This week, after 35 years on air, the word ‘Eurosport’ will vanish from our electronic programme guides. Officially, it’s simply being repackaged as part of TNT Sports, but it nevertheless marks the end of an era in the United Kingdom for a classic name in sports broadcasting.
Eurosport always felt like the underdog: a relatively low-budget operation, sometimes lacking enough channels for the sheer amount of live sport it attempted to broadcast. Much of it, of course, was about other sports, and in recent years its football offering has been meagre. But in the glory days, Eurosport was a hugely invaluable source for world football fans, showing live Serie A, highlights from Europe’s major leagues, and all manner of international tournaments. It was also a leader in women’s football coverage.
Here’s the story of Eurosport’s football offering over the last 35 years, told by some of the people involved.
James Richardson (assistant producer 1989-92; presenter, 2003-12)
Jurriaan van Wessem (director/producer 1989-2006)
Amy Lawrence (commentator/co-commentator, 1995-96)
Tim Caple (commentator, 1996-)
David Astorga (producer, 1998-04)
Dave Farrar (commentator, 1999-2008)
Wayne Boyce (commentator, 2000-)
Andy Bodfish (commentator 2002-)
Dan O’Hagan (commentator 2003-21)
Lucy Ward (pundit/co-commentator 2005-24)
In the age of easily accessible highlights, news and opinions from around the world via the internet, it’s difficult to explain how unique Eurosport’s football coverage was. In an era where the focus was almost entirely on the British game, Eurosport opened up global football to British viewers. Part of the charm was that the footage was broadcast to nearly every country in Europe simultaneously, which was somewhat unique upon its launch.
James Richardson: My first job in TV was commentating on an American football match, bizarrely, and through that experience I got put in touch with this guy who was recruiting for Eurosport, which was this new channel that Sky was setting up with the European Broadcasting Union. Sky existed as a cable channel, but 1989 is when they launched Sky News. They didn’t have Sky Sports, they just had Eurosport as their sports channel. The logic was pretty simple: the EBU had a bunch of sports rights they never used, so it was almost a showcase for unlimited amounts of all this sport they had, and they could put it out — pretty much — for free. So I got a job there as an assistant producer in 1989.
Jurriaan van Wessem: It was a joint venture with the EBU and Sky, but in 1991 there was a court case that it said it wasn’t legal according to European law.
Richardson: They ruled it was a breach of competition rules for the EBU to run this channel with all these rights, so they essentially had to divorce from Sky.
Van Wessem: Sky had to sell their part of it to TF1 in France, which was really a commercial channel… but it was officially state-owned. That was the difference.
Richardson: It closed down tragically with a goodbye montage accompanied by Waiting For That Day by George Michael. Then Eurosport went off to Paris, and the EBU started it as its proper standalone sports channel.
Dan O’Hagan: I think Eurosport had a place in people’s hearts because it was football you didn’t see on other channels, and you got to see these weird and wonderful teams.
Andy Bodfish: Eurosport gained this cult following with us geeks who would just watch any football. Or any sport.
Wayne Boyce: It was the go-to place for stuff nobody else showed like Copa America, the Africa Cup of Nations. I was always really into world football and it’s like, ‘Oh, I wonder if Eurosport show that’, and more often than not, they did.
Tim Caple: We used to do massive highlights shows of UEFA Cup games, internationals, everything. Without a shadow of a doubt, it was ahead of its time. No one was interested in European football when I started at Eurosport. No one was that fussed. You’d get a few people interested in Italian football over here, but the level of knowledge was nothing. We were bringing people football from all over world.
Fernando Couto of Parma in action in 1995 (Allsport UK /Allsport)
Dave Farrar: It was before European football got really sexy in this country, it was still a bit niche. I don’t think I realised how special it was to people. It’s only now, people always talk to me about it. I felt we were a little gang, the viewers and commentators, we brought this different world. If we could get more and more people caring about Rennes and Strasbourg and Fiorentina and Venezia, the world’s a better place.
Richardson: The adverts were part of the experience. That added to the otherworldliness of it all. You’d just get adverts for ‘Visit Austria’, things like that.
Farrar: It moved me quite a lot recently when a guy got in touch and said, ‘I was a child of Eurogoals’. That really meant a lot to me.
Eurogoals. For football fans, the most legendary aspect of Eurosport was its Eurogoals programme, broadcast on Monday evenings, which showed highlights of matches from all across the continent — to people all across the continent. The leagues varied from season to season, depending upon broadcast rights. The French, Dutch and Portuguese leagues were particular staples, and Italy, Germany and Spain featured too, in the glory years. It was a one-stop shop for everything that had happened around Europe. The commentators had the tough task of providing a voiceover for dozens of matches, generally without having seen the footage beforehand. Their voiceovers went out live.
Van Wessem: I was the producer-director from 1993. The previous producer of football was good, but he was a friend of (disgraced Marseille president) Bernard Tapie. When the Marseille scandal broke out, he wanted to ignore it, and I said no! There was a big argument in the office, and I took over. I can’t say I invented Eurogoals, but I made a real pan-European programme. I did the job until World Cup 1998, when Christian Prudhomme (the current director of the Tour de France) became the head of football. He’s a good guy. But it was only because the World Cup was in France that he was interested in football!
The current director of the Tour de France, Christian Prudhomme, worked at Eurosport (JULIEN DE ROSA/AFP/Getty Images)
David Astorga: We had the feeling that we were working in a big show because it was seen all over Europe. Maybe now that doesn’t seem so unusual today, but I was very proud to work on Eurogoals because when you go abroad, people knew it. People could be in any country in Europe and see it.
Van Wessem: When I was a schoolboy, I was thinking of this kind of programme already, taking in the big leagues because, for a Dutch guy, I followed the French and Italian leagues, but we could only ever see results in the newspapers, never the television pictures of the teams, except in the European Cup. When I went to study in Italy, I found out that Italian television brought the rights to nearly every league, and it was great to experience that. It was called Europa Goals.
And before Eurosport, I’d worked for La Gazzetta dello Sport on the international desk. I always wanted to make a programme like this, on radio, speaking about international football. And then I got the chance to do it with television. I said I wanted to make a real programme. Let’s start with the Spanish league, then the French league, then Dutch, then Portuguese, then Belgian… sometimes we had the Greek league and Turkish league, and the Turkish league was very popular because of all the Turkish migrants around Europe that wanted to watch their league.
Boyce: Before I even dreamt I would work there, a lot of my Monday nights were watching the Premier League game on Sky and then flicking over for Eurogoals afterwards. To actually end up working on Eurogoals was unbelievable for me, because it was such a cult programme for me and my mates.
Where else could you enjoy Belgian football in the 1990s? (Tim De Waele/Getty Images)
Caple: When I first started there in 1996, Eurogoals was 90-minute show on Monday nights. Archie Macpherson did it every week, then it was me and Angus Loughran — Statto from Fantasy Football.
Farrar: The programme was cut to go out in every country. There was a central hub in Paris, and it was voiced in dozens of languages, because Eurosport was going out in 35 countries or whatever. Everyone would fly in from their respective countries. They brought the Dutch, the Germans, and the UK to voice it in Paris.
Caple: You’d fly into Paris, and there was all of us commentators — Dutch, German, Belgian, Spanish, French, us — all in a line, all talking at the same time.
Boyce: If you weren’t commentating, and you stood in that room, you’d hear the countdown go from 10 to zero as the programme was about to go on air, and when it hit zero, you’d hear the ‘Hello and welcome!’ in about 10 languages all at the same time. It was like a magic moment, hearing all those people broadcasting the same thing but in their own languages.
Farrar: The Dutch commentators had a whiff of insanity about them. The Germans, I was told one of them had been a Stasi informant! We would sit in open commentary booths with these small dividers between us… you would be describing a goal by Jay-Jay Okocha, and you would hear a Dutch voice shouting something — presumably the same thing in Dutch — and then “Jay-Jay Okochaaaa”.
Bodfish: I was living in Paris. The show was about two hours, and we had all the leagues. Some weekends we’d have, say the Lisbon derby and then PSV vs Ajax. It was a dream.
Caple: There was no internet, so there was this amazing sharing of information. And I realised how differently the Europeans watched football, what they talked about. Listening to them talking about tactics and formations — I thought, ‘Christ, we only do 4-4-2.’ I found their journalists knew a hell of a lot more than almost anyone who wrote about our game. It was a different level. No wonder we were a bit backward.
Farrar: You would often get scripts — just the clips and the list of who scored the goals — at the very last minute. Sometimes it would arrive during the programme.
Caple: The idea was that they’d arrive before programme started — there were occasions where they didn’t — you’d get a script, most of the time, but you’d never seen the tape. Ever.
Bodfish: I remember myself, watching it in the early 1990s. I’d be listening to Angus Loughran, Statto. He’d be describing a goal… but it wasn’t a goal, it would come back off the crossbar… and then later I realised why, because there was so much material that you didn’t have a chance to look through. It’s not post-production, you literally sit in a booth and do a magazine show as it’s going out live. And chunks of the programme would be being edited after the show had already started. When Eurogoals came on at 5pm, they wouldn’t have finished cutting, say, the Italian league — they’d just bolt that on. You’d just be winging it.
Van Wessem: The English and the Dutch commentators were the easiest because they knew how to improvise. The Germans, they wanted it all written out, but that just wasn’t possible. We had some very good commentators, including your colleague Amy Lawrence, who I think was the first female commentator in the UK.
Amy Lawrence: It was a fantastic show. What probably helped was that when I first started doing journalism, it was unusual to have an interest in European football. I was a nerd. I’d grown up reading L’Equipe and France Football and I had slightly more of an interest than the majority of English football journalists in what was going on elsewhere. There was so little coverage that if you had language skills and you used to read the foreign press, and go and watch matches abroad like I did, it was a real help. It felt amazingly glamorous to be popping off to Paris for a day to go to the studio.
Van Wessem: Some tapes were brought in from around Europe. The French league just came from the Canal+ studios in Paris. The Dutch league, it was a commentator bringing them over from Amsterdam to Paris, and the same with Belgium. Some were via satellite — we got most of the La Liga footage from the Spanish league, but the footage from Betis, Sevilla and Malaga always came an hour later, from Andalusian television. It was chaotic. Eurosport in general was quite chaotic.
Caple: The tapes were being edited, and the first time you’d see them was when you went on air. It got better in the later days, someone said, “Wouldn’t it be better if we saw the bloody tape?”
Farrar: We would have to get the physical tape — “Has anyone seen the French tape?!” — and have to share it with the Dutch and the Germans and the French. These days, it’s all digital. To be fair, I’d have watched the French round-up show on French television on a Sunday night, as they showed all of the goals. So I’d know that Marco Simone had scored a worldie, but I wouldn’t have seen our edit of the game.
Marco Simone celebrating a goal, possibly a worldie (Eric Cabansi/AFP via Getty Images)
Caple: You wouldn’t do commentary, as such. You couldn’t go from Ajaccio v Le Havre in reportage, then PSG v Rennes in commentary…
Bodfish: Sometimes it would be five-minute highlights of a game. There was always a debate about whether that was long enough to do a spoof commentary.
Farrar: My boss at Eurosport called it ‘aggressive reportage’. It’s not scripted, and it’s not a spoof commentary. Eurogoals is somewhere in between — we never had time to write it. I’d know the score, the goals, the setup line — ‘Rennes went to Strasbourg hoping for the three points’ — and if there had been an early goal, I’d guess that would be the first highlight. And then at the end, you have an ‘out’ line. But that was it; otherwise, you were flying blind. You have to realise that the tense should stay the same. You can’t switch from past tense to present tense. People who weren’t used to it would switch tenses… but if you had to voice seven matches from Ligue 1, it is quite hard.
Caple: Sometimes the scripts were wrong. You’d inject sentences to buy yourself time when something appeared that you weren’t expecting. “Er, well, as you can see here…”
Bodfish: The scripts were written by French people who spoke excellent English, but when they were rushing to do scripts on every league, it wasn’t always reliable.
Astorga: We had to work in English — that was something new for me, so we had to learn the vocabulary in English football, and to be understood by the commentators.
Farrar: Once, the script said there was a striker who had missed a match because they’d ‘injured their uncle’. It was actually their ankle.
Nostalgia for the glory days of Serie A understandably focuses on Football Italia. But towards the end of the Channel 4 era, its regular Sunday 2pm timeslot offered only games between mid-table sides. When that show ended in 2002, after a half-season without any coverage, Eurosport bought the rights to Serie A — and showed the big evening matches live.
Richardson: It was many years after my first spell when I crossed paths with Eurosport again. I’d come back to England. Football Italia on Channel 4 stopped in 2002. They’d said they didn’t want to show live games, they just wanted to show the highlights and they offered what they felt was an adequate compensation for highlights. The Italian league said, ‘No, we’re not interested in that, we can sell these rights somewhere else’. Six months later, and they had absolutely no offers whatsoever. So they went to Eurosport and said, ‘Would you like some Italian football?’
Farrar: When British Eurosport got the Serie A rights for the UK, that was a dream come true for me. Suddenly, we could show UK audiences the Milan derby, the Derby d’Italia, the Rome derby… it was an amazing thing to be part of.
Roma coach Fabio Capello, pictured in April 2003 (Grazia Neri/Getty Images)
Richardson: Football Italia was always at Sunday 2pm, but they weren’t the prime games any more, by the end. So it was good in that sense, that we were showing loads of Italian football, and really good games — and sometimes we’d get the money to go out and do little features in Italy, which we put into our coverage before the game started.
Farrar: I’m not a Roma fan, but that team with Francesco Totti and Antonio Cassano was my favourite. Not the best team, but amazing to watch at times.
Richardson: It was a good time. We had Marcello Lippi’s second Juventus team, that era… there was always a nice feeling at Eurosport. Amid the bombastic Richard Keys-era Sky Sports, they were very much a friendly, slightly more homeopathic-feeling sports outlet.
Farrar: For me to ‘sell’ the league I’d always loved, the one that makes your heart beat faster, to be the voice of that, it was a dream come true, the ultimate buzz… well, the ultimate buzz would be to be there. But I was in a studio in Slough.
That brings us to a crucial part of Eurosport. Although the commentators were sometimes at the games, usually they were at a studio in Paris, or later — in the British Eurosport days — in a business park on the outskirts of London. The challenge for the commentators was to replicate the intensity of being at the games.
Caple: You didn’t say that you weren’t there. You left it to people’s imaginations.
Farrar: My rule is always: never say you’re there, but never say you’re not. Then you haven’t lied. This is something I learned through Eurosport. I want to try and behave as if I’ve woken up where the game is being played. I’ve got the newspaper coverage from that country, to get into the soul of it — that’s more important than knowing how many goals the centre-forward has scored — which of course I will make sure I know as well. Everywhere I happen to travel to, I go to the stadium — so that if I’m ever doing a game ‘from’ there in future, I’ll have details. I’ll mention the name of a bar nearby the ground. The ability to scene-set is really important.
Caple: How many times did we have no teamsheets for Africa Cup of Nations games? For the first game, you might have a squad list. You’d have a list of 23 players, and you’d be sitting there with a pen marking down the players. When you got to the second game, you’d have a formation from the first game, that made it easier.
Van Wessem: These days they have squad numbers, but back in the early days they wore 1-11. It would sometimes take a long time to work it out. Who is the No 11?
Farrar: Team news was often an issue. We used to get the team news faxed from the stadium — it wasn’t a photo taken with a mobile like now — people would be standing by a fax machine waiting on team news from Nigeria v Benin. There weren’t always shirt numbers… if two goals go in in the first 10 minutes, you’re in trouble. So many times I thought, ‘What have I done?’ I’m pretending to be at this game. I have no idea what’s going on. People must think I am the worst commentator ever.
O’Hagan: I remember doing a World Cup qualifier, North Korea against Saudi Arabia from Pyongyang. No teamsheet came. And there wasn’t much information about North Korea out there…
Bodfish: Not getting teamsheets, that would happen on a regular basis. I did a World Cup qualifier once, they gave me the wrong teams. I’m doing North Korea v Indonesia here, you’ve given me Bahrain v Jordan! And you’d always be at the mercy of the host broadcaster for pictures.
Boyce: Once, I was commenting on a women’s match and the guy that was on the main camera… well, in the background of the picture was a cow having a pee. And for whatever reason, the cameraman just zoomed in on it at kick-off for the second half. It was an unbelievable piece of directing.
Farrar: From a certain point, we did have the internet, but it was nothing compared to now. In a way that’s a blessing — as long as you know more than your viewers, you’re OK.
Caple: No internet meant there wasn’t the opportunity for people to vent their views! People were just happy to see the games.
The Eurosport TV channel studio, in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, pictured in July 1999. (Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images)
Eurosport provided extensive coverage of international tournaments from around the world — the Asian Cup, the Copa America, the Gold Cup and, perhaps most memorably, the Africa Cup of Nations. It was also the place to see the stars of the future, with youth tournaments screened extensively.
O’Hagan: The Africa Cup of Nations was a Eurosport staple, and I must have done five tournaments or so for them. They were magical, they felt so exotic. Just to do those games, those names, those players, the sounds of stadiums. It was so exciting to be a part of, and I think that came across.
Bodfish: The Cup of Nations was great to work on, some really fun football. My favourite game was a Cup of Nations quarter-final in 2015. Congo were 2-0 up against DR Congo, who came back to win 4-2. But sometimes for the Africa Cup of Nations, the camera would be miles away from the pitch…
Farrar: There was a big incident in the Cup of Nations final of 2000, which went to penalties. One of the Nigeria players, Victor Ikpeba, hit the underside of the bar, it bounced out, and we couldn’t work out whether it had been given or not. And then (Cameroon’s) Rigobert Song steps up — and I didn’t know whether it was to win the AFCON or not!
My co-commentator didn’t know either. I said something generic, then he scored, everyone went mad, so then I went mad and I got away with it. But the German commentator guessed! He said it was to win it. What would he have done if he’d got it wrong?! There was a big argument about that one…
O’Hagan: I did the under-17s, under-20s, the number of world-class players that I first saw on Eurosport at 17 or 18 in these youth tournaments was amazing.
Caple: We saw Leo Messi! Before anyone knew who he was, we’d seen him.
Farrar: One thing Eurosport did was to provide a platform for this stuff, like the under-20 tournaments. I didn’t get why FIFA and UEFA didn’t understand that. Where do you see those tournaments now? Is the world a better place now Eurosport don’t show the Cup of Nations? We all really cared about it. It wasn’t another job. We really cared. We’d really try to do our research on the Solomon Islands Under-17 team.
Boyce: Women’s Champions League would be on it. Women’s Euros, Women’s World Cup, under-17s, under-20s, everything, all the major youth tournaments. You knew it would be there on Eurosport, but now it’s here, there and everywhere, isn’t it? It makes it a lot more difficult. It was the go-to place.
Caple: We did the Asian Cup, the Asian Champions, Japanese League… you could be commentating two games in a row from different countries. You could be doing a J-League game, then women’s football from Germany straight after.
Lionel Messi in action at the FIFA World Youth Under-21 Championship in 2005 (Aris Messinas/AFP via Getty Images)
In recent years, women’s football has finally started to receive serious coverage on mainstream television channels. But for years, the only place you’d see the women’s game was on Eurosport.
Lawrence: Eurosport had coverage of the 1995 Women’s World Cup final, and they thought it would be quite nice to get a female co-commentator. I’d only been a journalist at FourFourTwo for a year. I was asked if I fancied doing some commentary — I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I thought I’d give it a go. I was totally unprepared, and I was commentating in a glorified cupboard alongside Angus Loughran, Statto, who I’d watched on Fantasy Football in his dressing gown. We didn’t even have a lineup when the game started, and we were watching this tiny little monitor. Women’s football was light years away from where it is now. Very few people globally knew that there was a Women’s World Cup final on, let alone actually watched it.
Farrar: They had the FIFA and UEFA age-group contracts, so we did the under-20 World Cups, the Toulon tournament — that was very Eurosport. That’s how the women’s football thing developed, as we’d have the under-20 and under-17s women’s. I remember commenting on Arsenal Women in Europe, talking about Alex Scott. My fact for her was always saying how she started out as a centre-forward, then shifted to right-back.
O’Hagan: They were the first real champions of women’s football. I got to do women’s games for the first time at Eurosport, for the World Cup in 2003. Eurosport were mocked for having this low-rent approach, but they gave women’s football its place. They treated it with respect and credence, and, of course, it’s now all over other channels. But the first to do that was Eurosport. It gave women’s football a platform.
Caple: No one wanted the women’s games. It’s incredible how that’s exploded. People used to literally laugh at it. “What are you doing? What you showing that for?” I did Emma Hayes’ first game doing co-commentary, when she was at Arsenal, before she went to the US. We had the likes of Lucy Ward and Sue Smith. We watched how the sport developed.
Lucy Ward: In 2005, England were hosting the Euros and I was playing at Leeds alongside Sue Smith. She didn’t get in the England squad and was devastated about it. Eurosport asked her to do some punditry work for them, but she’d already said yes to the BBC, so recommended me. I’d done a bit of radio stuff, and I was a teacher, so I could speak in front of people. So there I was with Matt Smith, being a pundit on the Euros.
Eurosport were the first ones to use me. At that stage, I was commentating on my peers. I played against these people, I knew them. So whenever it was England, it was fantastic. Whenever I see Tim Caple, I make such a fuss of him… the work he put in, he’s a legend, with his Monsters Of Rock voice.
O’Hagan: Jen O’Neill, who edited SheKicks magazine for years and years, was an excellent co-commentator on women’s football, a real trailblazer who bought a depth of knowledge to these games, because when I first did the women’s games there wasn’t any information out there. People like Jen and Emma Hayes, they were lifesavers to us. They knew the players, they knew the backstories, and they brought these games to life.
Ward: Jen never gets mentioned anywhere as a pioneer in terms of broadcasting and writing about women’s football. She trudged a really lonely path.
Farrar: I used to sit with Jen and watch so many talents of the future. And we had the women’s Euros live when Germany were at their best, with Birgit Prinz up front. It was quite pioneering. I used to get really annoyed with how dismissive people were about women’s football. It’s great where it is now.
Ward: Eurosport always had women’s football on. I think it’s real credit to them: they never shied away from it. If they could get the rights — which probably didn’t cost that much back then — they showed it. That was it: put women’s football out there. That’s my overriding memory of them, being real leaders in the broadcast of women’s football.
Germany’s Birgit Prinz at the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 (Doug Pensinger/ALLSPORT)
One of the frustrating (at the time) but glorious (in hindsight) aspects was that you could never entirely be certain that the advertised Eurosport schedule was exactly what would be broadcast, because of the complexity of covering a huge number of different sports, some of which were only popular in certain parts of Europe and you’d probably never previously encountered. In the days where certain sports have dedicated Sky channels, this was the polar opposite (polar being the optimum word, considering how often they showed the biathlon, which combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting).
Boyce: It was always one of those channels, when you were up late at night, you’d go, ‘Let’s see what’s on Eurosport’, and it would be the race up the Eiffel Tower or something, and you’d be like, ‘This is amazing.’
O’Hagan: There was always a danger you might get called in, and be told the commentator for the luge hasn’t turned up — ‘On you go!’ I remember seeing trailers on Eurosport 2 for things like log cutting, and tractor pulling.
Caple: If somebody was late, the coordinator would ask you go in and start the programme. One day, I ended up doing sumo wrestling.
Astorga: Ski jumping. I didn’t know anything about ski jumping.
Boyce: My first break on the main channel was a programme called Thunderbox. It was a boxing evening, but with a hip-hop background. I was a breakdancer and a bit of a hip-hop DJ on local radio at the time, so my two loves came together. There was also the table football world championships, we showed that.
I also commentated on surfing, and the sea went flat and there were no waves, so we had 25 minutes on air with no surfing, which was fun.
Richardson: I did NHL for them, American football, definitely biathlon, handball… oh, and Russian football, which is when I first encountered (Football Italia commentator) Gary Bloom.
Van Wessem: Wall climbing. Tell me the rules, then I can do it! You have to adapt.
Caple: I did saloon car racing. I’d be trying to remember the pronunciation of names from the video games I’d played. If you could commentate there, on any given sport, you could go anywhere.
Farrar: Having gone from high-production standards at BBC World Service, I didn’t get it at all when I first went there… I just didn’t get it. And then I realised: it was just about being live all the time. Why are we going to the football 20 mins late? Someone would shout, “They’re about to decide the gold medal at the skiing!” Why aren’t there slick studios? “Because we don’t really care about that, we just want to show live sport!” It took me a while but then I realised, they’re right. That’s what people wanted. Live sport. Live, live, live.
Caple: It was always based upon getting as much live stuff as possible in. They just wanted to get it on, because it could be something incredible. It’s better to have some coverage than none at all. The Olympics was the best for it. I walked into doing some basketball once. “We need someone to go and do the last eight minutes of the basketball match!” What game is it? “The gold medal match.” OK, f***ing hell. How many points do they get when they score a hoop?
Farrar: Once I’d finished a football match, and I got yelled at to go downstairs and do tennis, and I was petrified about that… for all that I said earlier about newspapers, and feeling like you’re there… I just went downstairs with a sheet of stats and reeled them off.
Caple: You’d carry around a massive encyclopaedia. Results, history, stories. Walk in, sit down, put the headphones on, and, “The Americans are in the final for the fourth time in five years, who can forget that epic battle with the Russians…” For the Sydney Olympics in 2000, we suddenly switched to the shooting, I was doing it, and we had the live commentary of the second Team GB gold medal of that Games. The BBC didn’t. We could do stuff like that. Or the Winter Olympics. The BBC had Ski Sunday for one hour, but we had wall-to-wall coverage.
Farrar: In the Winter Olympics, we were thrown in on everything. You’d turn up and be asked to call the gold-medal event in the curling. Even on football, five years in a row, we used to show ‘Michael Schumacher and Friends’ versus a world all-star team. I had no idea who all the Swiss celebrities were. I never had to fill in on monster trucks, annoyingly.
Biathlon was a perennial favourite on Eurosport (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
Bodfish: Most commentators are happy doing a range of sports if we’re with an expert co-commentator, an ex-player who knows the nuances of the sport. I did swimming and weightlifting. The less technical sports. I mean, I’m not saying weightlifting’s not technical, but, with the best will in the world… has he lifted it or not lifted it?
Boyce: What was unusual was that they had Simon Reed, a ‘head of commentary’, a very rare position for a broadcaster. He did a tremendous job of putting together expert co-commentators. He always found the best person.
Caple: The first time I did the 100 metres, I had 15 minutes’ notice. Either you just shut up, or you made a fist of it and called the winner. I was so pleased I’d called the 1-2-3 in the right order, that I sort of missed the fact Maurice Greene had just set a world record…
Richardson: I really enjoyed doing the Tour de France, because that’s such a magnificent event. But it takes so long to watch it that you need to be either unemployed to watch it, or employed to watch it. I mean, I’ve seen both sides of that.
And, without wishing to overdo it, there was always a gloriously shambolic quality to Eurosport — it sometimes felt like you were watching a home-taped VHS rather than a continental broadcasting giant. Perhaps the strangest aspect was its ‘WATTS’ programme — a compilation of funny moments from various sports, soundtracked by carefully (if somewhat sarcastically) chosen music choices. It was the closest thing to TikTok on television 20 years ago.
O’Hagan: Eurosport had a very unique way of editing. On Match of the Day, they will cut the highlights and include the best action, and make it look like a continuous feed. Eurosport didn’t do that, to save time. They would just cut chunks of games: kick-off to minute 15, then minute 25 to minute 35, that kind of thing. Usually they didn’t miss the best bits, but for the Champions League final highlights in 2008, they missed the first goal… it was a very eccentric way of doing things.
Richardson: In my first spell there, it was all done with tapes, like big physical tapes, so you would have things like a young assistant producer — like myself — putting the tapes on pause during an ice hockey match so as not to record 20 minutes of them resurfacing the ice, then forgetting to take it off pause and missing the period that had all the goals.
Bodfish: Eurosport has never changed. It’s always been a bit Keystone Cops.
Farrar: It had a bit of chaos about it, and that suits my personality. It wasn’t award-winning television, but maybe there’s not enough of that these days. Once they accidentally showed a second half before a first half. So the floodlights went off halfway through. But it was 0-0, so not many people noticed.
Caple: The sun came up midway through! There was also an international tournament game that went to penalties. They booked the satellite feed for 120 minutes, to take into account extra time, but they hadn’t added the extra 10 minutes in case it went to penalties. So we went to the shootout, and the picture goes down.
Richardson: There was one incident doing the bobsleigh with Stuart Storey on commentary. We’d missed the crucial second run, and our American producer went, ‘Oh that’s OK, we’ll just put out the first run again, and put a different time on it!” So he’s prepared the highlights show, and Stuart rumbled this midway through and had a huge meltdown, and I always remember him saying, ‘If I go down, we all go down’. Those are words I’ve lived by ever since.
Eurosport wasn’t award-winning television but it did occasionally win awards (Christopher Lee/Getty Images for BT Sport Industry Awards)
Now, after 35 years, Eurosport will be fully absorbed into Discovery’s current brand, TNT Sports.
O’Hagan: I think what’s happened now is that Discovery felt the football they could afford didn’t get ratings. So they said, for less money, let’s buy the rights to snooker and darts and get a whole load more viewers. It’s sad — it was a place to show football that, OK, it wasn’t mainstream, but people did have an interest in.
Caple: It’s such a shame that it’s all coming to an end — well, it’s not really, it’s just a renaming.
Boyce: From the viewers’ standpoint, it’s the end of an era, but I still work for Eurosport, because it will still be on overseas. The brand is going in the UK, but it’s very much alive in Europe.
Farrar: People used to look down on it. But the people who watched it didn’t. I once read a commentator’s autobiography and he dismissed Eurosport as ‘rubbish’. I thought, it might be rough around the edges and a bit silly, but it’s not rubbish. It’s better than that. And, you know, what’s broadcasting all about? Is it re-recording every opener to be perfect, or reporting on the Cup of Nations from Mali?
People will miss Eurosport, maybe without realising they were going to.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos via Getty Images)
