The BBC's reduced Olympic coverage is a huge blow to sports fans

It was 1992, I was nine years old, and what started out as a curiosity about the Barcelona Olympics turned into an obsession.

I can still, 32 years later, remember the BBC’s opening music for those Games, sung by Freddie Mercury.

Sally Gunnell winning 400m hurdles gold in Barcelona remains one of my fondest sporting memories.

Athletics wasn’t a new sport to me, but so many of the others were.

I had a scrap-book, in which I’d stick pictures of sailors and rowers and wrestlers having watched their sports for the first time.

I have zero doubt that the dozens of hours I spent watching Barcelona ’92 on the television contributed significantly to both my love of the Olympic Games, and my desire to compete in it.

Sally Gunnell won Olympic gold in 1992

As I got older, and as I developed a greater understanding of the Olympics and the varying sports on the programme, my watching habits became more sophisticated.

Ahead of each Opening Ceremony, I’d write a list of what I wanted to watch and when it was on. And with each Olympic Games, the BBC’s coverage became more comprehensive meaning there were fewer and fewer lines of my watching wish-list that I couldn’t fulfil. 

London 2012 was the pinnacle of the BBC’s coverage – 2500 hours of live sport across the varying channels and red button ensured that literally not a second of the action was missed.

With it being a home Games, the BBC either pushed the boat out in an impressive fashion or spaffed an unnecessary portion of their licence fee income on an over-the-top amount of coverage depending upon your perspective.

Either way, it’s indisputable that the BBC’s coverage of London 2012 was the dream for any Olympic obsessive.

There was wall-to-wall coverage of London 2012 on the BBC

The next fortnight will be in stark contrast to the heady days of wall-to-wall Olympic coverage on the BBC.

There will be coverage, but it’ll be far from all-encompassing. 

UK law gives Olympic coverage on free-to-air channels some protection – the Olympic Games is on a list of “protected” sporting events alongside the likes of Wimbledon and the football World Cup so there will still be considerable coverage of Paris 2024 available to the general public.

The 250 hours of sport that the BBC will show over the next fortnight is not insignificant but the realisation it’s a mere ten percent of the coverage of London 2012 puts that figure into perspective.

This makes me so incredibly sad, perhaps disproportionally so given most people are not quite as Olympic-loving as I am.

But the consequences of the diminishing coverage of the Olympic Games on free-to-air television should not be underestimated.

Watching coverage on television is most children’s introduction to sport, and particularly sports that are less mainstream.

It’s almost certain that the vast majority of children in the UK are aware of the lower-profile Olympic sports not through personal experience but rather, through discovering it on television.

The migration of sporting coverage onto subscription television channels is just the latest development in the broadcast media landscape.

Money talks and so, if one of the subscription services want coverage of a particular sport, they have the money to ensure they get it.

Certainly, it’s a fantasy to believe the BBC can compete with the sums of money that would be required to ensure any more Olympic coverage than they have for Paris 2024; in 2015, Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) bought the European TV rights for the Olympic Games for a reported 1.3bn euros which means that for Paris 2024, they can show as much of the action as they want across as many channels as they want. In the UK, across the Discovery+ app and Eurosport channels, more than 3,800 hours of live coverage will be shown of this summer’s Olympics, a figure which dwarfs the BBC’s 250 hours.

But just because it’s long been inevitable that the BBC’s Olympic coverage would be wrenched away by organisations that neither rely on public money nor have to justify their spending doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous for the future of sport.

Just look at both golf and cricket, and the damage that’s been done by removing almost all of the coverage of these sports from free-to-air television.

In the space of a relatively short space of time, both golf and cricket have seen their viewer-base collapse, and that’s down almost entirely to the departure of these sports from free-to-air channels.

Golf used to be a mainstay on the BBC – now there’s mere minutes of live action of the biggest tournaments shown each year.

Cricket’s governing body justified its decision to grab the money and swan off to subscription channels by claiming the revenue made from their broadcast deals would be used to take the sport into schools.

It’s an absolute fantasy to think that a kid playing a few hours of cricket will have a commensurate impact on their interest in the sport as being able to flick on the television and watch The Ashes for weeks at a time. 

As has happened with so many things, watching sport now has a clear class divide – if you have money and therefore have subscriptions to television packages, you can watch sport to your heart’s content whereas if you don’t have money, you have to make do with the scraps, if you can manage to find any coverage at all.

The BBC will, I’m sure, do a good job with its 250 hours of coverage of Paris 2024. I’ll be watching most of it.

But those hours have to be prioritised and so it’s certain that while athletics, swimming and cycling will be largely unaffected, the smaller Olympic sports that rely so heavily on the platform that the Olympic stage typically provides will be heavily adversely impacted.

The ship has sailed in terms of blanket coverage – never again will we see London 2012 levels of Olympic coverage on the BBC.

And that is both sad and significantly damaging to sport in this country.