On the day that David Wilkie, who has died of cancer aged 70, won an Olympic swimming gold medal in Montreal in 1976, he was the first British man to do so since Henry Taylor 68 years earlier.
Expectations for him were high: as a teenager, he had won Olympic silver for the 200m breaststroke in Munich in 1972, and the following year became world champion. In Montreal he delivered, beating the world record in the same event by three seconds – a country mile by swimming standards.
