Let’s rewind the clock: it’s the opening day of competition at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. The city is basking in sultry temperatures and as evening draws closer scalding anticipation builds.
All eyes turn to the pool at Tollcross International Swimming Centre. This has been the hot ticket for months. Scots Michael Jamieson and Ross Murdoch lining up in the men’s 200m breaststroke final.
Jamieson, 25, is the poster boy for Glasgow 2014. His sculpted physique, as if chiselled by the Gods themselves, adorns billboards and the official programme. He is tipped for gold and has voiced intentions to set a world record time.
Murdoch, 20, is the rookie who burst onto the scene a year earlier with a slew of blistering performances. He finished first in the heats that morning.
Millions tune in to watch on TV, eager to see Scotland win gold and records tumble. Yet few could have envisaged how the expected script would be ripped up and rewritten with a jaw-dropping twist.
In a Daily Mail Sport special, we dissect what unfolded behind-the-scenes — including the tumultuous build-up and seismic aftermath — of what many will remember as the greatest shock of Glasgow 2014.
Ross Murdoch and Michael Jamieson embrace in the pool after their iconic race in 2014
Revisiting footage of the race, almost 12 years on, brings the same spine-tingling goosebumps. The knife-edge tension that intensifies with every gliding stroke as Murdoch and Jamieson, barely a sliver between them, surge to the front of the field.
Suddenly, Murdoch finds an extra gear. In the closing metres, he pulls away from Jamieson. Fingertips touch the wall. A Scotland one-two.
It takes several seconds to sink in. Murdoch has beaten Jamieson. Disbelief fills their respective faces. Two contrasting sides of the same coin.
Murdoch, the victor, grasps the lane ropes in wide-eyed incredulity, gasping for air like an oxygen-starved fish as he scans the scoreboard, brain still catching up with his Herculean physical effort. Jamieson, pipped for gold, is instantly crestfallen.
Clocking 2:07.30, Murdoch has set a new British and Commonwealth Games record, Jamieson finishing in 2:08.40. England’s Andrew Willis, taking bronze, receives only a passing mention as the surprise result becomes headline news.
Post-race interviews see the Scots duo run a gamut of emotions. On the podium, a tearful Murdoch has the air of a young man still pinching himself, half expecting someone to shake him awake from this dream at any moment. Jamieson looks numb.
There is no sugar coating that the psychological impact for both is monumental. Jamieson is crushed while Murdoch, the newly anointed king, has found himself thrust into the glare of the spotlight in unimaginably overwhelming fashion.
Within the annals of sporting history, the head-to-head between Jamieson and Murdoch has subsequently been framed as a David and Goliath-esque upset, although that is to arguably do a huge disservice to both men.
Murdoch’s wide-eyed delight after usurping Jamieson was an enduring image of 2014 Games
Murdoch wasn’t merely a plucky underdog who got lucky — he was a talented swimmer who rose to the occasion and peaked at exactly the right time. As for Jamieson? The yesterday’s man tag he became swiftly lumbered with was cruel and unjust.
In an exclusive interview with Daily Mail Sport, Jamieson provides fresh insight into the unseen turmoil he was fighting behind closed doors. A spiralling sequence of events far graver than anyone could have imagined.
The lead-up to Glasgow 2014 bore all the hallmarks of a glossy Hollywood biopic. As an official ambassador, Jamieson was the smiling and wholesome hero with a glittering Olympic silver from London 2012.
It felt like the stars were aligning perfectly. Not only did he declare his intention to win the 200m breaststroke in his home city, but to do so in a world-record breaking time. A goal that Jamieson now admits consumed him to unhealthy levels.
‘It became an obsession for me,’ he says. ‘I was hell for leather, every day, with that time in my head.’
The road to Glasgow was paved with mountain-sized bumps. In 2013, Jamieson finished fifth at the world championships, hampered by a torn tendon in his bicep.
‘That was an absolute kick in the teeth,’ he recalls. ‘Psychologically, it was back to square one when I thought I would be pushing on and trying to conquer the world that year. Things just started unravelling in the lead-up to Glasgow 2014. I was pushing harder and harder.’
This was evidenced in November 2013 when Jamieson faced a health scare, experiencing cardiac arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat, that saw his heart rate spike dangerously high during a training session.
Doctors had to shock his heart back to a regular rhythm. At the time, admits Jamieson, he viewed this as a warped badge of honour. In January 2014 — only six months out from the Commonwealth Games — another injury forced him to take four weeks off training.
These setbacks were well-documented. What wasn’t widely known then is how badly he was imploding. His mental health had reached a dark place.
Going into Glasgow 2014, Jamieson found himself being eaten alive by inner demons at loggerheads: attempting to heal years of poor self-image and unhealthy training habits, while striving for the biggest summit of his swimming career to date.
‘Psychologically I really, really wasn’t in a good place,’ he says. ‘There was a realisation leading into the Games that I just wasn’t healthy. I was already getting a fair bit of support and in the very early stages of unpicking the state I was in.’
Murdoch and Jamieson pose with England’s bronze medal winner Andrew Willis
To reach the required physical peak, while his mental wellbeing was at such low ebb, he concedes now, was an impossible task.
With hindsight, Jamieson knew it was game over. In the call room before the 200m final, there were none of his usual rituals. He didn’t take his pre-race, energy-boosting caffeine powder or listen to music to get super-pumped.
Walking out poolside, Jamieson remembers inwardly apologising to everyone in his head. He was resigned to his fate — beaten before the starting gun fired.
‘I knew after the heats that I wasn’t going to be able to make the jump needed in the final to get the record,’ he says. ‘And, for me, that was the target over and above wanting to win and get a gold medal. I was so fixated on trying to chase the record.’
Jamieson valiantly attempted to shift focus, hoping that if he fought with every sinew, it might be enough to win. ‘It wasn’t,’ he says, simply.
After Glasgow 2014, he disappeared from public view. ‘I felt like I needed a period to sort myself out,’ says Jamieson. ‘I was getting a lot of support from psychiatrists at the time because it was a wee bit of a state of emergency.
‘I needed to get healthy and on an even keel before I thought about getting back into training. But I never got on top of it. I always felt like I was carrying this huge weight. That was affecting everything. I just couldn’t perform.
‘I was pushing as hard as always, but it was like there was this invisible weight around me. I wasn’t as powerful and explosive — every marker across the board never really recovered.’
Jamieson returned to Tollcross for the Rio 2016 Olympic trials seeking ‘closure’ on his career. ‘It was awful,’ he says. ‘Internally, I was there to put the nail in my own coffin and prove to myself that I needed to stop chasing this, that it was time to retire.
‘Physically, I knew I was still capable — I was just so far down the road psychologically, there was no way I could get back to my best. I needed to put myself in a position where I felt almost embarrassed by how beaten I was.’
He officially retired from competitive swimming in 2017. As Jamieson reflects now with unflinching candour, openly discussing the complex and often conflicting emotions that surfaced, he is keen to emphasise this isn’t a ‘poor me’ story.
Jamieson has explained how he faced dark times as he pushed himself to excel at 2014
‘Do I look back on my career with a hint of disappointment? Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think that is ever going to leave me, but I have also made peace with it,’ he says.
Jamieson has no regrets about being the Glasgow 2014 poster boy. Quite the opposite, he insists. ‘I absolutely loved it,’ he says. ‘Not necessarily the attention, but generally the level of support. People knew what you were aiming for.
‘I didn’t enjoy necessarily being front and centre. It wasn’t something I ever sought out or wanted. But it was validation that we were working hard towards a goal.’
Today, he comes across as positive and upbeat — no longer dragging that invisible weight. Jamieson, 37, has become a successful entrepreneur, founding his own swim academy and more recently a wellness studio/gym.
He recognises that swimming has opened many doors for him and continues to do so. This summer, Jamieson will lend his expertise as a pundit for TNT Sports coverage during Glasgow 2026.
As for Murdoch? One might have assumed that being catapulted to Scots household name was the easier path of the two. Yet, he would later describe his Glasgow 2014 victory as ‘the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.’
The proverbial poisoned chalice. No matter how many medals amassed and milestones reached, everything paled in comparison to that golden moment. The pressure of expectation undoubtedly weighed heavy.
In the ensuing years, Murdoch battled injuries, poor form and mental health struggles. There were highs — including double European gold in 2016 — but his Olympic dreams never quite panned out.
At Rio 2016, Murdoch fell short of making the 100m breaststroke final. It hit him hard. He considered carving ‘a new identity’ outside of the sport.
‘I didn’t deal with failures as well as I should,’ said Murdoch, speaking in 2018. ‘Post-Rio was a massive challenge for me.
‘In the run-up to Glasgow, I was purely doing it because I just loved it. That was the sole reason for me competing. Maybe I lost a bit of that in the lead-up to Rio.
‘I always thought I never took myself that seriously, but when things didn’t go my way, I took it very seriously. At the end of the day, it’s just swimming, isn’t it? It’s just a hobby that I happen to be really good at.’
Murdoch laid bare a deeper internal discord, which he described as an inexplainable feeling of loneliness. At that point, he was reluctant to put a label on it, although later conceded it was likely depression.
In early 2017, Murdoch worked with a psychologist in a bid to reconnect with his ‘enjoyment’ for swimming.
‘I definitely needed that psychological help,’ he said in a 2018 interview. ‘If I didn’t have that, I’d have struggled to keep swimming. There was a time I didn’t think I wanted to do it anymore.’
Murdoch also struggled with the scale of his career high and fell out of love with swimming
The grim days of the coronavirus lockdowns also saw him contemplate calling time on his career. Fortitude prevailed and Murdoch qualified for the Covid-delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympics. But again, a place in the final — this time the 200m breaststroke — eluded him.
In December 2021, Murdoch quietly retired from swimming. What he may have hoped would feel like freedom and sweet relief instead brought a void. Murdoch missed the routine and purpose of training.
He was back in the pool 11 weeks later, going on to clinch a trio of bronze medals at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. A fitting and well-deserved swansong — Murdoch bowing out to applause, rather than anonymous silence.
‘Those 11 weeks were some of the hardest times of my life, 100 per cent,’ he affirmed in 2022. ‘You think you’ve got it all figured out, but you don’t. And after I went back in the pool, everything else seemed to click.’
Looking at photographs from then, there is a sparkle in his eye that had been absent for some time. Soon afterwards Murdoch, then 28, departed his decade-long base at the University of Stirling to pursue a childhood dream of joining the police.
Testament to how phenomenal Murdoch’s swim at Glasgow 2014 was, it still stands today as a British and Commonwealth Games record. There is another important postscript to that July evening, one that stuck with Jamieson for a long time.
‘Immediately after the race, standing next to Ross, I was interviewed first,’ he recounts. ‘I was obviously totally gutted. I was asked a couple of questions and answered honestly.
‘I wish I had just stepped aside and gave him his moment. I remember chatting to him about it and apologising afterwards. My folks held a wee party after the Games and a lot of the swimmers came. I had a couple of beers with him then.
‘We very loosely keep in touch now — Ross is a good lad. I was glad that at some point, I was able to talk to him about it, because it did bother me for a few years.
‘I would have hated to have thought that I got in the way of his celebrations because, ultimately, we were both in it for the same reasons — trying to compete and win.’
