It won’t be the most high profile sport news of the last few days, but as far as the future of Scottish sport is concerned it could be the most significant.
I’m talking about the participation figures on the back of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.
In the past Scotland has failed to capitalise on hosting a sporting event, but thankfully this doesn’t look like being the case after 2014.
According to sportscotland there has been a big increase across the board in membership of clubs involved with the 17 Commonwealth Games sports.
It’s what I hoped would happen, but you can’t take it for granted.
The individual governing bodies deserve a lot of credit.
During the Games it’s all about Team Scotland but they stand on their own two feet afterwards.
It doesn’t surprise me that two of the biggest success stories have been gymnastics and netball.
I’m sure there are a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of them will be that people’s misconceptions about those sports have been blown out of the water. I know mine were.
I covered the gymnastics at the Hydro and I couldn’t have been more impressed. It was so exciting.
And that’s coming from someone who can’t even do a cartwheel! I was pretty good at most sports at school but gymnastics was the exception to the rule!
I’m sure a lot of people dismissed gymnastics as a proper sport, but Daniel Keatings and others have shown that it takes unbelievable strength and athleticism to get to the top, and I bet a lot of the new participants over the last 12 months are boys.
The misconception about netball would have been that it was a slower and more boring version of basketball.
But that was another sport I saw in the Hydro, and the final between New Zealand and Australia was anything but slow and boring. And the semi-final when England lost in the last seconds to New Zealand was one of the most dramatic moments of the Games.
I’m sure that the fact Usain Bolt came along to watch the Jamaican girls in one of their games didn’t do netball’s profile any harm either.
It’s really encouraging that we’ve got off to a good start after Glasgow, and with a bit of luck in a few years’ time there will be men and women winning medals at future Games who say that the summer of 2014 was their inspiration.
* It’s Six Nations time again and there’s the usual mixture of hope and dread for Scottish rugby fans.
I’ve got a feeling it will either be feast or famine for Vern Cotter’s boys.
If we win in Paris we could go on to get three or four victories, but lose and it could be another familiar long and grim couple of months in store.