Category: Sport
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Olympics Day 2 – Basketball
Another early start for me, and my first visit to the Olympic Park for a couple of matches in the preliminary men’s basketball rounds. Since the session started at 9am, I took seriously the “get there two hours early” suggestion, and found myself in St Pancras International at about 7am. By 7.20am I was in…
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Olympics Day 1 – Men’s Road Race
Up early today for the first Olympic action with the Men’s Road Race departing from Central London at 10am. I got to Richmond Park an hour ahead of that and roughly twenty minutes’ later, the peleton arrived. They weren’t really racing at that point, and looked like a big colourful cycling club out for a…
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Olympics – The Torch Relay
Warning: There’s probably going to be a bit of Olympics coverage in this blog over the next couple of weeks! Well it was only around the corner, and I was coming back from a meeting anyway, so I had to join the massed ranks of office workers, shop workers, and tourists who came out to…
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BBC Olympic Deal
The BBC has just announced that it’s signed a new deal with the IOC for the next four summer and winter games through to the 2020 games in a city that has yet to be announced. It’s not immediately clear how much the BBC has paid, but This was an interesting deal because of a…
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The Premier League’s £3bn Deal
First of all – wow! I mean WOW! £3bn for the new Premier League rights. A 71% increase on the 2010/11 – 2012/3 deal. In the current economic climate, that has to be a spectacular result for the Premier League, and its clubs. But I just wanted to address what it means for all the…
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Sport on TV – Racing
Channel 4 has just done a deal with the Racecourse Media Group to become the exclusive free-to0air broadcaster of horse racing of all forms of horse racing in the UK. At first glance, it’d seem to be a good deal, with Channel 4 picking up the rights to prestigious events such as the Grand National,…
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Olympic Stadium and Velodrome
At the weekend, I was lucky enough to get along to a day of the UCI Track World Cup series in the new Olympic Velodrome as part of the London Prepares series. Lots of photos to come. But in the meantime, the buildings looked stunning – the velodrome in particular.
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US Sport on BBC Radio
A few days ago, the BBC press office put out a press release detailing some of their US sport coverage. In particular, coverage of Major League Baseball’s World Series, and NFL coverage ahead of the International Series game at Wembley as well as other regular season games. The sport is broadcast on Five Live Sports…
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F1 on Television
The news that the BBC is sharing Formula 1 rights with Sky leaves me personally unperturbed. While some of the rule changes introduced in recent years do seem to have led to some actual over-taking, other forms of motorsport seem more interesting, and seem less like engineering competitions. However, my own ambivalence towards the “sport”…
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Following Le Tour
No. Sadly, I don’t mean spending large parts of July in a camper van driving between the Pyrenees and the Alps, joining the multi-national throngs clinging to the mountainsides. I mean following the Tour, on-air and online. Assuming that you’re not “available to view” during the daytime on weekdays, your first decision is whether to…
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“Crisis? What Crisis?”
Fifa is in a mess. I have no love for the organisation, yet I love football. I’ve read Andrew Jennings’ books, follow the reports, and have seen how the organisation essentially looks after itself with little real concern for the planet’s most popular sport. It’s a personal fiefdom for the likes of Sepp Blatter as…
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Radio Silence
Warning – football rant coming… How petulant exactly is Sir Alex Ferguson? He’s like a spoilt child in his refusal to talk to anybody in the media before or after his matches, ever since he got in trouble following comments he made to both Sky and his in-house channel MUTV. It’s the utter lack of…
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The Business of Football
I’m still coming down from an excpetional Wednesday night that saw Arsenal overcome a 1-0 defecit to win beat Barcelona, easily the best team in the world, 2-1. As I sit there dreaming about how Arsenal might maintain that lead in the much tougher return fixture in the Nou Camp a fortnight from now, I’ve…