David Murdoch, one of Britain’s biggest podium hopes when the Sochi Games open in seven days’ time, says it would be the fulfilment of a dream to parade through his home town with an Olympic medal around his neck.
That town is Lockerbie and last month’s 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack perpetrated on British soil brought home memories of how, as a young boy, he witnessed the downing of Pan Am 103 with his own eyes.
“I was about 300 yards away and I saw it come down,” he said. “I was in the car driving back home and we were on an adjacent street.”
Murdoch, who was 10 at the time, had only recently taken up curling but, in the days after the disaster, his local ice rink served a different, grisly purpose as a temporary morgue. A total of 243 passengers and 16 crew died in the atrocity, with a further 11 people killed on the ground by falling wreckage.
“Yes they used the rink as a morgue and a lot of troops were using our farm to land on,” he said. “There were lots of bodies scattered all over Lockerbie so they were using the farm to put the Chinooks down.”
A quarter of a century later, Lockerbie remains synonymous with the death and destruction that rained down on Dec 21, 1988, but Murdoch is hoping to bring the town some positive headlines in the way that Andy Murray’s tennis achievements have brought pride to Dunblane.
“Obviously, there was the anniversary with Lockerbie recently and there were tough times there,” said Murdoch. “But it’s a real nice town with a lot of good people in it and I’d love to walk through there with an Olympic medal.”
Although Murdoch now lives in Stirling to be close to his training base at the Scottish Institute of Sport, his parents still live in Lockerbie and remain leading lights of the curling club. His father has had several stints as club chairman while his mother is a long-serving coach.
“The rink was almost like the family home when I was growing up,” he said. “I was learning to curl a lot earlier than I should. Most people don’t learn until they’re 12 but because my parents were heavily involved in the rink and my brother and sister were older than me, I was in there running up and down the rink at seven or eight, just desperate to go curling.”
By the age of 16 he was a junior world champion, earning a gold medal as an alternate in 1995, and he won a second junior world gold a year later, this time playing as a lead.
In the senior ranks, he has won two world titles as a skip – in 2006 and 2009 – but he is the first to admit that his Olympics ambitions are unfulfilled after “heart-breaking” losses at the 2006 Games in Turin and in Vancouver four years later.
In Turin, he finished fourth after missing out on the final by a couple of centimetres, while in Vancouver he lost in a semi-final play-off to Sweden, having arrived at the Olympics as the reigning world champion.
“It’s unfinished business for me in relation to the Olympics with the couple of close ones we’ve had,” he said. “Obviously, the last time in Vancouver we were world champions and we just didn’t have a good week.
“I don’t think we suffered from the pressure. We never really had good form and if you don’t have that it’s a tough thing to get going. This year we actually have good form and we’re playing well.
“I’ve trained harder on ice for this than I did for the previous two Games and I think it’s paying off. I’ve got a higher percentage of consistency on ice now and also a bit more experience from another four years in the game. In curling, the older you get, the better you get, or at least I hope that’s the case for me.”
In Sochi, Murdoch will be joined by the same team-mates – Tom Brewster, Greg Drummond, Scott Andrews and Michael Goodfellow – who won bronze at last year’s World Championships.
If they can reach the podium, they will be the first male curlers from Britain to do so at a Winter Olympics since 1924 – an achievement for the whole of Lockerbie to celebrate.
“It’s something you dream about, especially after the heartbreaks of not winning and training all those years,” he said. “You put in a lot of work and sacrifice and you sometimes you feel that you want to get something out of it. That’s what’s been pushing me on.”
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