Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance … It is so organized that at all times it is compelled to reproduce the central action which characterizes all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own; two individuals are pitted against eachRead More
In the Rio 2016 gold medal bout of the 80kg taekwondo between Lutalo Muhammad of Great Britain and Cheick Sallah Cisse of Ivory Coast, Muhammad was ahead on points with one second to go. In one second he would win the gold. The clock had been stopped while the athletes got once more into position.Read More
Following on from that post about the value of sport and live television for helping to define what television is, I saw something else to note about the BBC’s coverage of the Rio Olympic Games. The BBC used three terrestrial channels to broadcast Olympic video, plus its website and app – BBC One and BBCRead More
There was an interesting moment in the heat of the Olympic Games coverage on the BBC when the presenter Clare Balding told us to look to at some sport in progress – I think it was the golf – saying “let’s see what he does next”, or words to that effect, as some crucial puttRead More
The Olympic Games will be upon us soon, and I don’t know how I feel about them. It’s not the stories of political corruption, or of state-sponsored drug-taking, or even the mounting absurdities of the Games themselves, but simply that I haven’t got over the last Olympic Games as yet. London 2012 was perfect. WhatRead More
This is one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen, and I’m trying to work out why. It’s the stadium built for the Olympic Games of 1936, held in Berlin, a city that I visited for the first time a couple of weeks ago. The 1936 Games were of course Hitler’s Games, engineered asRead More
I have watched a lot of football in my time. I’ve not been to that many live professional games – four in total. But despite such apparent apathy I have seen hundreds if not thousands of football matches. I have seen them on television screens (from black-and-white era to Smart TVs), I have seen themRead More
I was in Stratford, London, the other day and went for a nostalgic look at the Olympic Park. You’re not allowed into the Park, of course, and a perimeter fence ensures that you keep your distance, but if you got to the top of the John Lewis store at the Westfield shopping centre, they haveRead More
One of the marvels of the Olympic Games of 2012 was the ubiquity of the video coverage. No more was there the experience of Olympic games of years past, when a single television channel covered as much as it could. The BBC delivered 2,400 hours of video over the seventeen days of the Games acrossRead More
I’ve been dreaming of going to the Olympic Games since I was eleven. The 1972 Games were such a thrill, not only for the sports themselves, but for the discovery of Olympic history. My heroes were the Olympians of years past: Ray Ewry, Jim Thorpe, Paavo Nurmi, Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph, Abebe Bikila. I alsoRead More