Hamish Davidson: A man of spectacular strength and appetites

He was up for any challenge: strength, sporting, eating, drinking. He once had a clubmate time him while he washed down half a pound of gorgonzola with a pint of milk. Eleven seconds for the competitively-minded.

He was Scottish senior shot putt champion thrice, in 1973 (as a junior), '75, and '78. His championship record (17.44 metres) survived for 18 years, and still ranks eighth on the Scottish all-time list. He should have gone to the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, but Davidson had a reputation outside the circle. He'd had to be carried off the plane by hammer-thrower Chris Black when the Scottish team arrived for a match in Athens.

"I did what I liked - I didn't want to be ordered around by wee guys in blazers,'' he later told me. He took rejection hard, and turned professional on the highland games circuit. He arrived home from his first outing (Old Meldrum) to find he'd been selected by Britain for an international against Bulgaria.

Amateur rules were draconian, and he never won a GB vest. He would have been the first rotational putter selected by Britain; a style learned from Willie Robertson who recalls him doing 12 metres with the 16lb implement aged 15.

Rotational suited the 28lb weight for distance, and he set a world best of 88' 10 1/2" (88 feet ten and a half inches) at Inverkeithing. His girth, at 22 stones, was massive, but he lacked the height to deliver a world-class shot, though he set 38 grounds records across Scotland.

"I was upset at the amateurs refusing me my Games place,'' he confirmed years later. "A lot of the guys were on drugs, but I never touched that stuff, and by the time the Games came round they'd had to come off, and were nowhere near what they were supposed to do. I might even have got a medal."

That Scottish championship best would have placed him fifth in 1978, 1.01m behind bronze medallist Bishop Dolegiewicz. He testified after Ben Johnson's drug-fueled Olympic sprint in Seoul that he had sold steroids to Johnson's coach. Dolegiewicz said steroid use was so rife in the throws that he could not name one individual who had not taken the drug. Canadians finished second, third, and fourth in Edmonton. Gold went to England's Geoff Capes who boasted in his autobiography how he had carried anti-doping samples from a competition in East Germany for testing in London. And how on collection at Heathrow, all were broken.

No such innuendo clouded Davidson's career. His drugs were alcohol and tobacco. When he ended Bill Anderson's eight-year reign as Scottish heavy events champion in 1979 he won a gallon of whisky which he shared with the Crieff crowd.

Davidson humbled Capes in Edinburgh's Princess Street Gardens. It was his birthday, and he'd reputedly drunk a bottle of gin. He celebrated with 20 pints of lager and chain-smoked cigars, then competed in Britain's Strongest Man the following day in London. He won the battery hold with a world record, and only in the final event - a man-to-man tug of war, in which Capes had bodyweight advantage - did the Englishman edge ahead. But he did deny Capes the Braemar heavy-weight title.

Davidson lived for years on a mink farm, near Cawdor, entertaining the notion of an outsize mink tracksuit, but the stock escaped. "The anti-fur lobby and Greenpeace killed the business,'' he said. His only marriage lasted a month, His wife, who ominously had arrived with her mother, was quickly dispatched home.

Davidson was also into gold at the wrong time, owned a bar, and did TV commentary. Though he launched and revived some highland gatherings, he had mixed success as a strength-sport entrepreneur, and I lost a money in Canadian property.

However, he'd won an art bursary at school and ran a gallery which claimed some of Scotland's finest wildlife artists. "It took a wee while to get back to paintings,'' he said.

Less profitable was a passion for cars: a Ferrari, Jaguar, and Datsun 260Z. Weights equipment in the garage at his farm collapsed, wrecking the Jag.

When a warrant was issued for his arrest on drink driving charges he fled to Spain - owing money to former Olympians. This roughest-hewn of diamonds, with his soft highland accent charmed sophisticated women with a regularity floored contemporaries. On the Costa del Sol he lived for a year with a millionaire countess before coming home to face the music, and was jailed for three months.

The charismatic Davidson may have drunk too fully from the cup of life, but he had a gentle side. He donated paintings to Children in Need, and towed 12-ton buses to raise funds for charity. Ross Hepburn, world age-group record holder as a 14-year-old high jumper, recalls being barred on age grounds from the senior championships where he seemed sure to have medalled. "Hamish fed me highland fudge in the Meadowbank stand as I was forced to watch, and then gave me a lift home," he said.

Davidson severely damaged a knee when a bridge on his farm collapsed under his weight. "I'm not a bad fellow really,'' he insisted on our last meeting, before he lost part of a foot due to diabetes. "Drink can ruin anyone. . .You can't go on living like that indefinitely.