Steven Downes

Steven Downes (born 1961 in Waterloo, London) is an award-winning sports journalist and television producer based in London.

Early career

Initially specializing in track and field athletics and other Olympic sports, Downes covered his first Commonwealth Games in 1986 in Edinburgh, when working for a local newspaper. His first Olympic Games was in Seoul in 1988, when he was working as swimming correspondent of "The Times".

In 1989, Downes left "The Times" to take up the editorship of "Athletics Weekly", the world's only weekly track and field magazine. The youngest editor in the title's history, when Downes took up the post, the magazine was struggling under new ownership, having lost one-third of is readership in the previous year.

As well as overseeing a re-design and the introduction of desk-top publishing equipment at the magazine, by the time Downes left "Athletics Weekly" in 1991, the circulation had stabilized at more than 1 million copies per year.

Television documentaries and books

Downes now went on to write for a range of national newspapers and international agencies, and began working as a researcher or producer on a range of television sports documentaries, including the BBC's "On the Line", and "Fair Game", the Channel 4 series presented by Greg Dyke.

Working with producer John Mair and presenter Kent Barker, Downes's investigation for "Channel 4 News" into the involvement of Andy Norman in the eventual suicide of athletics writer Cliff Temple led to the athletics official being sacked from his job as promotions officer for the British Athletic Federation (the forerunner of UK Athletics). The news report saw "Channel 4 News" win the Royal Television Society's sports news award in 1995, the first such award won by the programme.

As well as documenting Norman's career, the acclaimed 1996 book, "Running Scared", written by Downes with Duncan Mackay, detailed a number of further scandals within international athletics.

The book's expose of the drug-testing record of 1992 Olympic 100m champion, Linford Christie put Downes at loggerheads with the sprinter throughout the remainder of his track career. When the sprinter sued John McVicar for libel in 1998, Downes was summoned to the High Court in London by McVicar as an expert witness on Christie's career and his drug test record.

Doping investigations

One of the other television programmes to which Downes contributed was an investigation with Irish journalist Chris Moore into the exploits of the Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Michelle Smith de Bruin, which saw the Ulster TV programme nominated for another RTS award.

In 1999, following a series of investigative articles for the Sydney-based magazine "Inside Sport", edited by Greg Hunter, which that year won the Magazine of the Year award, Downes was named Writer of the Year in the Australian magazine publishers' awards.

Before the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, when working for Agence France-Presse, Downes broke the story of how as many as 24 members of the American track and field team had failed drug tests in the previous two years.

At the beginning of 2000, Downes had left the "Sunday Times", where he had worked as athletics correspondent and football reporter, to become deputy editor at Worldsport.com, the website launched by Alan Callan.

But after this venture crashed later the same year, Downes worked at Times Online, where he was business editor from 2003 until late 2006.

Sports Journalists' Association

In 2003, Downes was elected to the committee of the [http://www.sportsjournalists.co.uk/index.php Sports Journalists Association] of Great Britain, and has served as its honorary secretary since 2005.

Trivia

* Downes is married to Susan Glinska, the daughter of Władysław Gliński, the inventor of hexagonal chess.
* Brett Sutton, the Australian triathlon coach interviewed in Downes' article "Every parent's nightmare" following his convictions for sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl he had coached, has continued coaching, with one of his athletes, Chrissie Wellington, becoming Ironman world champion in October 2007.

External links

* [http://www.sportsjournalists.co.uk Sports Journalists Association]
* [http://www.sundayherald.com/sport/nationalsport/display.var.1824216.0.hung_out_to_dry.php Hung out to dry] how lack of funding discriminates against distance runners
* [http://www.sundayherald.com/sport/nationalsport/display.var.1546290.0.risky_business.php Sports minister's stance puts testing lab at risk] conflicts of interest raise questions over status of WADA-accredited testing lab
* [http://sport.guardian.co.uk/london2012/story/0,,2179125,00.html Britain left with only one lab for dope-testing as Olympics loom]
* [http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,678189,00.html Every parent's nightmare] investigation by Steven Downes into paedophile sports coaches
* [http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article424171.ece What did you do in the dot.com boom, Daddy?] crawling from the wreckage of a dot.bomb
* [http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/sport.cfm?id=736522004 Lewis gets jumpy as Marion Jones casts a long shadow] the questions a sports journalist is not allowed to ask. Apparently
* [http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/sport.cfm?id=970732002 Horrors at the Bates Motel] the inside story of financial crisis at Chelsea football club
* [http://www.channel4.com/sport/microsites/S/sportuncovered/marathon.html Blood brotherhood runs the show] investigation into the use of EPO by marathon runners