Geoff Bryan
Feature - Upfront
Geoff Bryan
by Matt Nippert
He is an old-school sports journalist. A familiar, mature face amid his younger contemporaries at TVNZ, English-born Geoff Bryan is so old-school that he doesn’t even own a cellphone. This week, the veteran reporter of five Olympic Games heads to Beijing to anchor TV1’s coverage of the 2008 event.
What sticks in your mind from past Games? What I remember from 1988 [in Seoul] – my first Games – is why they no longer release doves during the opening ceremony.
What’s wrong with doves? You’d think doves were a good idea, really, being the international symbol of peace and goodwill, but they shouldn’t be released just before the Olympic flame is lit, because a lot of the doves settled on the rim of the torch. Whatever the Korean word for “Ooooh” is, there was a big sound of it around the stadium.
Barbecued dove? Yeah, exactly. That one went under the heading of, “We didn’t quite think that through properly.”
What’s the greatest sporting moment you’ve covered at the Games? If I had to nominate the best in the 20 years I’ve been involved in broadcasting the Games – that’s a cruel thing to do – I think I’d have to put Danyon Loader at the top. Those two gold medals in Atlanta, that shy kid from Dunedin, what he was able to do …
And he’s hardly spoken a word since. He’s coming out, as it were – and I mean that in a verbal sense – this year he’s been quite public. He’s a lovely guy, and he has so much to offer, but, yeah, he was very quiet. He only wanted to swim.
Where were you when the bomb went off at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics? The bomb went off in the park next to the international broadcast centre. It was just after 1.00am Atlanta time, which was 5.00pm in New Zealand. I was live on air and heard a bang but didn’t know what it was. Then all of a sudden it was just mad chaos.
How can you possibly know enough to cover all those different sports? I have to know enough about a lot because you never know what you’re going to get. If there’s a 15-minute gap between events, the producer may suddenly say, “All right, we’ll have handball. It’s Sweden versus Hungary, and it’s a quarter-final match. Good luck.” They just leave you to it. That’s fine, it’s all part of the challenge. You have 30 different sports, so you’re going to know some because you’ve grown up with them, but some you’ll have read about, and you need specialists. That’s why we’ve ended up with 120 people going [from TVNZ].
You’ve covered all sorts of international sporting events. With that perspective, is New Zealand too fixated on rugby? I’m English-born, and I know that when we came here the whole idea was that every teenage boy wanted to grow up and be an All Black. Well, I doubted it then, and it’s definitely not the case now.
If I could narrow it down to my children’s- generation, not many of them are passionate about rugby. The fact it takes until the last minute to sell out an All Blacks test – sometimes they don’t sell out – that was unheard of 20 years ago. Society is changing, so why should rugby stay the same? It’s not going to happen.
I understand your father once crossed paths with the Bee Gees. It’s a wonderful family story. We had emigrated from England to Australia, and my father was employed as a recruitment manager for a subsidiary company of EMI records. Anybody less suited to this job than my father is impossible to imagine. We are talking about somebody who had just about every album it is possible to have from the Cyril Stapleton big brass band. Modern music stopped pretty much there for him.
Some talent scouts came to see him and said, “Well, we’ve found this trio, and they’re really good. You should go see them and spend money on them.”
My father went, wrote them off, said they were rubbish. But they took the Bee Gees, anyway – and the Bee Gees did make a bit of money.
Did he forever rue his mistake? No. To my father’s eternal credit, he still says he was right.
TV1’s coverage of the Beijing Olympics begins Friday, August 8, at 9.30pm, with live coverage of the opening ceremony from midnight.
