Athletics Lack of Publicity

In my view athletics hasn't received the sort of publicity that it deserves. This is in the middle of a busy athletics season. In the UK championships at Birmingham recently the BBC, for all their coverage of the event, managed to miss out almost all of the local athletes involved. Sophie McKinna's third place in the shot, Chris Baker’s 2^nd place in the high jump and Iona Lake's 4^th place in the steeplechase. Surely these were worth a look, particularly in view of the amount of time the BBC gave to the championships?

The Lausanne Grand Prix and the Paris Grand Prix events this week were on TV but you would be hard pressed to find them. They were only available on the red button. How is anyone supposed to know that unless you looked at the small print in Athletics Weekly? The commentary incidentally from both Tim Hutchings and Steve Cram was excellent very little of the endless chatter that seems to be so common.

Sky have covered the English Schools championship for some time but they didn't cover the event this year. The reason is that a number of their available cameras were covering events in Brazil in the World Cup. None were available for the event in Birmingham… Fair enough you might think but it was only the BBC and ITV that covered matches live. In addition to that two respected athletics journalists on national newspapers have been made redundant this month. Is it any wonder that athletics continues to be a low profile sport?