Norman Watson reports from Beijing on the Scottish contingent making up the Great Britain Olympic team

TEAM GB comprises 313 athletes, with Scotland punching above its weight with 10% of the total.

For 17 of the 31 Scots, the games that begin at eight minutes past eight on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008 will be their first ever.

Our Olympians have arrived from the Team GB training camp in Macao and are now settled into the Olympic Village north of Tiananmen Square—where a smuggled-in red telephone box adds to the home comforts.

Swimming tops the sports, with 10 Scots—the most ever selected for a games—and a noisy, proud third of the British contingent in this five-rings-emblazoned city.

Many of the Scots are already major medal winners, including Gregor Tait and Kirsty Balfour of the City of Edinburgh club.

Now the grand-dad of the team at 29, Tait goes in the 100m and 200m backstroke, while Balfour— several years a worshipper at Perth Christian Centre—will be praying to overcome Australian world record holder Leisel Jones in the 200m breaststroke.

Stirling swimmers Andrew Hunter and Todd Cooper are joined by Edinburgh’s Olympic debutants Euan Dale and Kris Gilchrist and Aberdeen’s Robert Renwick and David Carry.

North-east fingers will also be crossed for the extraordinary Hannah Miley of Inverurie.

Coached by her father Patrick 130 miles from the nearest Olympic-sized pool, Miley has swum her way into world-class company, smashing her own British 200m individual medley record in April to become ninth on the world all-time list, then setting a new European record in the 400m individual medley in May.

She goes in both events here, while the freestyle individual and relays feature Caitlin McClatchey, whose parents John (Edinburgh, 1970) and Louise (Christchurch, 1974) both swam for Scotland at Commonwealth Games.

Perthshire folk, meanwhile, will have eyes firmly focused on the artificial white water canoeing course at Shunyi Park—an hour north-east of Beijing—and in particular former Morrison Academy pupil Fiona Pennie and Bridge of Allan’s Campbell Walsh, who go in the slalom event, along with Aberdeen paddler David Florence.

Pennie (25), a world championship silver medallist in 2006 and now based in Nottingham, still has family in Crieff, and was still in nappies when she first stepped into a boat on Loch Earn.

Walsh, K1 silver medallist in Athens, is determined to go one better after taking European slalom gold in Krakow in May.

Thank the Grandtully and Stanley rapids for their unsung role in preparing Britain’s entire slalom team for Shunyi’s spectacular seven-metre descent, where, as with pin placement in golf’s majors, the course is set only the night before competition.

The longest-serving Olympian in the Scottish cohort is Lincolnshire-based archer Simon Terry, who also grew up in Crieff where his dad ran the Oakbank Inn.

Terry gave up archery after winning two bronze medals as a teenager in Barcelona in 1992— Britain’s first archery medals since Queenie Newell won the ladies’ title in London a century ago—and became a roofer then a welder, and is now a lorry driver.

But within a year of returning to the sport in 2004 he had reclaimed his place in the international team —peppering a target the size of a CD from 70 metres with the same bow he had taken to Spain.

Lone Scot among Britain’s imperious rowing squad is Katherine Grainger.

The Glasgow sculler is our most successful female rower ever—with two Olympic silvers, four world titles and an MBE for services to the sport.

Grainger is treading water with her PhD to skip the GB women’s quad scull in a six-minute race she says requires “an exquisite mixture of terror and fear and excitement and passion and emotion, and everything you’ve done for days on end, weeks on end, for months, for years.”

Other lone Scots representatives are fencer Richard Kruse, who hopes to improve on the foil quarter-final place he achieved in Athens in 2004, Banchory shooter Jon Hammond—also educated in Crieff—who goes in the individual 50m prone rifle, three-position 50m rifle and 10m air rifle, and the brilliant young pommel horse exponent Daniel Keatings, the first-ever Scottish gymnast to qualify for the Olympics.

A trio of Scots judo players will enter the 8000-seat Beijing University dojo this weekend.

Often on sport’s margins, judo has been reinvigorated with better funding and the support of former England rugby supremo Sir Clive Woodward, now the British Olympic Association’s elite performance director.

Euan Burton, Michelle Rogers and Sarah Clark of the powerful Edinburgh club are hopeful of bringing back Britain’s first judo medal in modern times as part of a seven-strong GB squad in which, uniquely, every single member is a medallist at either European or world level.

Given the strength of hockey in Dundee it is ominous that the city has no representative in the GB men’s or women’s hockey squads—although Athens Olympian Niall Stott is here as a reserve.

The two Scots with the 16-strong men’s selection are Kirkcaldy-born striker Stephen Dick and goalkeeper Alistair McGregor, from Aberdeen.

It was Chris Hoy who won gold in the 1km time trial on the opening day of track cycling in Athens in 2004 to give Team GB a flyer, and he is here again, taking part in the sprint after the International Olympic Committee removed the kilometre race from the programme.

Hoy is joined in the sprints by 2006 Commonwealth gold medal partner Ross Edgar.

Last Tuesday Hoy smashed 10 seconds for a 200m sprint for the first time in his life, then lowered his personal best again in the same session—he stayed coy, though, over how near he was to the 9.773 seconds world record.

To athletics, and until the eleventh hour it looked like Scotland’s contribution to Team GB would be the worst for half a century—only Glasgow’s Lee McConnell had qualified after returning to the 400m flat after experimenting over hurdles.

Then, with just hours remaining before the selection cut-off, East Kilbride 110m hurdler Allan Scott, City of Glasgow AC’s 1500m runner Susan Scott and Fife AC steeplechaser Andrew Lemoncello dipped under the Olympic ‘A’ qualifying barrier.

Susan Scott has twice broken the Scottish 800m record and will relish a fast pace over the extra lap and three-quarters.

Lemoncello, a member of Fife AC since the age of nine, who qualified with three hours to spare when he clocked a personal best 8min 22secs in Paris last month, will have every runner in Scotland roaring him on in the 91,000-seat ‘Birds Nest’ stadium on August 16.

Finally, interest in the fortunes of tennis doubles pairing Andy and Jamie Murray extends far beyond their home town Dunblane—but nowhere among this glittering firmament of sporting superstars are the Scots more firmly in the Olympic spotlight.

The British Olympic Association predict Team GB to win only five athletics medals—a total that will probably be eclipsed by our cyclists, swimmers, rowers and sailors as Team GB push for what would be an outstanding top-six finish in the medal table.