Brekkie Boy

Well the BBC is now restricted to just one TV channel and one red button stream as part of the (poor) deal with Eurosport. Really think (and hope) Eurosport make a huge loss on all this - obvious they were more interested in profitting from the rights than establishing themselves as THE Olympic broadcaster, and it's all been very last minute and low key for them. Today they've announced you can subscribe to the Eurosport Player for just 99p for the games - just not understanding their business model at all. I'm convinced the IOC would have made much more by selling directly to the PSBs (full rights, though non-exclusive) and then as they used to letting Eurosport pay for the pay-TV rights on top.

Obviously NZ have had great success in team sports but it's completely the opposite strategy of Team GB where the focus has been on individual sports with multiple medals up for grabs rather than team sports with just one or two medals to be won. As long as Liam Malone gets a race though all should be good.

Regarding the villages although using barracks or student accomodation might be cheaper surely there is a potential for significant profit to be made if they do become expensive apartments/high rise complexes after the games. It's just the local federation need to make sure it's them, not the developers, scooping most the profit.

Re: London vs the rest of the UK. I think given the circumstances apart from a few officials in the cities themselves there wouldn't be much outcry if London hosted over Birmingham/Manchester/Liverpool - financially it makes sense and actually putting the London venues to use once again for a major multi-sport event should quieten the complaints about the legacy. My biggest complaint about the legacy has always been that hosting future multi-sport events wasn't really part of the plan. I suspect to with bloody Brexit on the horizon the government would be keen to show we're welcoming the world and use the games to strengthen the links across the Commonwealth. Obviously in terms of benefits to a city the likes of Liverpool and Birmingham would benefit much more from the exposure than London. I quite like the idea of Liverpool hosting but practically in such a short time frame it doesn't seem viable.

Kuala Lumper seems the most realistic option to me with them hosting the SEA games this year. I really don't think Liverpool, Birmingham or even Manchester could cope with the quick turnaround, mainly due to the stadium, so London would be the best UK option. I really think though it would be in Liverpool and Birminghams interest to push for it to go to KL in 2022 then stay on track for their 2026 bid, preferbly from Liverpool rather than Birmingham. If the Gold Coast weren't hosting in 2018 then Melbourne would probably be the favour - you get the impression they could host any multi-sport event with less than a weeks notice.

Liverpool shouting the loudest but practically that's a tough ask - can't see either Everton or Liverpool providing the stadium (or getting one built in less than 5 years) and they'd have to build the pool too. I agree cycling would end up in Manchester. Birmingham isn't in much better a position either - practically speaking London is the obvious choice for London but it does seem that despite all the talk of "legacy" there was little thought put into hosting future multi-sport events when planning the Olympic park post-2012. Of all the UK cities Glasgow would be best positioned for a quick return, but I don't think there is any desire for them to do so. I'd love it to go to Singapore but they've shown little interest in hosting them. Kuala Lumper might be an option too but not sure they've hosted any multi-sport event since the 1998 games. As things stand even Delhi looks attractive.

A 388 day relay is a bit ridiculous really - could have knocked 365 days off that easily enough and just flown the baton straight out to Australia and streamlined the whole thing. I don't imagine people really rush out to see the baton in the way they do the Olympic Torch.

Well there would be the venue for any Birmingham bid - difficult to justify building one in Birmingham if a suitable relatively new venue is less than an hour away.

Dan Walker has been superb, as have all the BBC presenters to be fair. Clare Balding gets all the credit once again but I think cycling turned out to be her krptonite - she didn't seem to grasp the basics of it and with her increased workload these games as the primetime presenter she wouldn't have had the time to study it in the way she could the swimming in 2012, where she had very few studio presenting shifts.

I managed to just wake up in time for Adam Peaty's final last night - left it to my body to decide if it was worth waking up for and woke up about 5 minutes beforehand. Unfortunately my body also decided to keep me awake during the Opening Ceremony despite me getting bored of it rather quickly. NBC are probably as good as anyone as prepackaging highlights into a show, so no reason not to give network viewers the live option and the highlights option. The next two Winter Olympics at least should offer some live skiing in primetime without disruption to the schedules (they're normally held in the morning, so that'll fall in primetime). I don't see what NBC have got to lose in 2020 by giving viewers the chance to watch the evening events, including the ceremonies, live in the mornings and then having a mixture of live morning events and highlights of the days key moments in the evening. I'd be surprised if the overall ratings dropped for the ceremonies if they had a live broadcast in the morning and an encore in the evening.

NBC possibly the only rights holder in the world that doesn't show it live - was ridiculous with the ceremony when they could surely have started at 7pm. Yes they pay the most for rights but collectively the rest of the world puts their hand in too - and the latter starts don't favour the Europeans. It's notable with the Paralympics that the swimming and athletics will begin about 4 hours earlier, much more suitable for UK audiences and still primetime for Rio. Anyone know what is "primetime" in Brazilian television? I guess in Tokyo we might get morning swimming finals again. Notice in Rio for the athletics though they're having finals in both the morning and evening session, so some (less appealing) finals are early evening in Europe.

Just had a shot on the BBC at the end of their primetime coverage of the cauldron with the sculpture moving and it looks pretty impressive.

Similar arrangement for the BBC, though their Olympic Park broadcasts are from within the park rather than the IBC. Most of the BBC1 coverage is from Copacabana, except primetime which is from the Olympic Park with Dame Clare Balding of Olympia. Reverse for BBC4 with daytime from the Olympic Park and primetime from the Copacabana - and so far all on the beach rather than in the studio.

They seem to be keeping the second cauldron a secret - only a couple of quite unofficial videos around of it's lighting in the middle of the night and not seen a single shot of it on the broadcasts today. It's as if the IOC are wanting to downplay the cauldron and make it just about the lighting rather than it burning for the games. If the Maracana was the Olympic Stadium it would have been fine - the cauldron is just about visible above the roof line and it would look superb overlooking the athletics, and be one step up on the London cauldron. But it's not - it's only used for football and to be honest I would be surprised at all to discover it's been removed for those games. Hopefully Tokyo will return to the tradition but if this is the future of the games I'd rather see the torch arrive in the stadium earlier in the ceremony and then travel through the streets to the location of the city Cauldron to be lit at the end of the ceremony.

Also as much as it was a nice idea to give the petals back to each nation I think it could have stood very well as a sculpture within the Olympic Park post-games and it's a shame it was effectively dismantled.

The intro won't debut until tomorrow as the football has just been shown on the Olympic Channels using OBS titles. It's highly likely though the titles will be an edit of the promo as has been the case since 2004.

Not sure "bid" is the right term for the Commonwealth Games anymore. Last one standing is usually more apt. A shame Cardiff backed out but understandable, and I'd rather not see it back to England quite yet, although Liverpool is probably as close as it could get to me - although the all-Wales CG bid had the athletics just 10 miles from me, but that would never have been the final outcome. I take it there is little interest from Singapore in hosting, or it returning to Kuala Lumper. Canada seem to have backed out too. Would be good to see the games return to New Zealand though, but again is 2026 too soon after Australia in 2018?

I loved the lighting of the cauldron in London (one of my faves, and for once something mechanical worked), but hated how it didn't shine over London for the duration of the games. Having the cauldron locked inside an empty stadium for half the games is not what it's supposed to be about. Therefore Athens probably wins for me - simple, elegant and quite modern.

A shame but not surprising. The cost does seem high but the sporting infrastructure is not there - even converting the Millennium Stadium or Cardiff City Stadium to host the Athletics wouldn't have come cheap and wouldn't have necessarily got the go ahead from the owners of the stadia, especially based on how long Hampden Park was out of action for.

P.S. Actually seems that just like recent deals this involves the BBC giving up things early and it'll be from 2018, not 2022, that they cut back to two streams. How poor must the BBC's negotiators be? BBC: We've got the 2018-2020 rights Eurosport: We've got the 2022-2024 rights BBC: We'd like to share those please. Eurosport: Fair enough. We'll let you show no more than two events at a time in return for £110m and the entire rights to 2018-20. Oh, and you'll only be allowed to show two events at a time live in 2018 and 2020 too. BBC: Great, DEAL!

That is such a poor deal for everyone concerned - another example of the BBC being taken back to the 90s. I don't even see how that deal can be legal - the Olympics is on the crown jewels list which means it must have free to air live coverage in it's entirity. No World Cup match can be shown on pay TV (they even have to get permission for the group games they have to show on free to air digital channels), so I don't see why any event from the Olympics should be allowed to be exclusive to pay-TV. At the very least every medal event and every event featuring a British participant or team should be free to air, and though I expected a deal where the BBC would get live coverage plus a limited number of additional live feeds in return for the 2018-20 pay-TV rights I didn't expect it to be so crap - just one stream is pathetic and simply inadequate. The reported £110m price tag for such rights, on top of the BBC giving Eurosport the 2018-20 pay-TV rights, just suggests poor negotiations by the BBC. They only paid £60m for the full rights to London 2012 (where Eurosport also had pay-TV rights), so to pay over double that (as the Winter rights aren't as valuable) for just two streams of coverage really does suggest they're being ripped off. Eurosport only paid £920m for the 2018-2024 rights in total, so the BBC is contributing an eighth for next to nothing. It also shows how the IOC screwed up by doing a deal with Eurosport behind closed doors - if the BBC were willing to pay that much for such crap secondary UK rights for just one Olympic cycle the IOC would easily have got more than £920m by airing an open aucition amongst all Europes PSBs - the big five would probably have cleared the £1bn mark, and even on top of that the IOC could have sold pay-TV rights to Eurosport as they did previously.

Just highlighted how the mandatory list for the Commonwealth Games needs updating, but completely understand Durban's stance. Although I'm not a fan of cities being awarded events without a bidding process I wonder if some sort of guarantee for a World Championships in Track Cycling and Gymnastics could change their mind - though it probably still wouldn't be financially viable. Are their other venues in South Africa that could be used. Glasgow sent the Diving over to Edinburgh while back in Manchester 2002 the shooting was about 300 miles away, and I think an event outside Durban but in South Africa would be preferable to none at all.

Easily design A. How does the cost compare with Zaha Hadid's monstrosity?

What took them so long? So glad to see the Zaha Hadid design dumped - she built a costly ugly bunker for the London Olympics which might look OK from the outside but looked horrid from the inside. I'm all for great architecture but her designs just aren't fit for purpose when it comes to the requirements of Olympic venues.

This is the first real challenge when it comes to sports rights and I hope at least one broadcaster in one country does push the issue. The EBU can bit collectively (and indeed did for many years), and in more recent times for the countries outside the big five the rights have been on sold to an agency, but then they were sold on in a country by country basis. Not even the biggest channels have a chance if the rights are sold collectively - and indeed in this case behind closed doors it seems. It's one thing organisations renewing rights with their existing partners without putting them out to tender but I think it's pretty bad form to sign them away without giving the existing rights holders the opportunity to bid.