WHEN it comes to dashing through the snow to deliver the goods, Santa Claus no longer has a monopoly. Were it not for the fact this one took place in early March rather than December, and her chosen mode of transport was a hastily-convened taxi rather than a one-horse open sleigh, in every other way Laura Muir battling through the frozen tundra of the M74 and M6 to celebrate her first global medals seemed a bit like a little Christmas miracle.
Muir, you will recall, was juggling a few balls as 2018 began. So committed was she to completing the final year of her veterinary science degree at the Glasgow vet school and going for gold at both the World Indoor Athletics Championships in Birmingham and European outdoors in Berlin that she had long since made peace with the notion of sacrificing the chance to compete for Scotland at the Commonwealth Games at the Gold Coast. In retrospect this was a canny decision.
Considering how little excuse most students require to slope off from lectures to the union, it spoke of Muir’s fastidiousness that she only knocked off a little bit early from the animal hospital where she was on a placement on the Wednesday afternoon, with her 3000m final on Thursday evening.
But the Beast from the East had some plans of its own. With the runways at Glasgow Airport suitable only for sledging, two flights to Birmingham on the Wednesday were cancelled with little prospect of anything changing any time soon. The trains were off, too, leaving her only option being finding a Glasgow taxi driver willing to risk the icy roads for a fare in the region of £1500.
“This time yesterday I was in a taxi halfway down the M6, it was crazy,” said Muir, who had kept her mind off things with a little bit of ad hoc studying of her vet notes on the way. “We couldn’t see the bonnet, the windscreen wipers were freezing. It took us about six hours and we got here at 11pm. Going through Carlisle it was just crazy.”
Typically, Muir had designs on doubling up down there, just as she successfully did with dual European Indoor gold in Belgrade in 2015. She was battling some of the sport’s all-time greats, not least the controversial Ethiopian Genzebe Dibaba, whose coach Jama Aden was arrested in Spain in 2016 in a doping probe. The rest of the cast list included quicksilver Dutch athlete Sifan Hassan, Nigeria’s world outdoor 3000m champion Hellen Obiri, Germany’s Konstanze Klosterhalfen and Shelby Houlihan of the USA (Scotland’s Eilish McColgan ultimately finishes tenth) but Muir backed herself and it soon transpired she was in a three-woman race, chasing Hassan, who in turn was chasing Dibaba. She left nothing out there, the Dutchwoman’s protective swerve in the final straight enough to limit her to a fine bronze. Things were to get even better, though, Muir swapping places with Hassan – again behind Dibaba – in her preferred event, the 1500m.
Having passed her Birmingham examination with flying colours, next up for Muir to negotiate were those pesky final exams, which allowed her to graduate as a fully-fledged vet. With Hassan opting for the 5000m at the outdoor European Championships in Berlin, the 1500m always seemed likely to be a procession for the imperious Muir and so it proved, as she took her first major outdoor gold. As 2019 begins, she is rated the top 1500m runner in the world, with the World Championships in Doha later in the year, after the European Indoors at her home venue of Glasgow’s Emirates Arena in March. At least the taxi fare should be cheaper this time.
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