OFF to Meadowbank in Edinburgh this month to defend his Scottish title is Uisdean Macrae of Nelson Street.
If successful, the plucky 36-year-old will add another three medals to the six he has already won this year.

The wheelchair athlete holds the 75 metre sprint title, and indeed in the last 11 years has come home with gold eight times and silver the other three. He also has won the gold medal for softball and putting the shot, but says that his performance in the shot is not as good just now as it sometimes has been.

Uisdean won his place in the finals of the Scottish Track and Field Championships by winning the Highland regional titles this May in the Queen’s Park, Inverness.
He competes in a 22-year-old racing chair which is beginning to show signs of age. “Recently I have had to spend £100 maintaining my chair,” Uisdean told News & Views. “And accommodation in Edinburgh will cost £65, so it is not cheap.”
But the athletic track is not the only place in which Uisdean has displayed his prowess this year. Besides the two medals won at Queen’s Park, he has also gained medals for swimming and wheelchair dancing. A member of the local Wheelchair Dancing Club which meets weekly in Raigmore, he was in the team which won the Scottish championships this year at the Thistle Hotel in Glasgow in June. The Inverness team not only won the gold medal in the disco section but the overall title as well.

Altogether they came home with a tremendous haul of medals, and in November next year they hope to strut their stuff at the international event (held every second year) in the Hilton Hotel, Blackpool.
And in March, at the Aquadome, he won both the 25 metre breaststroke and backstroke events.

Uisdean is on the fundraising committee at Leonard Cheshire House, and when News & Views spoke to him he was hoping to do a parachute jump at Cupar, Fife for the charity at the end of August. It won’t be his first - but it is 19 years since his last parachute jump, so he was looking forward to it!