In 2024, former BBC Producer John Evans was tempted back to watch the sport in which he worked for many years and here he suggests some changes that could pay off in future

The man in seat 461 – high up on the east side of what some of us will always know as the Olympic Stadium – leant over to his much younger neighbour to ask a question. “Can you hear what the announcer is saying, or is it just me?” 

“No, not really,” the younger spectator, almost certainly equipped with better hearing, replied.

I was that man in seat 461 at the London Athletics Meet in July, having to make the best of neither being able to properly see the finish line nor hear the words on the PA system. I had chosen cheaper tickets, so I knew I would not be in the front row in the home straight, but I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) that the large screens would help me bridge the gap. 

My improvised solution was to watch the live action as best I could, and then see (and hear) it via the BBC broadcast a few seconds later on my iPad. Not ideal. It prompted me to wonder why something like the in-venue radio channels you would find at events such as Wimbledon and golf’s Open Championship wasn’t available.

This must have been roughly the 50th track and field meeting I have attended, but it was my first as a paying spectator. Almost four decades earlier, I had been a producer for BBC Radio, organising its athletics coverage and conducting interviews with the likes of Seb Coe, Frank Dick, Carl Lewis and Fatima Whitbread at meetings from Antrim to Zurich during the sport’s heyday. 

Working on London’s bid to host the Olympics and then London 2012 itself sparked renewed interest, but in reality athletics to me had become something just to tune into during the Olympics, and maybe the World Championships.

Now my interest was growing again, fuelled by the success of athletes like Keely Hodgkinson, Matt Hudson-Smith and Josh Kerr, and engrossing documentaries on the BBC about the stars we knew simply as Linford and Daley. I was back caring about athletics and reading AW for the first time since the days of Mel Watman. 

Now I am left wondering if the success of those years in the 1980s can ever be replicated, and how. 

Coe has referred to that era as being the sport’s zenith, one that his extraordinary rivalry with Steve Ovett helped build. Add in larger-than-life personalities such as Daley Thompson, the fact that Britain could call on a strong regional spread of talent, and the sporting drama being shown on prime-time TV, when there were only three or four channels, and the recipe for success was clear. This was before the plethora of TV platforms, red buttons, countless smaller channels, as well as websites and apps, took some of the sporting drama from centre stage.

Back in the day, there was what Coe observed as being “the shit product” served up by football at a time when “all our big, national sports were under-performing”. That may have been unfair on the English clubs that won the European Cup six years in a row into the 80s, but the sentiment has some crude accuracy. His sport, Coe told the Thompson documentary, brought something “wholesome” to newspaper readers. (This was of course before Ben Johnson, doping in Russia and all that.)

Athletics was lucky to have big names aplenty, big personalities, big success and sometimes big controversy to keep it in the headlines but now things are much tougher, even though the sport’s reach is actually growing. 

In the three Olympic Games of the 1980s, 21 countries won track and field gold medals. In the last three – Rio, Tokyo and Paris – that number has swelled to 41. This very different world brings with it much more diverse and globally spread sporting talent, with some sports and much of the broadcast landscape dramatically different from 40 years ago.

With the exception of behemoths like football, every sport has to fight for its slice of attention so is there an easy way of bringing people like me back to athletics and, more importantly, lure newcomers?

To do that, those new spectators need to be made more welcome than I felt they were in July. A dedicated radio or online channel that does much more explaining about the people, the action, the tactics, even the technology being used, would make such a difference. 

Why was there not a meet-and-greet event afterwards to connect the stars with first-time spectators? Why not include something pitched at new spectators in the event programme, or even as a separate publication? These can’t be one-off initiatives, though – they need repeating at every big meeting.  

It would be great to think that a competition like Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track or a TV series like SPRINT could make all the difference, but I have to echo Cathal Dennehy in his doubts about the likely impact of the admittedly very slick Netflix documentary. Seemingly it has been a ratings success but, as he wrote in July’s AW: ”If we think it’ll magically create droves of new, loyal fans, we’re in for a letdown.”

The elixir, the solutions the sport has been waiting for, Dennehy wrote, “lie far from a Netflix series”. Yes, rivalries are key and there are some encouraging signs here, especially in the middle-distance events. Given the success stories of the past year, it does feel like there is currently a huge opportunity to grasp.

Further investment and labour being directed towards talent ID and development, ensuring there is another generation of stars to follow in the footsteps of the current British crop, would be at the top of the wish list. But doing that, of course, needs money and the help of today’s big names to attract sponsors. Talent and success, combined with media training and imaginative marketing to make athletes engaging and newsworthy, may in time raise the sport’s profile and help bring more people through the door.

Crucially, though, the in-stadia experience needs to be memorable for the right reasons when the public turns up. Surely that would be a good place to start.

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