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The Irish Sun
27-04-2025
- Sport
- The Irish Sun
London Marathon 2025 commentators: Who is providing coverage for the BBC this year?
THE 2025 London Marathon is projected to be the biggest ever, with a whopping 56,000 runners expected to take part. Here we take a look at the BBC's team commentary team, who will be guiding us through the on Sunday April 27, 2025. Advertisement 6 The London Marathon course winds through a great many of our capital's landmarks, including Tower Bridge Credit: Alamy 6 Gabby Logan will be fronting the BBC's coverage of the historic event Credit: Alamy Gabby Logan She will anchor the broadcast, providing seamless transitions between race updates, interviews and expert analysis. Having previously covered for , from August 2025 she will present the programme regularly in rotation with and . Gabby started presenting for Advertisement more on the london marathon She was part of the Beeb's presenting team for Euro 2024, and also covers Champions League football on Amazon Prime Video. Andrew Cotter 6 Andrew Cotter is the BBC's lead commentator for the London Marathon Credit: Getty Andrew Cotter will bring his extensive experience as a sports broadcaster to the London Marathon commentary team. He is tasked with delivering clear, insightful narration of the race's progress, highlighting key moments and athlete performances. Advertisement His ability to blend technical detail with engaging storytelling makes the coverage accessible to all viewers. Most read in Sport Live Blog Andrew is known for covering a variety of sports for the BBC, including the Boat Race, golf , rugby union , tennis and athletics . Steve Cram 6 Steve Cram is the BBC's expert analyst for the London Marathon Credit: Getty Steve Cram, a former world champion middle-distance runner, will provide expert analysis on race tactics and form of the runners competing. Advertisement Breaking down the strategies of elite runners, he will try to help viewers understand the physical demands of the marathon. Steve's deep knowledge of athletics enriches the broadcast with valuable context and expert insight. He first started commentating on Channel 4 the following year. Steve then landed the role of chief athletics commentator at the BBC in 1998. Advertisement He has co-presented both the Summer and Winter Olympics since Sydney 2000. Paula Radcliffe 6 Paula Radcliffe is the BBC's marathon specialist commentator Credit: PA Paula Radcliffe, the women's marathon world record holder, will be offering a unique perspective based on her elite running career. She will share personal insights into the challenges of the London Marathon course and race-day conditions. Advertisement Paula's commentary adds authenticity and inspiration, connecting viewers to the athletes' experiences. She has won both the London Marathon and New York Marathon three times, as well as the the Chicago Marathon in 2002. Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson 6 Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson will provide specialist commentary Credit: The Mega Agency Advertisement Her distinguished Paralympic career gives her a deep understanding of the athletes' skills and challenges. Tanni's contributions highlight the inclusivity and competitive spirit of the marathon event. On-course reporters Members of the commentary team will also report live from various Tasked with capturing the race's atmosphere and conducting interviews with runners, volunteers and spectators, the on-course reporters are: Advertisement Abby Cook Jeanette Kwakye Sarah Mulkerrins
The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
A case of the olo blues
During the recent university Boat Race, my wife and I were discussing the colour of the Cambridge crew's kit along the lines of: it's not blue, it's green; no it's not green, it's blue. It turns out we were both wrong. It's olo (Hue new? Scientists claim to have found colour no one has seen before, 18 April). There's nothing new under the sun. John CaterWimbledon, London US scientists: 'We've found an unprecedented colour signal.' Me: 'Oh, that's the colour of a waterproof jacket I've just ordered.' Anne Cowper Bishopston, Swansea The scientists who found a new colour missed a trick in not naming it octarine. Its description in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels as 'a greenish-yellow purple colour visible only to wizards and cats' seems to fit their discovery pretty SimmonsWestcliff-on-Sea, Essex Scientists believe they have found a new colour no one has seen before. Are you sure this isn't just a pigment of their imagination?Martin S TaylorByfleet, Surrey Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Telegraph
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Lord Hague thrown
Lord Hague watched the first annual Boat Race since his election as Oxford University chancellor from the banks of the Thames last weekend, and was overheard telling colleagues he finds time to stay in shape himself – by practising his 'judo skills'. As Tory leader he would spar with former Olympian champion Sebastian Coe, who was then his chief of staff. 'I wouldn't want to exaggerate but I still practise my judo occasionally and can do all the moves. It's good for mental and physical fitness. I can't help with the rowing though,' he tells me. When Peebles met his match Farewell to the late Andy Peebles, the Radio 1 DJ who secured the last interview with John Lennon before be was murdered in 1980. His funeral this week heard how he also interviewed Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and David Bowie, as well as Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's last executioner. Peebles – a fan of the Peterborough diary – was only really lost for words when he interviewed Margaret Thatcher for Manchester's Piccadilly Radio in the 1970s. Asking her for the price of a tin of baked beans, she replied: 'Do you know Andy, the Thatcher family don't eat baked beans.' Jugged Keir Just in time for Easter, the House of Commons shop has started to sell a 'handcrafted Toby Jug of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer ', happily made in Stoke-on-Trent, alongside jugs of Tony Blair, David Cameron and Winston Churchill. Only 1,500 of the four inch high jugs – worth £35 each – have been made. I think Starmer's Jug makes him look a bit worried to me. Other PMs are available. Political platforms Reality TV star Ollie Williams, who appeared on reality TV show Love Island in 2020, is one of Reform UK's candidate in next month's local council elections in Cornwall. And over in North Norfolk, Connor Rouse – who bared all on Channel 4's Naked Attraction – is a Liberal Democrat candidate to be a councillor in Holt. Who says politics is showbusiness for ugly people? Speaking imperial Plop! A back issue of 'The Yardstick' the journal of the British Weights and Measures Association, lands on my doormat (I am an honorary member), drawing attention to an advert for a Morrisons rump steak costing '£13 PER KG' and then in smaller print 'that's £2.95 for an 8oz steak'. John Gardner, the association's director, says: 'This demonstrates how the metric system bears no meaningful relation to quantities that are actually used, or are of human scale; a 'translation' is needed to make metric make sense.' He's right. Classy dame Actress Jean Marsh, who has died aged 90, was made an OBE in 2012. But Eileen Atkins, her fellow actress and co-creator of TV series 'Upstairs Downstairs', was made a Dame in 2001. Marsh didn't mind, blaming her lack of experience in classical theatre. She even generously wrote a rap for four theatrical dames – Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg, and Joan Plowright – to perform at a benefit show in in March 2005: 'We the Dames, we the bitches/ We done gone from Rep to riches/ We strutted our stuff at the RSC,/ The National Theatre and the BBC.' Marsh was delighted when the Dames performed her rap. 'It stopped the show'. Kemi's Easter treat Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has not joined in the craze for Colomba cakes which appear to have sold out in Marks & Spencer and Waitrose stores across the country. Instead she told me on GBNews she is excited about something else tomorrow, after a 40 day wait. 'I gave up alcohol for Lent so I am looking forward to having a drink on Easter Sunday,' she said. Bean's gravy Actor Sean Bean's current role as a gangster overlord in This City is Ours was hampered by a lack of gravy when they filmed for six weeks in the Costa del Sol. His co star James Nelson-Joyce says of Sheffield-born Bean: 'One of my friends was coming out to Spain and Sean asked: 'Can you get him to bring us two tubs of Bisto gravy?'. That's the mark of the man. We were in the middle of Marbella, in this fantastic apartment complex with beautiful restaurants and all Sean wanted was two tubs of Bisto.' Downing St's Chinese secret Where does Sir Keir Starmer buy the stock for 10 Downing Street's gift shop, asks MP Richard Holden In Parliament. Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould replies 'Many of the items sold in the 10 Downing Street gift shop are made in the UK. A very small number of items, such as water bottles from a well known British supplier, are made globally, including in China.' No one tell Donald Trump.
Telegraph
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Supreme Court message for sport is clear – transgender inclusion lunacy must end
It should never have required the highest court in the land to affirm that a man with a certificate cannot be a woman. But now that the Supreme Court verdict has been delivered, unanimously ruling that sex is defined by biology, the time has come to mount a decisive challenge to the sports governing bodies who continue to pretend that it is a matter of mere paperwork. For too long, this dangerous delusion has inflicted myriad outrages upon the nation's women, from a male in the Cambridge University women's Boat Race squad, to an all-male women's pool final, to a 17-year-old girl finding herself banned from six football matches for asking a male opponent, 'Are you a man?' Such absurdities are highlighted in the summary of the court's ruling in favour of For Women Scotland, describing how misinterpretations of the 2010 Equality Act have led to 'incoherence and impracticability' in the 'operations of provisions relating to women's fair participation in sport'. The language is legalistic, but the message is stark, acknowledging the cowardice of the sports authorities who have permitted men to injure women and enter female changing rooms purely by producing a Gender Recognition Certificate that can be bought for £6. FA must provide answers It feels a fitting moment to demand answers from the Football Association, whose policy on transgender inclusion represents Exhibit A in this lunacy. Quietly revised last month, without any public statement, it reads as if the recent dramatic rollback of gender ideology never happened. It enables male players to compete as women in the amateur game just so long as they can show, once a year, that their testosterone levels are below five nanomoles per litre – even when the upper limit of the average female range is 2.4. It presumes that the immutability of human biology can somehow be negotiated 'through dialogue'. It even manages to be ambiguous about women's entitlement to their own changing facilities, deflecting any decision to individual clubs. The dereliction of the most simple duty of care beggars belief. In September 2023, the FA was confronted with the case of Francesca Needham, a trans-identifying male accused of causing a season-ending injury to an opponent in a Sheffield women's league. Four teams refused to play against Needham's team in protest. Over 70 MPs and members of the House of Lords wrote that it was 'unthinkable' for an adult male to be allowed to play against women. Lord Triesman, the FA's former chairman, sharply criticised the organisation he once led, stressing how football was 'by far' the largest sport not to be defending the integrity of the female category. Still the FA refused to act, prioritising the views of a few noisy trans lobbyists above those of half the population. If you want the starkest example of its egregious stance, look at 'Appendix 2' to its policy, which asks those in the men's game to sign a waiver stating that they accept the 'increased injury risk' arising from sex differences, while presenting no equivalent question in the women's game. It leaves women to face such risk without their knowledge, never mind consent. The potential for unfairness could not be more clearly spelt out: 'I acknowledge and agree that I am voluntarily assuming the risk that I might suffer loss, injury, death or other damage as a result of my participation in the men's game.' And yet the expectation is that women will just tolerate it regardless. So ludicrous is the policy that it imagines men can play against women, provided their skill level is sufficiently mediocre. 'If match observation does not suggest that the player represents a risk to the safety and/or fair competition, the player will be granted eligibility,' it says. Ross Tucker, the sports scientist who has persuaded World Rugby to keep the women's game solely for women – how that could ever be deemed a contentious position in a brutal contact sport? – is savage in his condemnation. 'The FA policy is shambolic,' he says. 'Convoluted and illogical, it is a shrine to cowardice, intellectual dishonesty and its attitude towards women's sport. Imagine telling heavyweights they can fight middleweight boxers, because they're not all that good. 'It's fair to fight down – just don't be too strong or powerful.' It's preposterous. And the FA is doing it to women.' Widespread change needed Football is not the only major sport still to be indulging the activists. While the England and Wales Cricket Board has blocked males from masquerading as female in the elite division, it has signed off on self-ID in the grass-roots game, the level at which power disparities between men and women are most pronounced. This, apparently, is the compromise necessary in what it calls a 'complex area'. Except the Supreme Court did not detect much complexity. 'Sex has its biological meaning throughout this legislation,' it says of the Equality Act. ''Woman' always and only means a biological female of any age.' It required years of courageous campaigning by For Women Scotland for this to be expressed by some of the UK's most senior judges, just as it took months for The Telegraph to achieve a ruling by IPSO, the press regulator, that it was legitimate to use the term 'biological male' when discussing sport's transgender scandal. Now the matter is even more clear-cut, with the truth that men are not women finally enshrined in law. To think, sports have so long tiptoed around this conclusion for fear that it was too 'toxic'. Well, they are officially out of excuses.
Telegraph
14-04-2025
- Sport
- Telegraph
I was in the Oxford boat that fought back against Cambridge domination
As I slumped over the oars at the end of the 1994 Women's Boat Race, desperate in defeat, I would not have believed I'd ever race against Cambridge again. Still less that it would be on the Tideway in London – and we'd be leading them in the tally of victories by 2.5 to 1.5. Yet Saturday marked my fourth appearance for Oxford in the Women's Veterans' Boat Race. We race, like the Men's Veterans, from Putney to Furnivall Steps, just past Hammersmith Bridge, a distance of just under 3k. Veteran is an outmoded description for rowers of a certain age, who are now 'Masters'. But it is so called because we are all Veterans of the Boat Race, Reserve, or Lightweight Races. Eligibility is not quite so hotly debated as it is with our younger counterparts – the age limit is 33 and over, while the boat average must be 42 or above – but make no mistake: we want to win just as much. The tally for the Women's Veterans' Race was, before Saturday, poised intriguingly at one all and one extraordinary dead heat. Last year, we crossed the finish line just one foot ahead, Cambridge coming through at the end, while we held on despite burning lungs and tired legs. But due to a barney between the men a few years prior, the rules state Veterans have to win by a margin of more than 6ft, due to us not having stake boats at the start. A moral victory, the umpire told us. We got the Chapeldown, and having won the previous year, Cambridge retained the Senior Trophy, while both university names were etched on it. I think both crews were proud of making history in a brutal but powerful display of midlife athleticism – but we still felt we had something to prove this year. More of a grudge match, if you like. Cambridge's 2025 line up was boosted by the reappearance of Olympian bronze medallist (and Chief Umpire of the Boat Race) Sarah Winckless, who missed last year's race, and the returning Olympic silver medallist Cath Bishop. There's no age limit for coxes – and Cambridge brought in Jasper Parish, he of the race-winning dramatic dash for calmer waters in the 2023 Men's Boat Race. Meanwhile, Oxford made three changes to last year's crew, with Kiwi Sarah Payne Riches from Osiris 2018, and Americans Emily Reynolds and Katie Davidson from 2015's victorious Oxford Blue Boat and Osiris crews. That was the first year the Women's Boat Race moved from Henley to the Tideway – something we campaigned for over many years. We won the toss and chose the Surrey station. Having led on the Middlesex station last year, and watched Cambridge come up on our inside as the bend worked in their favour, there's no doubt in my mind Surrey is the better side. Crews on Middlesex must have clear water by Hammersmith Bridge. This year was the most nervous I'd felt. Rowing is a sport where disaster can strike at any moment – a crab [of tangled oars], a rogue wave – and the what ifs had been rolling around my brain in the days before the race. At 53 and 364 days old, should I really be back sitting in the stroke seat, with my opposite number two decades younger than me? I felt physically sick in the seconds before the start. We knew Cambridge, having lost the toss, would front load their race and try to edge us out in the early stages. Our boat was powerful, but with no real form book it was hard to say who were the favourites. It still feels surreal to me to be there on the start, looking up at Putney Bridge: this view denied to us in the 90s. Now we are truly part of the fold. We train from OUBC in Wallingford, and, like all other Oxford crews, we now have our own yellow Empacher boat. Women's Head Coach Allan French has welcomed us in, and we wanted to repay the trust placed in us with a victory. And that was what we got. Our plan, frankly, is always to go hard off the start. We went off around 43 strokes a minute, settling to 37, and just a few strokes in our cox called, 'You're already up, Oxford!' After a rhythm call to take us down to 34, we settled in, possibly slightly over-rating our opposition, and taking seats off them every single stroke. The noise is at its most intense in that first part of the race, as crowds line the Putney Embankment, and we fed off it – perhaps achieving clear water by Fulham Football Club. When you are already up and know you have the psychological advantage of the bend coming up in your favour, racing feels truly glorious. It is significantly less painful even though we stayed true to our race plan, putting our pushes in, as no victory is secure until you cross the finish line. That is psychology and adrenaline for you, because the physical effort is intense. A side by side race of nearly 3K is hard for anyone, young or old. Yet I felt 25 when I got out of the boat, exhausted but elated – we do this because it makes us feel young again. And also because racing against Cambridge is an obsession that never dies. I still dream about that 1994 Boat Race loss, and each victory now assuages that pain. If you think controversy can't erupt in the same way with the Veterans, then think again: yesterday, Oxford Men's Veterans crossed the line 1/3rd of a length ahead, but were disqualified for a blade clash halfway through the race. In a slightly unorthodox decision, Umpire Caroline Lytton gave Cambridge the option to vote on a verdict of a DQ or a dead heat. Naturally they chose the former, and lifted the trophy. But there is still joy on behalf of all the Veterans to be taking part in a Boat Race again, and to be afforded the privilege to do so. I asked Emily and Katie what taking part in the Veteran's Race a decade on meant to them. 'Ten years ago, the women coming to race on the Tideway was such a big thing,' they said. 'Now it's just normal for women to be rowing on the same day as the men. And that's how it should be.' I caught up with Sarah afterwards to ask her view of the race. 'It's great that the Veterans are so competitive,' she said, with all the grace and diplomacy of a Chief Umpire – and indeed, we won in a record time: eight mins and 11 seconds, to Cambridge's eight mins 25 seconds, with a verdict of four lengths. At Putney Bridge tube on the way home, with more Chapeldown drunk and a very satisfied smile on my face, I bumped into Paddy Ryan, the Cambridge Women's Chief Coach. 'How's it looking for tomorrow?' I said. 'You're not going to like it,' he replied. No, I don't like it: every dark blue is willing there to be a reversal in Oxford's fortunes. It will come, even if it didn't happen this year. But in 2023, rumour has it Cambridge hung a broom outside their boat house to signify a clean sweep when every single Oxford crew lost, including the Veterans. I'm proud to have prevented them from doing that this year.
