 was voted off the show, in which she had been partnered by Hamish Gaman, in week three on Sunday.
“I am gutted to be going but in the grand scheme of things I am happy and grateful for the opportunity – and that I am still in one piece,” the 29-year-old, who made a comeback in athletics after serious injury in 2013, tells AW.
“Going into it, people said: ‘What is she doing? It’s a big risk’. And it was a big risk but I have come out the other side and learned a new skill, met new people.
Shakes-Drayton, who will compete for England at the Commonwealth Games in April, has spent the last few weeks spinning plates to fit everything in.
Asked what she has taken away from the experience, after some careful thought, she says: “I enjoyed every minute of it. It was great fun being with all the other people. I have a lot of memories. Realising that any week I could be going home, I tried not to take it too seriously.
Having lost three years of her career to that serious knee injury in 2013, Shakes-Drayton now switches all her attention back to athletics and the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
Originally selected for the 4x400m squad, Shakes-Drayton has now also been named for the individual 400m, something she is delighted about.
It is impossible not to have great admiration for the way Shakes-Drayton overcame so many setbacks on her comeback before being selected for last year’s IAAF World Championships, almost four years exactly from the date of her last GB vest.
Mercedes-AMG has quite a lot of changes pinned for the S633 and S73e, both of which are under development for now.
Based on recent information it is likely that the Mercedes-AMG S63e will become a plug-in hybrid and the V-12 powered S65 is likely to be replaced by the all new S73e. Both of the new variants will feature a V-8 engine paired with a 4.0-liter twin turbo.
This is without a doubt a powerful combination and was previewed in 2017’s GT Concept, which had generated 805 horsepower.
As for these new variants the company has in mind, it is possible that the S63e will generate 700 horsepower, of which 134 hp will be generated from the electric motor. As for the S73e it is expected to generate a complete horsepower of 805, where 205 hp is being generated from its electric motor.
Given the fact that the current S65 which is powered by a V-12 generates a horsepower of only 621, these new variants are certainly a huge step in performance improvements.
Image Source –IT IS Spring, so of course the mist is lying heavily across the Sidlaw hills and flakes of snow are beginning to fall again in the chill evening air. And there, smiling and beckoning you into the warmth of his home in Newtyle, is a familiar-looking figure.
Up at Tannadice
Framed in woodwork, cool as ice
And keeping out the wolves in his particular way
A smile and a wave
A miraculous save, they say
Out runs Hamish and the ball’s in Invergowrie Bay.
- Hamish (the Goalie), by Michael Marra
Hamish McAlpine is standing within the wooden frame of his front door, rather than a set of old goalposts, the way it once was. Behind him is the not inconsiderable obstacle of Kinpurnie hill, on which sits an unfinished observatory, overlooking Dundee, and beyond. Had this observatory, the building of which began back in the 18th century, ever been completed it might once have been possible to observe the trajectory of balls spinning out of Tannadice and arcing across the Dundee skyline towards Invergowrie Bay, as the song has it.
“Ach dinnae be stupid,” McAlpine gently admonishes his guest. “Invergowrie Bay is miles from Tannadice.”
Another of the great myths attached to McAlpine is that he once booted a ball out of Tannadice and into nearby Dens Park. “Never even tried it”, he says now.
I am preparing for the vague memory I have of McAlpine turning out for Celtic, who face his former club Dundee United tomorrow in a Scottish Cup semi-final, to be kicked, if not quite into Invergowrie Bay, then firmly into touch. But, no.
This one he is happy to confirm, even though Wikipedia, while carrying mention of his outings for the Rossie Priory cricket side, contains no trace of this Celtic connection. After Dundee United, he left for a near-two season spell at Raith Rovers, where he won promotion from the Second Division to the First Division in his first season.
“I stopped about a month before the end of the season,” he recalls. “I thought, right, I am just going to pack it in. I was doing nothing. Then I got a phone call. ‘Can you come to Switzerland, where Celtic are on tour?’”
Pat Bonner had hurt himself playing in the European Championships in Germany, and his understudy, Andy Murdoch, was also injured, while Allen McKnight had departed. “They did not have anyone,” continues McAlpine. “So I got a flight over and played four or five games. Billy McNeill was manager and Tommy Craig was assistant. I had not done anything for three months when I got the call. They said don’t worry about that. Tommy Craig asked me what would I think if I got the chance to sign, and I said, ‘what do you think?’”
McAlpine, who had turned 40 at the start of the year, told him he would jump at the chance. It would have been some swansong. “But big Billy went and got Roughie, who was playing in the States at the time – he was a bit younger than me,” he says. In actual fact Ian Andrews was signed before Alan Rough, but the Englishman endured an horrific afternoon in an Old Firm derby, conceding five goals. And so McNeill turned to Rough.
“I got a signed top at the end of the tour,” recalls McAlpine. “The boys signed an actual strip for me, an outfield jersey. It is in the attic with the rest of the crap.”
Would he have liked to have signed and be given the No 1 shirt at the start of the season, as Celtic sought to defend the title they won in 1988, in the club’s centenary season? “I have never thought about it,” he shrugs. “I suppose it would have been nice. I just went to play for Arbroath, then chucked it after a few months.”
He doesn’t recall exactly why he hung up the gloves, or indeed when. So after 20 years as a professional footballer, you can’t remember which team you played your last game against? “No,” McAlpine replies, and it’s possible to believe him. There is little in his house to suggest that a footballer lives in it. “There was a picture out there in the hall of me and Danny McGrain at the 100th Scottish Cup final. But I don’t think it’s there now,” he admits. That’s not to say he didn’t enjoy being a footballer. He loved it. And when he began to not love it quite so much, he promptly stopped, and ran a bar at the bottom of the Hilltown in Dundee, called, inevitably, The Goalie.
When he played, his enthusiasm was infectious, his eccentricities legend.
He didn’t need to be asked twice to leave his goal-line, rushing to the edge of his box to close down angles, to clear balls from the toes of opposition strikers and, on occasion, scampering all the way up to the other box to take penalties, and, sometimes, scampering all the way back again after having missed.
“Oh God aye, I missed a few – probably as many as I scored,” he says. “I missed one against Celtic, one against Rangers, I missed two against Ayr United in the same game, scored off the rebound with one of them, mind.”
He used to send Jim McLean into a frenzy, not that this was difficult. In his autobiography, Jousting with Giants, McLean writes that McAlpine was the one player who forced him to re-think his entire philosophy on the game. The manager once sent him back from the other side of the world to Dundee because he disobeyed orders during a game against a Japanese Select XI.
McAlpine felt that his natural ability would be hindered from trying to iron out mistakes by going over them again and again, the way the manager wanted him to do.
“Wee Jim probably thought I did not care enough, because I did not like doing the goalkeeping stuff so much in training, and preferred to play out-field,” he says. “He always thought I had to practice. I had to do this, I had to do that. I ruined his thoughts on it. It was the way I was.
“He learned to accept it. Eventually, he did not have me doing goalkeeping stuff all the time, he let me get on with what I wanted to do.
“He saw that what I was saying was right. I kept saying: ‘if you highlight your mistakes, you start to think about them too much’. Your mistakes cannot be hammered