Sports line-up
Al Jazeera International, the 24-hour English-language news and current affairs channel, headquartered in Doha, has announced its sports offering and revealed its line up of sports presenters.
In keeping with Al Jazeera International’s fresh approach to news and current affairs the channel’s sports coverage will be a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the expected and the surprising.
Viewers will be able to enjoy action highlights from the best of the football leagues in Europe and South America, the tennis grand slam events, the golf majors, cricket test matches, rugby internationals, Formula 1 and MotoGP, North American sports, athletics, boxing, cycling, sailing and winter sports.
The channel’s weekly magazine programme Sportsworld will also take viewers behind the scenes of some of these major sporting events. The team will interview not only the leading stars but also the unsung personalities – adhering to the channel’s aim of giving our viewers a 360 degree perspective on what is happening in the world of sport, both professional and amateur.
Al Jazeera International’s Head of Sport, Stuart Young, has assembled a team of experienced reporters and presenters, whose diversity and own areas of expertise complement each other: Carrie Brown formerly of Eurosport; Brendan Connor formerly of CBC Canada; Imran Garda formerly of South Africa’s Supersport channel; Joanna Gasiorowska who joins the channel from ITV’s Evening News; Dara McIntosh formerly of ESPN and NBC in the USA; Rahul Pathak from the UK’s Five News as well as Andrew Richardson formerly of Five News in the UK.
Head of Sport, Stuart Young, says: “I am delighted to have such a group of individuals whose breadth of knowledge, depth of experience and all-round strengths will take us to the forefront of sports reporting.”
“Together, we will work to bring viewers around the globe the latest from the world of sport. From countries often overlooked, on sports often under-reported, we hope to inform and enlighten as well as entertain and excite.”
Stuart Young has been a television journalist for 25 years, joining the BBC TV News team and eventually becoming the then youngest deputy editor of the Nine o’clock News. He has experience of the Middle East broadcast industry, having worked as Dubai TV’s news editor – combining the role with that of sports correspondent, and going on to produce and present the Gulf’s first home-grown sports programme. Start-up operations followed – launch editor at MBC and chef d’edition at Euronews – before Stuart joined Reuters, producing business TV programmes in a number of European countries. That was followed by three years as output editor at CNN International, before moving full-time into sports as weekend editor for SNTV. His first, and still greatest, sporting memory is of being taken by his father to see England beat West Germany to win the 1966 World Cup final.