The chair of UK Sport has called on the BBC to show more of Team GB’s “fantastic athletes” between Olympic Games and says there is significant public appetite for more coverage on free-to-air TV.
Nick Webborn said he expected millions to tune into the BBC’s coverage of Milan Cortina 2026, which begins on Friday, but urged the broadcaster, as a publicly-funded body, to show more Olympic sports between each Summer and Winter Games.
Webborn also cited a new survey commissioned by UK Sport, which found that 69% of the public wanted Olympic sports broadcast more regularly on free-to-air TV, with 66% of respondents calling for more Paralympic sports to be shown too.
Asked whether the BBC should do more, Webborn said: “I believe so. We found that nearly 70% of the British public would like more Olympic and parasport between Games on free-to-air, and we’re having discussions with the BBC about how we might do that.”
Webborn said he had met the BBC’s director of sport, Alex Kay-Jelski, in the summer to make his case. “Our discussions were positive but there wasn’t, in terms of detail, we will deliver X, Y or Z,” he said. “But the conversations are positive and I think they realise that we have some fantastic athletes.”
Webborn’s comments reflect a growing frustration in the Olympic ecosystem, with several sports privately believing the BBC should devote more coverage, both on its TV channels and website, to Team GB’s medallists and future stars – especially as it is funded by the taxpayer.
Eyebrows were raised in athletics circles, for instance, when the Keely Klassic – the inaugural meeting put on by the Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson – was only on the red button last year, with BBC2 showing a repeat of Flog It! instead. Last year Aquatics GB also had to step in to stream the World Aquatics Championships on its website because the BBC no longer covers the event.
However, Webborn is confident Team GB’s athletes, who are funded by UK Sport, will again enthral the nation at the Winter Olympics, especially as it will be in a far more UK-friendly time zone than the previous two Games in Pyeongchang and Beijing.
“Great Britain is the leading non-alpine nation in winter sports and that’s an amazing feat,” he said. “British people do get winter sports. I think they love them. And having these magic moments, particularly in our time zone, will really get them excited again.
“It’s wonderful that we’ve had Paris and Milan Cortina to really hook the British people back into our sports and to get to know the athletes better. And we’ve got a superb pipeline of events coming to the UK which will also inspire and excite the British public.”
Webborn, who took over as UK Sport chair last year, is the most senior disabled official in British sport. He reflected on how much sport had helped him after he dislocated his neck while playing rugby in the early 1980s.
“I spent nine months at Stoke Mandeville in the spinal injuries unit. The nights were bizarre, sleeping with 24 other people kind of groaning and whatever with all the issues they had.
“But the beauty of it was that it introduced me to sport for recovery and then high performance sport. I was doing archery and table tennis. Then that summer there was the International Stoke Mandeville Games. And I got to watch all these people do remarkable things that I hadn’t seen before.”
Webborn, who has worked on 13 Paralympic Games and has decades of experience in providing performance support to British athletes, said: “I was coming to terms with myself being a disabled person and all the uncertainties that you get with that. And you’d see people who’d embraced it and were living it.”
