With change needed to ensure lesser followed sports get their time in the spotlight, is it time to abolish the Crown Jewels and ditch the BBC for some coverage?
What I know about aquatics could be scribbled with a waterproof Sharpie on a pair of skimpy Speedos. I do know, though, that swimming is one of the cornerstones of the Olympics, trusted by the IOC to take the place of athletics as the anchor sport in the prestigious final week of the Games at LA28. I know too that if you stick a major champs on terrestrial tele, I’ll be sure to tune in and watch.
The 2025 World Aquatics Championships concluded last weekend in Singapore. If you’re a Brit relying on mainstream media – and especially the BBC – for your sports news, these Worlds will likely have passed you by unnoticed. No TV coverage on the national broadcaster’s platforms and precious few items on the BBC Sport website and app. When I tuned into radio coverage of one evening session on the Beeb’s app, it had just 108 listeners.
For the record, Great Britain sent a squad of 67 athletes to Singapore, finishing 15th in the overall table with five medals across artistic swimming, diving and the races in the pool. Although down on the ten medals GB secured at the Paris 2024 Olympics, there were sufficient strong performances in Singapore to give heart for the team’s three year run into LA.
Aquatics medal table
PositionCountryGoldsTotal Medals1China15372Australia13283USA10324Neutral Athletes6185Germany610………………………………..…..15Great Britain15
Taking a less parochial perspective, China topped the medal table, just as it did in Paris. Australia pushed the United States into third place. In the pool, as across a slew of Olympic and Paralympic sports, the pressure is already building on Team USA to deliver in front of a home crowd primed to celebrate no less than golden success in 2028.
Confronted by the BBC’s decision not to bid for the rights to broadcast Singapore 2025, Aquatics GB deserves enormous credit for securing those rights itself and ensuring live coverage and magazine packages on both its own website and via the Eurovision platform. This was an initiative from an aquatics governing body without precedence globally, and provided comprehensive access for British fans. The tragedy is that it was necessary at all.
A new way forward for the BBC?
Britain’s public service broadcaster has form in shunning aquatics championships, just as it has been scaling back its commitments aggressively across sport. As flagged in last week’s Sport inc., the BBC has not even signed up to show next years’s home Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, where swimming will of course feature prominently once again.
The BBC’s arguments for reducing sports broadcast are well-worn and revolve around the cost-to-eyeballs ratio, plus its ability to turn money spent on dramas and documentaries into income from lucrative worldwide syndication deals – not an option with sport.
For the biggest sports events, subscription channels can elevate broadcast rights deals to levels that drive out the BBC. There is a ‘crown jewels’ list of events, ultimately determined by politicians, which have to be free to access by the British public – from the FA Cup final and Olympics to the Grand National. This ensures that a roster of high profile sporting occasions is available to the Beeb, to do with what it does best. Perhaps, though, it is lower profile competitions that really need politicians’ protection.
Politically challenging
Britain has been investing consistently in Olympic and Paralympic medal hopes since 1996 through National Lottery and Exchequer funding of athletes and the governing bodies that manage their development. UK Sport also pursues an ambitious strategy of securing the right to stage big events on British soil. Successful athletes and events only have societal value, however, if they are highly visible. Surely this is where a public service broadcaster must come in.
Commercial media increasingly pursues a clicks-driven editorial approach. The outcome, understandably if frustratingly, is a handful of sports dominating virtual column inches. We live in a world in which multiple journalists report on a single match for the same platform and ‘colour’ pieces about the dominant sports and clubs crowd out traditional reportage on secondary and tertiary sports. Football, of course, being the most dominant force of all.
These ‘lesser’ sports (for which read nearly all the Olympic and Paralympic ones, but the likes of netball too) find themselves caught in a vicious circle in which reduced coverage effectively guarantees even less in future. And if tomorrow’s potential athletes don’t have sight of these sports today, what’s to ensure they look beyond football in making their sporting choices as youngsters?
The fix is conceptually simple, but politically challenging. Oblige the BBC to deliver a schedule of event coverage across those sports considered of national importance and which are struggling for broadcast oxygen. The iPlayer platform would be a minimum requirement, with highlights packages of key competitions on the Beeb’s main channels.
Beeb debate
I am not so naive as to believe this a cash neutral obligation. However, programming can be financially smarter. As viewers, do we really need so many expensive celebrity pundits and additional footage beyond that automatically supplied by host broadcasters? Some ‘crown jewels’ events can be ceded to other platforms, saving considerable sums. Plus, the National Lottery could be deployed to contribute to costs, turning the current vicious circle into a golden one of athletes-events-viewers-athletes.
If the BBC isn’t open to the debate, then perhaps the ‘crown jewels’ list should be abolished and, in parallel, politicians open a dialogue with Sky and TNT about the provision of broader sports coverage as a quid pro quo for them securing previously unavailable iconic events. They should want to dive in – the water’s lovely.
Ceremonial bump
For many, the Opening Ceremony is the Olympics. The swimming-athletics calendar swap for LA28 is a function of ceremony staging requirements in a venue that will then be converted to host the swimming. World Athletics is parroting the party line, but will surely be nervy about losing its traditional closing week status for future Games.
We are excited to support this visionary timetable change… By prioritising athletics in the first week, the Games will witness the most thrilling of starts – Seb Coe, president of World Athletics.
China in your hand
For an event with a subterranean profile in Britain (and wider), head to Chengdu and The World Games 2025 which starts today. 4,000 athletes taking part in 34 sports from drone racing to wushu, fistball to life saving and tug-of-war.
GB has entries in 15 sports. I can testify that the city’s giant pandas are well worth a visit. No prizes for guessing what one of the two World Games mascots is.
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com