Athole Still

Athole Still went to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics as a teenager but was only a reserve for the Great Britain 4x200 metres relay squad. His best performances, however, came after those Games.

At Dundee in 1954, Still set a British Native 110 yards freestyle record of 58.5, and the following year finished second to both Ronald Roberts and Neil McKechnie respectively in the 110 and 220 yards freestyle finals at the ASA Championships in Blackpool. It was the nearest Still came to winning an ASA title.

Still served with the Royal Air Force (RAF) for two years from 1955 while doing his National Service. His finest moment in the pool came after demobilisation, when he won the 4x220 freestyle relay with the Scotland foursome at the 1958 Cardiff British Empire and Commonwealth Games. This made up for his disappointment at missing out on a place in the relay squad at the 1952 Olympics.

Still had been an inspiration to the great Scottish champion Ian Black, who was a fellow member of the Gordonians Swimming Club. When Black retired, the day before his 21st birthday in 1962, Still also decided to quit competitive swimming, to embark on a successful career in journalism.

Still became swimming and opera correspondent for The Times and also commentated for ITV, until they pulled out of swimming coverage in the late 1980s. During his journalism days, Still dovetailed his job with that of opera singing, for which he had a passion since he was a youngster. He had studied languages at Robert Gordon’s College, Aberdeen, and got his professional operatic break in 1966 when he performed at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen when he was brought in as an understudy for the opera Boris Godunov. Still went on to become the principal operatic tenor with the Scottish Opera. He enjoyed a tour of Britain with La bohème, had a summer season at Glyndebourne, and then toured with Macbeth. When his voice was eventually not good enough to perform at the highest level, he established Athole Still International in the late 1980s. It was an agency for opera singers and sportspeople.

Representing opera singers provided the bulk of Still’s business, but he was also involved in some high-profile sporting deals and transactions over the years. His biggest football deals involved taking John Barnes from Watford to Liverpool, Gianluca Vialla from Juventus to Chelsea and Sven-Goran Eriksson into the England manager’s job. Still acted as the agent for Olympians Duncan Goodhew, Steven Redgrave, James Cracknell, and Sharron Davies and many other high-profile sportspeople, including jockeys Willie Carson and Tony McCoy.