Cash award will help top shot keep eye on success
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A TOP Caithness shooter has been awarded £6000 from an initiative set up to help high-performance athletes achieve their potential.
Watten’s Sarah Henderson is one of 32 athletes in eight sports who have been chosen to receive a sportscotland Athlete Personal Award (SAPA).
Each of them have the potential to make the podium at the Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast or have winter Olympic ambitions for Pyeongchang.
The £192,000 handed out yesterday is the first year’s funding of a two-year investment to provide additional support for training, competition and living expenses for the next two years.
Mrs Henderson, who shot at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, is delighted to have been chosen, and said the money will help her work towards qualifying for major competitions, including the 2018 games in Australia.
She said yesterday: “It’s brilliant news and is really quite exciting. It’s to help me with living expenses and equipment expenses.
“It gives me the opportunity to renew bits of my equipment and will help paying for travelling expenses to get to competitions.
“It’s really going to help out. It’s a lot of money but we have a lot of things to spend it on.”
Mrs Henderson and her husband, fellow shooter James Henderson, have to travel long distances to take part in training and competitions, and a lot of it they have to fund themselves.
“We go down to Edinburgh for training, and the nearest competition for us is in Aberdeen,” she said.
“Our first trip away this year will be to an outdoor competition on the Isle of Man in Easter.
“We normally have to fund that ourselves, so this money is going to make a real difference.”
The SAPA initiative was introduced for London 2012, Sochi 2014 and Glasgow 2014. It has proved successful with 30 of the medallists at Glasgow having received awards and the wheelchair curlers delivering bronze at the Winter Paralympics in Sochi.
More than 100 high performance athletes have been supported from almost £1.5 million of funding.
Director of high performance at sportscotland Mike Whittingham said the SAPAs have made a significant difference to athletes with podium aspirations.
He said: “SAPAs are designed to help athletes who are in the development stage of their high performance career and need additional support to help them train and compete at the right level as they approach competition.
“They help ensure Scottish athletes can focus and concentrate on their ideal training, recovery, and injury prevention strategies.
“The smallest performance increment can make all the difference when competing at Commonwealth or Olympic level, and that requires meticulous preparation and support.”
