| Hosts: Birmingham Dates: 28 July to 8 August |
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When Ross Murdoch says he retired in December for 11 weeks, it takes a moment or two for it to register.
The 28-year-old has taken off on tangents about bad shirts, good gear and whether Australians, Scots or Irish have the best patter before the opportunity arises to revisit a revelation delivered only as an aside a few minutes earlier.
“December? As in seven months ago?”
“Aye, just December there. I was done.”
It emerges that for 11 weeks, Murdoch didn’t get in a pool at all. Which is quite something for a swimmer.
He had just finished a gruelling three-month stint in the International Swimming League, straight off the back of the Tokyo Olympics, and was preparing to head to the University of Stirling for an afternoon session.
His bag was packed but, when it came to leaving the house, he couldn’t take it with him. “I just went without it and went straight to see the coaches,” he explains. “They knew what was going on. I didn’t want to announce anything. I just wanted to fade out.”
And that was it. Murdoch was no longer a swimmer. But what was he?
He had a degree in sports management to finish but could not summon the motivation to be a student. He looked at other ways of making money. But without any work experience, his choices appeared to be limited to marketing or being a barista.
Crossfit and running proved uninspiring, too, and his fitness suffered. “I felt like a dead man walking,” he says. “I was just sitting looking at the four walls a lot of the time.
“After about two-and-a-half months, I had one of the worst weeks of my life. I think it was six weeks from trials, so I went to watch the guys training – getting absolutely hounded – and I thought, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake; that should be me’.
Once again, Murdoch went to see the coaches. “Man, I was embarrassed,” he recalls. “It was like when you’re asking a girl out… dry mouth, sweaty palms and so anxious.”
They sent him away to think about it, with the instruction to come back a few days later if he still wanted to swim again. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t think I’d want it. But I did. I really did. I’d never wanted anything more in my life,” he says.
“That first time back, I was swimming with Duncan Scott, one of my best mates in the whole world, doing 600m backstroke with paddles, which is one of the worst, most boring things you can do, but I had tears of joy in my eyes.
“Those 11 weeks were some of the hardest times of my life, 100%. You think you’ve got it all figured out, but you don’t. And after I went back in the pool, everything else seemed to click.”
‘All I’ve ever wanted is to swim for Scotland’
The trials were ugly. Murdoch, a man with a Commonwealth medal of every colour in his hip pocket, just did enough to scrape into Team Scotland. But since then he has had four months to get himself right for a third Games, in Birmingham.
And it would appear he has done just that. Murdoch has gained almost six kilos of lean muscle since the Olympics last summer and is practically bouncing off the walls with excitement at what might lie ahead.
Something about competing in the Commonwealths stimulates him like nothing else, even if he now considers himself as “one of the auld da’s” of Team Scotland.
“Every since I was a wee boy, all I ever wanted to do was swim for Scotland in the breaststroke. Nothing else,” he says.
“I don’t think Olympic gold would have trumped winning in Glasgow in 2014. Everything just aligned that day – it was here, it was my granddad’s birthday, all my family were there. So to be able to do this for a third time, I can’t put it into words.”
The only thing that might make it that wee bit extra special? Carrying the flag at the closing ceremony, he reckons.
By then, his case to do so could be embossed by having five individual medals clanking around his neck and being able to claim himself as one of the most decorated athletes this country – his country – has ever had in the Games.
Murdoch’s first event, the 200m breaststroke, starts and finishes on Friday. By the end of the weekend, the 100m will be done, too. And so, more than likely, will be his career as a elite swimmer.
“I love music and I look up to rock stars of old and when you hear your name called, and you hear the crowd cheer, and you get goosebumps… aw, man, there’s no feeling like it,” he says, visibly excited at the prospect.
“I would assume this is my last crack at it. So to be announced one last time in a final, swimming for Scotland, I’d probably cry. What a way to go that would be.”
