultural and political
circumstances.
The place of British Olympic sport continues to provide interesting terrain for
examining contested ideas of nationhood in the UK. With London set to host the 2012
summer Olympic Games a significant issue has emerged in the build-up to what will be the
largest sports event held in Britain. The core of this issue is the British Olympic
Association proposal to enter a combined British team in the 2012 Olympic soccer
competition. The idea has been resisted by the autonomous football associations of
Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales which are concerned a combined British Olympic
soccer team will undermine their independent status in FIFA. Some Scottish politicians,
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the Scottish football press and supporters of the Scottish national soccer team have also
publicly expressed their opposition to the proposal.
There may be no satisfactory resolution to this issue, but the debate is important.
The No Team GB soccer campaign, like the narratives surrounding Scotland’s 2002
Olympic curling medallists, reveals the complex, differentiated and contested character of
the state-nation-identity axis in Britain. This contested national discourse cannot be
addressed by symbolic global sporting events like the Olympic Games. In Scotland the
institutions and cultural practices of civil society reciprocally mediate the narrative of the
nation. In certain circumstances, but notably Olympic sport, the distinctive nationhood of
the constituent nations may appear to be temporarily suspended but is in fact never far
from the surface.
Notes1 The terminology used in this essay to refer to the nation-state follows the geo-political
terminology explained by Kellas, The Scottish Political System, ix. That is, United Kingdomof Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK or Britain for short) refers to the state. The acronymGB – short for Great Britain – constitutes ‘England, Wales and Scotland (i.e. the UK excludingNorthern Ireland). In recent years, including during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, the BritishOlympic Association has used the phrase ‘Team GB’ to refer collectively to athletes whoessentially represent the UK at the Olympic Games, even though such teams include athletesfrom Northern Ireland. In this essay an attempt is made to restrict use of ‘Team GB’ to occasionswhen citing press reports, otherwise the terms UK and Britain are used. In terms of teamsrepresenting Britain at the Olympic Games the positioning of athletes from Northern Ireland ishowever complex, since in some sports competitors may represent Ireland. This complexity isnoted here.
2 Anderson, Imagined Communities.3 Smith, ‘Curling’.4 Reid, ‘What about the Flowers?’.5 Breitenbach, ‘Curiously Rare?’.6 Kennedy, Pussard and Thornton, ‘“Leap for London”’.7 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 3; Birch, The Concepts and Theories, 4–7; Kellas, The Politicsof Nationalism, 2.
8 Breuilly, Nationalism, 1–2.9 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 4.
10 Smith, ‘Nations and their Pasts’, 359.11 Bairner, ‘Gender, Class and Nation’.12 McCrone, Understanding Scotland, 3.13 Hall, ‘Nationalisms’, 1.14 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 10.15 Ibid.16 Boyle and Haynes, Power Play, 154.17 For example Bruce, ‘Marking the Boundaries’; Falcous, ‘The Decolonizing National Imaginary’;
Gardiner, ‘Running for Country’; Grainger, ‘From Immigrant to Overstayer’; Hogan, ‘Staging theNation’.
18 Cronin, Sport and Nationalism, 55–6. The transience of national unity associated with sportis evident in the case of South Africa in the post-Apartheid era. The apparent socialcohesion and unity that surrounded that nation’s victory in the 1995 rugby union world cupreceived considerable popular and official commentaries. The occasion may have offered aglimpse of the possibilities for South Africa as a unified nation, but when the celebrationssubsided the everyday realities of endemic racial division and discrimination remained, andresurfaced in sporting contexts in subsequent years (see Jarvie and Reid, ‘Sport in SouthAfrica’).
19 For example, Bairner, ‘Football and the Idea of Scotland’; Giulianotti, ‘Scotland’s Tartan Army’;Jarvie and Reid, ‘Sport, Nationalism and Culture in Scotland’; Jarvie and Walker, Scottish Sportin the Making of the Nation; Moorhouse, ‘Scotland against England’.
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20 Jarvie and Reid, ‘Scottish Sport’.21 McCrone, Understanding Scotland, 144. For studies of sport see Bradley, ‘The Patriot Game’;
Finn, ‘Faith, Hope’; Reid, ‘Shinty, Nationalism’; Reid, ‘An Outsider’.22 McCrone, ‘Understated Nations’, 1.23 McCrone, Understanding Scotland; Paterson, The Autonomy of Modern Scotland; MacCormick,
‘The English Constitution’.24 Bryant, ‘Social Self-organisation’, 399.25 For example Jarvie, ‘Highland Gatherings’; Reid, ‘Shinty, Nationalism’.26 For example, in relation to the UK there is a substantive body of research that has examined the
contested manifestations of nationhood associated with sport in Northern Ireland (e.g. Bairner
and Darby, ‘Divided Sport’; Hassan, ‘A Champion’; Sugden, Boxing and Society; Sugden and
Bairner, Sport, Sectarianism) and some work has considered the negotiation of nationhood
through sport in Wales. The case of Catalonia within Spain has also received attention from sports
scholars including: Hargreaves, Freedom for Catalonia?; Duke and Crolley, Football,
Nationality; while the Basque Country has been examined by MacClancy, ‘Nationalism at
Play’, and Palmer, ‘Outside the Imagined Community’.27 A limitation of almost all studies of sport and nationhood is that the focus of such work is on male
sports practices and the men’s national teams of any given nation, although this tends to be
unstated. Sustained and substantive analyses of how women’s sport is engaged in discourses of
nationhood are required.28 Law, ‘Near and Far’, 303. Also MacInnes, ‘The Press in Scotland’.29 Blain and Burnett, ‘A Cause Still Unwon’.30 Law, ‘Near and Far’; Hutchison, ‘The History of the Press’.31 Law, ‘Near and Far’, 314. It is noteworthy that much of the Scottish content of these papers
focuses on soccer in Scotland, which is widely noted as a powerful symbol of national identity.32 Kennedy and Hills, Sport, Media and Society, 20.33 This retrospective collection of material is explained simply. I had not planned to carry out a
study of media coverage of the games; as the curling competition unfolded it was apparent this
had been an opportunity almost missed to examine the contested discourses of nationhood in the
UK that infuse sport in Scotland. A valuable addition to future research about the discourses of
contested nationhood associated with British Olympic sport should include material from all three
newspaper categories and from radio, television and other potentially interactive media output.34 Elder, Pratt and Ellis, ‘Running Race’, 183.35 Gardiner, ‘Running for Country’, 234.36 ‘The Year Ahead: How 2002 Is Shaping Up: Winter Olympics’, The Independent, January 1,
2002.37 ‘Salt Lake City 2002 The Olympic Flame Flickers’, The Scotsman, February 9, 2002.38 ‘Going Gets Tough for McMillan and Gang’, The Times, February 14, 2002; ‘Staying at Home the
First Step on a Slippery Slope’, The Times, February 15, 2002.39 ‘The Winter of Our Discontent’, The Scotsman, February 15, 2002.40 Scotland has participated in the European Championships finals on two occasions (1992 and
1996) and in the World Cup Finals on eight occasions (1954, 1958, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990,
1994; Scotland was invited to participate in the 1950 finals but the SFA declined the invitation);
the national team has not progressed to the second phase on any occasion.41 ‘Golden Girls: Britain Wins the Gold Medal in Women’s Curling’, The Guardian, February 22,
2002.42 ‘Sport General: Curling’, Daily Record, February 19, 2002.43 ‘Coomber Stays on Track to Strike Gold’, The Daily Telegraph, February 19, 2002.44 ‘Inspired Britain Battle through to Semi-finals’, The Times, February 20, 2002.45 ‘Martin Reaches Medal Play-offs’, The Scotsman, February 20, 2002.46 Ibid.47 ‘British Women Line Up a Shock Gold for Curling’, The Daily Telegraph, February 21, 2002.48 ‘The Best Curlers since Hilda’, Daily Record, February 21, 2002.49 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.50 Alabarces, Tomlinson and Young, ‘Argentina versus England’; Palmer ‘Outside the Imagined
Community’.51 Clarke and Clarke, ‘Highlights’, 66.
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52 Given the rivalry between Scotland and Canada in curling, and the all-Scottish composition ofBritain’s Olympic curling teams it was anticipated that Scottish newspapers would developaccounts that marked Canada as the national (curling) other during the Olympic curlingtournament, but this was not evident in the narratives examined during this study.
53 ‘One More Win Against either USA or Germany will put Qualification Beyond Doubt’ (‘SaltLake City 2002: Freakish Gold for Last Man Standing’), The Scotsman, February 18, 2002;‘Rhona Martin and the British Women Curlers look to be Heading Out of the Winter Olympicsafter Losing 6-5 to the USA and 7-5 to Germany’ (‘Sport General: Update Curling’),Daily Record, February 19, 2002; ‘Martin was Due Back on the Ice in the Early Hours of thisMorning, Against Germany’s Natalie Nessler, Looking to Avenge the Round-robin Defeat thatDenied her Direct Access to the Semi-final’ (‘Martin Seizes Curling Lifeline’), The Herald,February 20, 2002.
54 ‘Coomber Stays on Track to Strike Gold’, The Daily Telegraph, February 19, 2002.55 ‘Winter Olympics: Rhona is Going for a Medal Sweep’, Evening Standard, February 18, 2002.56 ‘Enough to Make your Herr Curl’, The Express, February 19, 2002.57 For example Creedon, Women, Media and Sport; Harris and Clayton, ‘Femininity, Masculinity’;
Kennedy, ‘She Wants to be a Sledgehammer?’.58 ‘The Woman and her Curlers Just a Stone’s Throw from Sainthood’, The Times, February 19,
2002.59 Ibid.60 ‘Instead of G-String Divas the Nation Plumped for Women in Tracksuits Moving Rocks About’,
The Daily Telegraph, February 23, 2002.61 ‘TV Express: Inside Television: Sport, Checkmate on Ice’, The Express, February 21, 2002.62 ‘Shelley Vision: Slippery Slope to Addition’, The Mirror, February 19, 2002. Colin Hendry
represented Scotland on 51 occasions winning his first international appearance in May 1993; hewas captain of the national team on 22 occasions between May 1996 and March 2001.
63 ‘Unsporting Comments Curl the Nation’s Lip’, The Scotsman, February 22, 2002. It was not onlythe British media that did not understand the distinction. The official website of the Salt Lake CityOlympics declared ‘England stuns Canada’ in headlining its report of the curling semi-final matchbetween Britain and Canada.
64 Bairner, ‘Football’, 9; Smout, ‘Perspectives on the Scottish Identity’, 102.65 Paterson, The Autonomy of Modern Scotland, 2.66 ‘Unsporting Comments Curl the Nation’s Lip’, The Scotsman, February 22, 2002. Also see
‘They Didn’t Pretend to be Cool So Why did they Get Such Flak?’, The Herald, February 23,2002.
67 Letters and Opinion, The Herald, February 25, 2002.68 ‘They Didn’t Pretend to be Cool So Why did they Get Such Flak?’, The Herald, February 23,
2002.69 McCrone, Understanding Scotland, 90–3; Reid, ‘An Outsider’, 73.70 Letters and Opinion, The Herald, February 25, 2002.71 For example ‘Rhona the Rock’, Daily Mail, February 23, 2002; ‘Winter Olympics: Martin’s Race
to Play Stone of Destiny’, The Independent, February 23, 2002; ‘Down a Quiet Ayrshire Lane,Granite Blocks Turned into Stones of Destiny’, The Herald, February 23, 2002; ‘Record 5 MillionWatch Stone of Destiny’, The Scotsman, February 23, 2002.
72 The Scottish Parliament, based in the national capital, Edinburgh, has devolved powers over arange of social, cultural and political affairs including local government, education, the Scottishlegal system and sport in Scotland. In 2009, ten years after the Parliament was established, there isan ongoing debate about extending the powers of the Parliament.
73 For example, ‘only twice in modern times . . . have Britain won two medals at a WinterOlympics’ (‘Bob Skeleton Can Help End Britain’s Drought’, Sunday Telegraph, February 3,2002); ‘the British women curlers look to be heading out of the Winter Olympics’(‘Sport General:Update Curling, Daily Record, February 19, 2002); ‘Britain started nervously against the Swedes’(‘Martin Seizes Curling Lifeline’, The Herald, February 20, 2002).
74 ‘Why We Must Embrace our Unlikely Heroines’, The Herald, February 25, 2002.75 ‘Home are the Heroines, Home from the Lake’, The Herald, February 27, 2002.76 ‘Golden Girls Did Us House Proud: TV Had Us by the Short and Curlers’, Daily Record,
February 22, 2002.
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77 ‘Down a Quiet Ayrshire Lane, Granite Blocks Turned into Stones of Destiny’, The Herald,February 23, 2002.
78 ‘Home in Triumph: Crowds Welcome Scotland’s Curlers Back from Salt Lake City’,The Scotsman, February 27, 2002.
79 Evening Times, February 22, 2002.
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