Just for starters

KATY BARDEN TALKS TO BARRY CRAIGHEAD, SCOTLAND’S CHIEF STARTER WHO IS STILL GOING STRONG AS HE ENTERS HIS 61st YEAR IN ATHLETICS

- KATY BARDEN

WHAT’S your game then?” piped up an inquisitive, slightly accusatory under-11 after her Forth Valley League match 100m final was recalled. The Pitreavie athlete had been leading and wasn’t impressed when Barry Craighead’s recall gun went off.

Neither was Craighead; he’d misjudged the number of steps and fallen off the start box, accidentally firing the recall shot as he hit the ground.

“I was speechless,” he laughs. “It was just the way she said it, this wee kid, I’ll never, ever forget it.”

A lifelong Edinburgh AC member, Craighead is one of the best known, liked and respected figures in Scottish athletics.

Formerly an employee of the Northern Lighthouse Board, a job which took him all over Scotland and to the Isle of Man, he has just entered his 61st year as an official and has no plans to slow down. Indeed, he was to be found hard at work in Holyrood Park last weekend on starter duties at the BUCS Cross Country Championships in Edinburgh.

He covered his first event, an open-graded meeting at Newhaven, in the late 1950s, and having served his time and honed his skills at a multitude of local and regional events, he was appointed Chief Starter for Scotland in 1971. He has since held a range of other senior positions, including District Secretary and President of the Scottish Amateur Athletics Association 1983-84.

He was a competitor too, and notably won the British Army Cross Country Championships in Aldershot during his period of National Service.

“I was actually a racing cyclist – an endurance specialist – until I went into the Army for National Service in 1958,” says Craighead, who rode for the Army in the Tour of Britain, “but the Army changed my mind.