IF Glasgow 2014 is anything to go by, some of the Scottish participants at this week’s unique multi-sport European Championships in the city may get a tad emotional and dewy eyed about the chance to compete in front of a home crowd. Jack Carlin puts a more prosaic spin on things. Some of his pals from Paisley have bought tickets and he doesn’t want to give them any more ammunition than necessary.

“Obviously it is lovely to be back,” said the 21-year-old, something of a silver medal specialist with two in World Championships, and one from the Europeans and Commonwealths

to his name respectively already.

“I managed to visit home for a bit before I came to the hotel to catch up with family and friends, people I don’t often see these days so much as I am living down in Manchester.

“I’ve got family and friends coming throughout the week, so there is pressure in that sense I guess,” he added. “Especially with the pals. You don’t want the rinsing that they will give you if you lose.

“Of course they are supportive, that is why they got tickets themselves to come and watch. And hopefully they will be on their best behaviour – they are usually fine.

“I’m sure they’ll be cheering me on – or booing me if I crash out! Put it this way, I’d probably get a good slaughtering if they paid for tickets and I got knocked out in the first round.”

When it comes to his parents, Gillian and Scott, the affection is more unconditional, yet no less voluble. “No, it will be nice,” Carlin added, “a lot of my family haven’t seen me race live at this kind of level and I think they’re all rather excited. My mum is a bit bonkers and I’m sure she’ll have a banner somewhere. You’ll hear my mum, she’s loud.”

When Carlin says he doesn’t get to spend much time with his old pals these days, what he doesn’t mention at first is the lads’ holiday he went on to Tenerife with a group of them in the immediate afterglow of that fine ride to silver in the individual sprint at the Gold Coast.

A rare piece of downtime he had promised himself for his endeavours in the last six months to a year, the 21-year-old made the most of it, even if the increases in his weight profile on the back of it weren’t exactly the kind of marginal gains which make the British Cycling programme what it is today.

“I did get a few beers in,” he admitted. “The Gold Coast was lovely, such a lovely place and then when I came back I went out to Tenerife with my mates from Paisley.

“I thought I should catch up with them before I got back to full time training so we went on a boys’ holiday. It was a tough couple of weeks when I came back to training to be fair – I was a touch heavier than I should have been!”

It might be pushing it to call him Jack the lad, but Carlin takes his downtime from what can be an all-consuming sport seriously. “You don’t want to think about a gym when you are away,” he said. “If you take time off, you need to completely take yourself away from it or you will never relax. It is just nice sometimes, just to remind yourself what it is like not to be an athlete in that sense.”

Considering the strength of the Great Britain cycling squad which has alighted in Glasgow for these games, it is a sign of Carlin’s growth in the sport that he has three chances to get on the medal rostrum at an event which is the first chance to put qualification points on the board for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

First up, today, he goes in the team sprint, having moved up from the group’s blistering lead-out man to second man in a squad which also contains the formidable talents of Jason Kenny.

Kenny might have taken Hoy’s mantle as the alpha male of the Olympic GB individual sprint unit, but for now he too must play second fiddle to Carlin in this category. Having already been runner-up in the World Championships, next Carlin will hope to taste glory in the individual sprint, before bidding to complete the hat-trick in the keirin, the event in which riders follow a motorised bike, or durney, around the track before launching the sprint. He is a World Championship finalist in that discipline too.

“I will hopefully be holding up the British challenge for the individual sprint but first there is the team sprint, that will give me a marker which will show me where I am and how I am going to be for the rest of the competition,” he said. “We have got such strength and depth at the moment that anyone can make that step up and it is still all to play for, two years out from Tokyo. This is the first Olympic qualification, which is obviously the main aim. That is what will give us a good idea of a basis and what we can all build upon for the next two years.

“I’m not expecting there to be a Jack Carlin velodrome in Paisley just yet,” he added. “But this year has been quite a big turnaround for me, going from man one in the team sprint to bill myself more as an all-around sprinter, so the individual stuff is obviously stepped up massively. I am definitely more confident now in my individual skills than I used to be, I’m probably going into this event more confident than I have ever been in prior events.

It is all to play for. There is the Dutch team, the French team, the German team and it is all so close, within hundredths of a second between the first eight in the qualifying. Europe is very strong, you are only really missing the Australians and the Kiwis when it comes to this. If you do well here you are setting yourself up well for the rest of the season.”

You almost have to remind yourself that he was just a teenager when the last multi-sport event hit this city at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. “I was still a junior back then, sitting in the stands, watching everyone competing at Glasgow 2014 and I kind of thought to myself ‘that is where I want to be one day’. Obviously I got picked for the Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast earlier this year and I did race in Glasgow two years ago I think it was at the World Cup, and the atmosphere there was phenomenal. The Velodrome will fill itself. There are enough people who love sport in Scotland, especially the west of Scotland. Going by previous times it’s always been busy and it’s always been loud. You know what Scotland’s like, it doesn’t have to be fully packed for it to be noisy.”

Especially when Carlin’s friends and family are around.