Olympics

Welcome to the great British summer of no sport. There will be no Wimbledon, no Euro 2020 football, no Open golf and no Olympics, which leaves the sport broadcasters on the canvas.

Punch drunk they may be, but no one is throwing in the towel. The challenge is to fill the hours of telly set aside for sport this summer and to attract the bumper audiences being enjoyed elsewhere on TV during the lockdown.

Live sport has not disappeared entirely – Taiwanese basketball and baseball anyone? – but there is not much of it about.

Eurosport announces launch of three new channels to cover the Winter Olympics at PyeongChang 2018

The Tour De France winner and eight-time Olympic medallist will join a raft of famous faces taking part in the fourth series of the perilous winter sport contest, held in Austria.

This year’s competition could be the toughest yet, as a large number of sports personalities are due to take to the slopes.

They include former England Rugby Captain Jason Robinson OBE, former England footballer Robbie Fowler, Olympic medallists Louis Smith and Jade Jones and Paralympic medallist Kadeena Cox.

My week starts at BBC Sport HQ in Salford at what is a very exciting time – the Olympics are under way. I walk to our ground-floor operation, where the BBC Breakfast set has been relocated for 17 days so that we can bring viewers all of the action from the previous night.

Join a morning conference call with colleagues in London before starting a day of back-to-back meetings, both with colleagues in Salford and liaising with those in Brazil – the four-hour time difference can make for a very long day.

On 27 August, 2,000 sports clubs across the country will open their doors to the public in celebration of the UK's biggest ever sports day as regular couch potatoes are urged to go outside and get some exercise.

As the London 2012 Olympics concluded, the overwhelming emotion for the vast army of BBC executives, consumed for years by a project on the grandest of scales, was relief at a job well done.

Barbara Slater, the Director of BBC Sport, likes to bang the drum for digital. Even so, last year she found the time to blog on the corporation’s website just six times.

Four of those six posts apologetically explained why the BBC had been forced to cede flagship rights and was likely to make further cuts in the future.

The posts unpicked why the BBC, after six decades, had to surrender Open golf and also give up on a, perhaps vainglorious, bid to roll back the years by making the Beeb the exclusive home of Formula 1.

Are we on the threshold of another television revolution similar to the introduction of colour or multichannel? There is a lot of excitement around virtual reality in show business and media circles. But can broadcasters successfully deploy VR – or will it turn out to be as ephemeral as the recent commotion over 3DTV?

Discovery Communications has revealed a number of appointments at Eurosport who will support the company’s Olympic Games Strategy.

In June it was announced that Discovery had been awarded the European TV and multiplatform broadcast rights to the 2018-2024 Olympic Games.

The coverage will be overseen by an Olympic Games leadership organisation team. Three of the five team members were announced this week, with Jean-Thierry Augustin leading Commercialisation, David Schafer heading up Operations and Planning and Géraldine Filiol directing Olympic Relations and Coordination.

Since taking command at Discovery Communications in 2007, David Zaslav has conquered the world. The US giant now operates in 230 countries – and is still expanding.

Eurosport was added to its roster of channels in 2014 and the rights to the Olympics Games nabbed this summer.

“We are a global company and more global than any other media company in the world. We have more employees outside the US than we do in the US. We make more money outside the US,” said Zaslav.