Blain’s Very Late Morning Porridge Feb 16th 2026 – Sliding, Jambos and Rugby, Sports that matter
“He’s kicked that one so high it’s come down with a touch of frost on it..”
The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, and tomorrow is the start of the Year of the Fire-Horse (the most volatile of the 60-year Chinese zodiac cycle) but what a fantastic weekend of sports we just had. It’s all positive stuff… Let’s enjoy it while we can.
Apologies for the very late Morning Porridge this morning after a very early flight back from Edinburgh. Tomorrow there will be a full breakdown on the market implications of ‘who-said-what-but-meant-that” at the Munich Security Conference and what’s afoot in AI stocks, but this morning… let’s enjoy the good things in life and talk about sports, their influence and importance, whether it be in Olympic gold in Skeleton, Football, or Scotland’s magnificent win on Saturday in the 6 Nations Rugby at Murrayfield.
Sports matter – not just in terms of the potential opportunities to monetise sporting success (of which there are many), but also in terms of concepts such as soft power and belief, and how that can influence sentiment and growth. After Saturday’s win I was a one-man economic boom-time in Edinburgh’s hostelries on Saturday. Might oak-trees stem from little acorns, and small sporting successes can make small nations mightier yet.
But, let’s start with the UK’s “sliding successes” racking up two Olympic gold medals in Skeleton – which is basically running full pelt down a bobsleigh track before jumping face-down on a tea-tray to see who can get to the bottom fastest in one piece. I have tried it – it’s very, very scary and hurts a lot when you get it wrong. But Britain’s Matt Weston has won two golds this year as the world’s top skeleton slider.
Britain’s dominance in Skeleton is not due to some inherent British genetic sliding gene, or a unique national gift for slipping at speed. We don’t have an unnatural and uncanny coordination of our heads to steer the things (which is how it’s done). Skeleton dominance is the result of a deliberate decision some 25 years ago, in pre-London Olympic days, to focus national resources on Sports where the UK could achieve showcase national success. Back then the government understood Sporting success is a form of soft power.
In the case of Skeleton it’s been money very well spent. First up was identifying the participants, originally taking superb athletes from other disciplines like cycling and retraining them for sliding. Alongside came the investment and resources in the programme; building a concrete test-track at Bath University, (I lent the team the Batfish Sailing Team Van to take their kit to train on Norwegian tracks in the winter), booking wind-tunnel time, and utilising tech to constantly refine the details like the tea-tray and helmets. (The UK’s latest helmet design was declared illegal just days before the start of the Olympics.)
The UK has now won 5 skeleton golds, 2 silvers and 5 bronzes since Amy Wilson hit the podium high-step in Whistler in 2010. It’s now one of our most successful Olympic sports. The fact there isn’t a single bobsleigh track in the UK highlights its anything but a mass participation support, but its success has undoubtedly boosted interest in ice-sports, and secured support for other sports by demonstrating the potential of a smart approach to winning.
Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, is one of the world’s great cities. It may be small, but it’s a leading European financial centre. On Thursday I was lecturing at the Edinburgh Business School to the post grad investment management course, then had a marvellous lunch on Friday with Edinburgh’s finest financial minds hosted by Roy Leckie of Walter Scott at the world infamous “Library of Mistakes’. The weekend was spent at the Rugby and laughing long and loud with great friends.
Sadly, Sunday wasn’t such a great day for my Football team, Hearts, crashing 4 – 2 to the Huns Rangers in Glasgow. The Jambos have historically been the 10th best team in a 2 Team league for decades – the Scottish Premier League being a duopoly of Celtic and Rangers. Yet, this year Hearts are leading the SPL – which has shocked many fans. Their success has come on the back of a data-driven approach, crunching information and numbers to build the team based on identifying under-rated but excellent (and cheap) players outside the usual large teams, and then refining their individual match-day strengths.
I had a serendipitous meeting with one of the football data guys over the weekend who described to me how the visual information he and his team collect at training sessions and on matchdays on skills like passing & shooting accuracy, anticipation, awareness, can be combined with the physical inputs monitoring how hard they are working (from sensors on their necks), is dramatically changing the beautiful game. (A few years ago I wrote in the porridge about how Southampton FC appointed a manager to do the same thing – he was sacked when he failed to turn the team around.)
What Hearts are doing with a data-led approach to the Game could be transformational for smaller teams. Today Footie is dominated by extremely wealthy bulge-bracket teams, but if names like Hearts and Wrexham show other effective ways to monetise success – then it’s a game changer. We live in an era of sports monetisation – and there could be gold in lower hills of Football leagues as data takes over.
And we have to talk about the rugby.
In Rugby’s Six Nations championship, Scotland’s win against the English on Saturday at Murrayfield was a remarkable triumph and completely against expectations. At lunch on Friday our host, Roy, asked for predictions for the game. I came closest predicting Scotland would do better than expected and would hold the English to a draw. Everyone else, mostly proud Scots, guessed we would lose either by a heartbeat or by a massive drubbing.
The fear was Scotland would do their usual. Start well, even score a few points, but then tire, make silly mistakes and unforced errors to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory – as they have so oft done in the past. But didn’t happen. They simply outplayed the English at every point – and corrected all the faults that lost them the Water Polo in Rome last week. And they played at 110% from minute zero to the very end. Why? Pride in being Scots, and the opportunity to show the Rugby world how wrong it was to write us off.
Now it just so happened we were staying in the same hotel as the English team, and late on Saturday night we found ourselves in the lift with three of them, towering over my small Welsh wife, she-who-is-Mrs-Blain. They were absolutely charming chaps. I thanked them for giving us such an enjoyable and entertaining afternoon, and hoped they enjoyed the rest of their trip to my wonderful home town. One of them even smiled.
Out of time and back to a proper Porridge tomorrow..
Bill Blain
Author of the Morning Porridge
Advisor – Spitfire Strategic Capital
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England team not English team…..although noted the Scottish team contained some non Scots…..😉