I know how much pressure the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee is under and thank its members for using some of their precious time to look into the issue of sport, which I know is often left on the shelf. I really appreciate their taking the time to do that.

I declare a significant interest in sport, given that it has defined my life. I am a level 4 senior coach and have been since 2000, having coached football and athletics at all ages as well as rugby, hockey and mixed basketball.

I was amused by Willie Rennie talking about running through the mud, the gore and the wet and going up and down hills. I thought he was a strange man to enjoy that, but he said that he does a lot of his best thinking while he is out running, which really resonated with me. When I require thinking time, I pull on my kit and go out for a run. I am much slower than I used to be, and a lot of old ladies go past me carrying heavy shopping, but thinking is nonetheless done.

I am going through my third cycle of coaching youngsters all the way up to senior level, and all three of my daughters have gone through that process. Much progress has been made, especially in football, rugby, tennis and cricket, but we have a long way to go to reach parity and equal opportunity. I also heard Willie Rennie say that sport mirrors life. If we look at participation, we see that there are 645,000 members of sports clubs in Scotland but that only 102,000 of them are women and 67,000 are girls. So, 26 per cent of members of sports clubs in Scotland are female and we are starting from a point where there are three times as many male participants as there are female ones.

There is also a far greater drop-out rate for girls than for boys, and they drop out at an earlier stage. Puberty has been mentioned, and we have talked about how menstruation affects participation in sport. I see that as a problem in coaching and coach education. We must develop our coaches to understand the different physiological demands on female and male players, and not only in regard to matters such as puberty and menstruation. A male 800m runner and a female 800m runner experience different physiological demands, and the female will take longer to run 800m.

Coaches are also key to tackling misogyny. We must be strong enough to speak out, and I have done that myself when I evicted a couple of athletes from my own squad. I evicted one from an international squad and was actually challenged by other international coaches, who did not want me to do that, but I was not prepared to have that sort of attitude in my squad.

I also note that there is a central belt bias, because many opportunities for participation are in the central belt, with rural areas once again being the poor relation when it comes to access. Even when public transport is available—and as has been said before—many girls do not feel safe travelling on public transport after dark.

People continually raise the issue of poor body image. The irony of that is that participation in sport develops a healthier body and actually tackles poor body image.

I think that there has been a disparity in the bounce-back from Covid. I speak anecdotally from my own perspective, because I have seen fewer women than men coming back into sport. Incidentally, there was also a big drop-off in disability sport during Covid. One thing that greatly surprised me was that the women who have come back to sport are less competitive: they will come and take part in training, but they will not compete. I need to understand a little bit more about that.

We cannot overstate the importance of sport to society when seen against the backdrop of Scotland being the unhealthiest nation in Europe. I have spoken a lot about our need to tackle the £5 billion price of obesity and the £4.5 billion cost of mental illness, as well as the costs of diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease and musculoskeletal conditions. Poor health is the biggest drag on our economy.

Sport is such an inclusive activity, and it breaks down so many barriers. On the way through here this morning, I was listening to a radio programme and I heard that women are more prone to poor mental health and social exclusion because of their lifestyle. Sport is one of the big answers to that. Sport gives us confidence, resilience and aspiration—those intangible things that help us in the rest of our lives.

On a wall in my office, I have a poster that says:

“Food is the most abused anxiety drug. Exercise is the most underutilised antidepressant.”

As I said, poor health is the biggest drag on the Scottish economy, and the place to tackle that is in school. School is our battleground. We need to start in nursery, then continue through primary, secondary and beyond, giving our children more time and opportunity to participate. At the moment, they have to go home to go somewhere else.

Sport has become the bastion of the middle classes. All that we need do is look at the Olympic team and see how many were privately educated.

I know that I am running out of time—