So farewell then, Eurosport. For 36 years you were the bric-a-brac of satellite channels, dishing up the curios and the comforting, the magnificent and the strange. You were the friend we ignored for weeks at a time, until the Australian Open, the Giro D’Italia, or some esoteric sport from an unpronounceable place lured us back in. Although we never did get round to buying that 16-CD pack of German soft-rock classics for an unbeatable low price, which you peddled during every advert break in the late 1990s.
And now, on 28 February, you are to be killed off, with your tastiest morsels assimilated into TNT Sports behind an expensive paywall. Yes, you were occasionally mocked. But you really will be missed.
We forget just how different the TV landscape was when Eurosport was launched by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky in 1989. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 served up the Big Match and the usual sports. But Eurosport was defiantly different.
Its first three programmes were Davis Cup highlights, alpine skiing and cyclo‑cross. The next day, Baltic handball took centre stage. One brave journalist at the Murdoch-owned Times reckoned it looked “like an extended Grandstand from a thin week 10 years ago”. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
And where else would you find Archie Macpherson commentating on the 1997 Beach Soccer World Cup from Copacabana beach in Rio – where Junior, the 80s Brazilian legend, was the player of the tournament? Or sumo on Christmas night? And regular truck racing?
Meanwhile another satellite upstart, Screensport, regularly showed heavyweight boxer Herbie Hide knocking out stiffs from America, and daily aerobics with a chap called Gilad Janklowicz working out next to lots of women in Lycra. No wonder the middle classes were sniffy about satellite TV.
The Guardian’s Robert Pryce, however, was an enthusiastic early adopter. “If this is junk, I’m hooked,” he wrote when Eurosport launched. “I want two more channels, at least.” Two? Try more than 20. Pryce was also astute enough to see where things would end up. “Sports that are pretty and rich will be fought over,” he wrote. “Sports that are pretty and poor will be offered riches. Sports that are plain and poor will have to consider plastic surgery.”
Eurosport, however, never really trotted down that path. In fact its “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach led to it being a pioneer, far ahead of the curve.
We all remember Brandi Chastain removing her shirt and swinging it over her head in triumph when the USA side won the 1999 World Cup – the moment women’s football was put on the map. But how many of us recall we got to watch it live, thanks to some bright spark at Eurosport?
The channel also showed the Africa Cup of Nations before many football hipsters were even born, all the qualifying sessions in Formula One long before Sky made it a thing, and cycling’s grand tours in their directors-cut-length glory for the first time.
Admittedly not everyone was quite as enamoured. Martin Kelner, formerly of this parish, once questioned whether Eurosport was part of a cunning government plan to soften us up for full economic union with Europe: “If that plan includes the majority of us holding the Tour close to our hearts, I shouldn’t hold my breath if I was Tony Blair.”
Its willingness to show every minute of an event wasn’t necessarily a virtue for Kelner, either. “Join us tomorrow morning at seven Central European Time, six in the UK, for the qualifying rounds of the men’s hammer,” he wrote in 1997. “It would be the most resistible invitation you will ever receive, and it could only come from Eurosport, the completists television channel, whose boast that their coverage of the world athletics championship in Athens will be ‘comprehensive’ is on a par with George Best revealing he is fond of a tipple.”
Perhaps. But to these eyes there was always something reassuring about the channel’s rhythms and eccentricities. Winter: alpine sports. Spring: the cycling classics and French Open. Summer: the big Olympic sports. And so on.
In a world where sporting tastes are increasingly vanilla – and Netflix’s algorithm understands what we want before we know it ourselves – Eurosport never fell into line.
Its offering was more like rum-and-raisin ice cream, with added marshmallows, sprinkles, strawberry sauce and a chocolate flake on top. Would you want to eat all of it, all the time? Of course not. But some of it, some of the time? Absolutely.
Its demise was announced in a press release oozing double-speak and misdirection. “Combining Eurosport and TNT Sports content in the UK and Ireland will enable us to offer a single, premium viewing experience,” it claimed, before talking more nonsense about giving audiences “a slightly simpler journey to find the sports they love”.
Really this is about squeezing cash out of fans – and profits for shareholders. Sky and Virgin Media customers now get Eurosport for free but soon will have to fork out £30 or £18 a month respectively for TNT, with no guarantee that the sport they love will get as much coverage.
However, we will still have our memories. Mine involve being a teenager in Luton, and those rambling summer holidays watching the Tour de France. It gave me a window into another world – one which, a couple of decades later, I was fortunate enough to enter.
