Sports dilemma

It’s still a free country, so John Dalzell (Letters, 27 September) is perfectly within his rights to boycott London’s 2012 Olympic Games, and indeed encourage others to do likewise.

Whether or not he is correct to state that “every time that Team GB takes the field, no matter in which sport, it diminishes Scotland as an independent country in its own right”. I’m not quite so sure.

As matters stand, this is a complex issue which intermixes widely differing aspects of both political and sporting autonomy with funding, provision of facilities and only infrequent opportunities for the cream of Scottish talent to perform at the highest level on the biggest of global sporting stages.

Further questions concerning financial support, investment in sport and where, under the tutelage of whom and in what quality of facilities our top sporting performers may train and prepare for such challenges, make individual choices less straightforward.

What ought to register at the top of the Richter Scale of current concern north of Hadrian’s Wall is the London-centric proposed so-called cost-cutting merger between UK Sport (supposedly covering and supporting England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and SportEngland (responsible only for sport in England). Go figure.

Ron Sutherland

Millwell Park

Innerleithen, Peeblesshire