Roger Mosey, the BBC’s director of coverage for the London 2012 Olympic Games, has said it will be a “major challenge” for the UK public-service broadcaster to provide coverage of smaller Olympic sports beyond the conclusion of this year’s Games.
“The truth is, if you look at [the 2004 Olympics in] Athens, badminton got eight million viewers, hockey 6.5 million,” Mosey said, according to the Guardian newspaper. “We did try to play badminton and hockey outside of the Olympics and then it gets 500,000 people watching. It is a big challenge to sustain that level of interest. Though I hate the phrase minority sports – some minority sports like curling are huge in the Winter Olympics – they are simply not [at other times].”
Regarding the cost of the BBC’s London 2012 coverage, Mosey said figures would not be published until after the Olympics because it was “very difficult to disentangle normal business from specific Games spending.”
Mosey also hit back at suggestions from former BBC executive Sir Paul Fox that London 2012 could represent the final Olympics to be shown by the broadcaster, which is under pressure to reduce spending on sports rights due to a government-imposed licence fee freeze. The UK remains the only major market in Europe without a rights deal for the 2014 and 2016 Olympics.
Mosey added: “What you have got to imagine is what if the Olympics were behind a pay wall, what if you had to pay a subscription to get the Olympics? That seems to us to be an enormously bad idea and that’s why we support the listed-events legislation. Public access and digital public spaces is what the audiences want.”