A year later she married and became Liz McColgan, under which name she would go on to become a record-breaking world champion, Olympic silver medallist and one of Britain's most popular athletes. She was so popular that in 1991, the year after she retained her Commonwealth Games title, she won the coveted BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.

In those troubled Edinburgh Games, which were almost derailed by a political boycott that left 1,500 athletes at home, McColgan was Scotland's only gold medallist in athletics.

She had plenty of support from the public but not, she felt, from Scotland's sports authorities, as she had been to the United States on a scholarship and had no financial help from her own country.

Life had been hard for McColgan from her childhood in Dundee.

She was brought up in a block of flats in Whitfield, a tough area where one of her neighbours said after her victory: "That'll show them there's more than criminal records come out Whitfield."

Years later McColgan said that without her love of athletics, and the encouragement of her PE teacher at school and her first coach Harry Bennett, she would not have had a good life.

"I would probably be on the dole, I would be smoking and drinking," she said.

"That is the lifestyle I came from, and I still have family members with that lifestyle.

"I was very lucky that I chose a different path from many other members of my family.

"I do not hide where I came from, because it is part of me."

As for that race in Edinburgh, McColgan said she never experienced anything like it again in a career that lasted nearly two decades.

She had returned from the US, where she broke records in college athletics on her scholarship, to train for the Commonwealth Games on her own.

Her coach Bennett, who died while she was in the US, had always told her she would make a great 10,000m runner - even though there was no such distance for women at the time. 

It had never been on the programme at the Commonwealth Games before, and McColgan said: "I wasn't a favourite or anything.

"I thought it would just be like running at your local track but the exact opposite happened.

"I was the most nervous I've ever been for a race.

"It felt as if every single person in the stadium was shouting my name, it was so personal.

"The hairs stood up on my neck while I was running.

"I never experienced the same atmosphere at any other championships."

McColgan won by 70 metres, then she lost a bet on the podium.

Two of her fellow runners had bet her she would cry at the medal ceremony.

"I didn't think I would, but the crowd were something else and Scotland the Brave sounded so wonderful," she said.

"It was so overwhelming, totally unbelievable.

"I could never, ever relive that moment."