Commonwealth Games medallist Malin Wilson becomes first ambassador for new Rural Athletes Support Network helping youngsters in Ullapool area
Commonwealth Games medallist Malin Wilson has become an ambassador for the Rural Athlete Support Network (RASN).
The Ullapool native spent her youth travelling from the Wester Ross town to Invergordon, Alness and Inverness to train, as well as making regular journeys down to Edinburgh to train with the national squad before moving to the capital full time.
Now living just outside of Madrid in Spain, Wilson will continue to show support for athletes looking to follow in her footsteps through the RASN, a newly-established group which aims to reduce the barriers for young rural athletes to compete in the Ullapool High School catchment area.
The network is the brainchild of Ben Bruce, a footballer for Invergordon in the North Caledonian League who previously turned out for St Duthus, who was the year below Wilson at school in Ullapool and got the judoka on board.
“It’s about trying to make younger generations see that anything is possible, as cliche as that sounds,” Wilson explained.
“Someone that grew up in Ullapool is doing sport at a high level, so it doesn’t really matter where you live.
“I jumped on board to give Ben a hand, but I’m also totally for people dreaming big and doing sport with a real objective – not just because it’s what you do at school. You can still go to national championships from Ullapool.
“I used to travel four hours for two hours training, and I wouldn’t even get home that day. I had to get the first bus from Ullapool in the morning, because if I got the later one I wouldn’t get to judo that day.
“If I didn’t get the bus, I would hitchhike to Inverness, then I would wait all day until another girl from Inverness finished school and her dad would take us to Edinburgh. I would have to stay at theirs on the way back, somewhere between Inverness and Dingwall, and then get the morning bus back to Ullapool on the Thursday.
“You just have to be clear in what you want to do, and if you want something, go and try it.”
Often athletes from rural areas will have their hands forced by circumstance. If they want to compete at an elite level, they will likely have to move within reach of either national training centres, or top clubs, which are largely congregated in big cities.
However, Wilson is proof that it is still possible to make it to those levels from rural areas with lots of hard work and dedication to the chosen craft.
In fact, she believes that her work ethic and identity as an athlete to this day was shaped by those early experiences of travelling from Ullapool to try and better herself.
“I think it helped make me who I am, which is someone who is extremely determined and hard-working,” she reflected.
“Any time I go to a Grand Slam, or if I’m standing on the top of a podium, I never forget what it took for me to get there.
“That’s not only training hard, but also everything that I’ve sacrificed – I don’t like using that word because they were choices I made, but it’s the best way of saying.
“I never forget the path that I’ve taken and decisions that I’ve made to get here. Even coming to Spain, everything seems to have been going uphill, but I am capable of dealing with that because of my upbringing. Nothing was ever just available, you always had to fight for it.”
