Athletics: At 15, Gemma follows in Linsey's quick footsteps

Where Macdonald blazed a trail 20 years ago, Nicol is treading carefully on her route to the top. Simon Turnbull reports

Cathy Freeman was at Melbourne Planetarium on Thursday, launching her new website and telling the wide world how happy she was that she would be coming to Manchester to run in the 4 x 400m relay at the Commonwealth Games. At the same time Gemma Nicol was at home in Dunfermline, hooked up to the internet, looking up the results from the English schools' athletics championships to check out the opposition for the international schools' match in Glasgow yesterday.

Nicol is a 15-year-old pupil at Queen Anne High School in Dunfermline. Like the 29-year-old Freeman, she has been picked in her country's 4 x 400m relay squad for the Commonwealth Games. Four weeks after her selection was confirmed, she is still coming to terms with the prospect that she could be running against the world's best, the Olympic 400m champion now among them.

"I was shocked when I heard the news," Nicol said. "I never thought I would be going to Manchester. I'm nervous, but I'm really looking forward to it." Nicol turns 16 on Saturday, three days before the heats of the 4 x 400m relay. As part of a six-strong Scottish squad for the event, it remains to be seen whether she will actually be called upon to run in the City of Manchester Stadium.

If she does, she will not be the youngest athlete to compete in the Commonwealth Games. Rose Tata-Muya of Kenya was 13 when she ran in the 800m in Christchurch in 1974. Nicol, though, is the youngest Scottish athlete ever selected for a Commonwealth Games.

Her emergence on the senior international scene has prompted comparison with a female Scottish 400m prodigy of two decades ago. Linsey Macdonald was 16 when she ran in the Olympic final and won a 4 x 400m relay bronze medal in Moscow in 1980. It just so happens that she was a Dunfermline schoolgirl too, and that she was guided by Jimmy Bryce, the sprint guru who coaches Nicol.

"Sure, Gemma's going to be compared to Linsey," Bryce said, "but she doesn't want to be a Linsey Macdonald until she's about 19, 20, 21. She wants to take it much slower and progress gradually." Nicol has a best 400m time of 55.00sec. Macdonald clocked 53.08sec as a 15-year-old and 51.16sec at 16. She never got any faster, though. Now 38, working as a doctor in Hong Kong, and expecting her first child, Macdonald maintains she was simply unlucky with injuries and with being so successful at such a young age that she had to fit in too many races in schools', age-group and senior competitions.

"Of course I have learned from what happened with Linsey," Bryce said. "If you can't learn from another 20, 22 years of experience then there must be something wrong. I've learned to say 'no'. Way back in Linsey's day she was pressurised by people at the top, telling her, 'We want you to do this. We want you to do that'. And, really, she was the type of person who didn't like to say 'no'.

"Maybe a lot of times we should have said 'no'. I'm saying 'no' to Gemma at this particular time. She hasn't gone to the world junior championships in Jamaica and she's not doing the 4 x 300m relay at the schools' meeting in Glasgow this weekend. We're trying to protect her and make sure she's in tip-top condition for the Commonwealth Games." Nicol will certainly be going to Manchester with an impressive running pedigree. Her grandfather, John Sharp, is a former British professional sprint champion and her mother, Wendy, is a former Scottish schools' cross country champion who reached the 90m final at the New Year Sprint meeting at Musselburgh race course last December.

At 71, Bryce competed in the big race at the New Year Sprint, the 110m handicap. He won it back in 1956. He reckons Nicol has "a good chance" of winning a medal with the Scottish 4 x 400m squad in Manchester. Linsey Macdonald won a Commonwealth bronze medal in the same event in Brisbane in 1982 – at the grand age of 18. Cathy Freeman won a gold in the 4 x 100m relay in Auckland in 1990, aged 16 years and 11 months.