Steven Downes

For those of a similar name, see Stephen Downes (disambiguation).

Steven Downes (born 1961 in Waterloo, London) is a sports journalist and television producer based in London. He writes regularly for the Sunday Herald and morethanthegames.co.uk, while having worked as London correspondent of the U.S.-based Olympics website, AroundtheRings.com, from 2008. He is often called upon as a sports pundit on television and radio by BBC World Service, Sky News and TalkSport.

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, the South London Press, where he was deputy sports editor. His first Olympic Games was in Seoul in 1988, when he was working as swimming correspondent of The Times.

Steven Downes
Occupation	Author, Journalist
Nationality	United Kingdom
Notable works	Running Scared (Mainstream, 1996, with Duncan Mackay) Bridge of Sighs (Mainstream, 1997)
Website
http://www.sportsjournalists.co.uk

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.

He went on to launch Bite, an aspirational lifestyle magazine for vampires modelled on Jamie and Louise Redknapp's successful Icon publication. However, the project floundered within six months. Downes lamented he had been ahead of the game, pre-dating the mass-appeal populist shows such as Twillight and True Blood.

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, 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.

His work since includes exposing the commercial funding of the UK's second WADA-accredited drug testing lab, which presaged the withdrawal of the laboratory's accreditation, and the hiring by the London 2012 Olympic organizers of a former Bulgarian weightlifter who had served a doping suspension for steroid use. In the latter case, following Downes's report the London Olympic organizers withdrew their job offer to Sevdalin Marinov.

Other work

At the beginning of 2000, Downes 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.

After this venture crashed later the same year, Downes worked at Times Online, where he was business editor from 2003 until 2008.

Most recently, he has worked for the Sunday Herald newspaper and reported widely for a number of websites, including that of the world governing body for track and field, IAAF.org, and for Atlanta-based AroundTheRings.com. He has also written Olympic sports tips for the Racing Post.

Sports Journalists' Association

In 2003, Downes was elected to the committee of the 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 and is godfather to Rose Chegwin, daughter of TV presenters Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin.
• 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

• Sports Journalists Association
• Scammed - Olympic athletes fear they have lost thousands in sponsorship scam
• London 2012's Deighton acts quickly to dump weightlifting drug cheat employee
• Charity begins at home for TV's marathon investigation
• Putting sporting deaths in the picture - the ethical dilemmas posed by Nodar Kumaritashvili's fatal crash at the Vancouver Olympics
• Hung out to dry how lack of funding discriminates against distance runners
• Sports minister's stance puts testing lab at risk conflicts of interest raise questions over status of WADA-accredited testing lab
• Questions for Paula Radcliffe: Sunday Tribune article from August 2004 highlighting hypocrising surrounding the marathon icon
• Britain left with only one lab for dope-testing as Olympics loom
• Every parent's nightmare investigation by Steven Downes into paedophile sports coaches
• What did you do in the dot.com boom, Daddy? crawling from the wreckage of a dot.bomb
• Lewis gets jumpy as Marion Jones casts a long shadow the questions a sports journalist is not allowed to ask. Apparently
• Horrors at the Bates Motel the inside story of financial crisis at Chelsea football club
• Blood brotherhood runs the show investigation into the use of EPO by marathon runners