Sports correspondent & historian with Sideline Sid

There is no bigger event in world sport than the Olympic Games which take place every four years.

The current Olympics in Paris are providing plenty of pulsating action, the joy of success and the pain of failure and as always, some controversy to stir the pot.

A mountain of money drives the Olympics, which is heavily derived from the mass communication of broadcasting, publishing and the internet, commonly known as The Media.

Media is the eyes and ears of the Olympics and major sporting world events, trumpeting the news good and bad, for the world, to read, hear, and view.

I have had the privilege of being a very small media fish in a big pond, at four World Cup/Championships during the last two decades.

As a writer I believe in life experiences, and in early 2009, I tentatively applied for a volunteer media role at the 2009 World Rowing Championships held at Lake Karapiro.

To my delight, I won a position as part of the World Rowing Federation media team, which wrote and dispatched the good news from the rowing pinnacle event.

Our team was a mixture of World Rowing media personnel and local volunteers, with the best part being situated slap bang on the finish line.

I quickly learned that there was a hierarchy in the media ranks, led by New Zealand Sky Sport television, who had the broadcast rights and first shot at recording the action.

I was witness to a verbal battle between one of the other TV channels, and event staff, after the TV camera crew crossed to the other side of the lake to film unauthorized coverage.

They were told in very clear and explicit language that any further breaches would see them removed from the list of approved media.

So to the current Olympics, where our television channels play second fiddle to the host broadcasters. We get to see interviews immediately after the event, while other networks’ reporters get the scraps outside the venues.

Two ICC Cricket World events and the World Squash Federation Junior World Championships provided me with further insight on the distribution of sports news, worldwide.

A roving brief, for the daily newsletter at the WSF Junior championships held in Tauranga 2017, provided further background into spreading sporting news throughout the globe.

There were new challenges to meet, especially the requirement to limit my story to 250-300 words, when I usually wrote 500+ words to tell a tale.

The 2014 Cricket World Cup qualifiers and the Under 19 World Cup headquartered at the Bay Oval, provided other specific audiences. A daily blog from the Bay Oval was well received on the Indian sub-continent. We provided a focus off the field which required plenty of background research.

One thing I learnt from being involved with the four World Cup/Championships in New Zealand, is that media coverage is the lifeblood of elite sport. Take it away and elite sport would wither on the vine.