BBC Sport director and exec producer Sally Richardson presented with Outstanding Contribution Award at Sport Production Summit

Sally Richardson with Alessandro Reitano

Former BBC Sport executive producer and lead director Sally Richardson was presented with the Outstanding Contribution to European Sports Broadcasting award at SVG Europe’s Sport Production Summit today (Thursday 12 Sept), where she shared highlights from her career in front of a packed audience at De Hallen Studios in Amsterdam.

Richardson, who retired from the BBC earlier this month after more than 30 years of working for the broadcaster, was honoured for her contribution to sports production. Over the years, her career has taken in a host of Summer and Winter Olympic Games, 25 years of the Wimbledon Championships plus a plethora of other sports including both codes of rugby and the Boat Race.

Previous recipients of the SVG Europe Outstanding Contribution to European Sports Broadcasting Award include Olympic Broadcasting Services founding chief executive Manolo Romero, EMG UK chair and CTV founder Barry Johnstone, HBS founder Francis Tellier, international sport coordinator Velitchka Nedialkova and Graham Fry, former IMG production managing director.

Presenting Richardson with the Award, SVG Europe Advisory Board chairman Alessandro Reitano described Richardson as a deserved winner of the award. He said: “Sally’s contribution to European sports broadcasting over the years has been immense, and it’s an honour for SVG Europe to celebrate her career.”

Richardson also received video messages of congratulations from former colleagues and friends Sue Barker, Gabby Logan, Clare Balding and Katherine Grainger, who all praised her professionalism, calmness, kindness and support, and wished her well in retirement.

Richardson’s production career began at the BBC in 1985 in a regional newsroom in Leeds. After her A-Levels, Richardson went to secretarial college. “In those days, it was what you did as a female,” she explains. “And then I worked for a finance company for 18-months, just because I needed a job. But I really wanted to work in the theater, and on the same day that I had an audition with a theater company, I also had an interview at the BBC in Leeds.

“After the audition I went to the phone box to ring my parents to come and pick me up, and Mum said, ‘you’ve had a call from the BBC. They want to offer you the job’. And so that was it. At the time I didn’t really have any burning desire or ambition to work in television, but once I got there, I knew that I wanted to work in sport, because I’d always had an interest in it, which came from my family.”
Richardson credits BBC Look North presenter Harry Gration with helping her during the early stages of her career.

“He was really, really good to me,” she says. “Once I got established, I told him that I was really interested in working on sport, and so from then on, anything that was sport related in BBC Leeds he got me to work on it with him. And that was where it all started, really.”

One of Richardson’s first directing roles was on long-running BBC sport programme Grandstand, while her last major directing role before retirement was as lead director for the BBC’s Paris 2024 coverage, ensuring the every Team GB medal winning moment was shown live on the broadcasters network channels.

She likens directing to being a conductor. “You are center stage, and you’ve got all of the players around you. And you try to make sure that everybody’s playing all the right notes, in the right order.”
And on the importance of mentoring and shadowing, Richardson added: “I’ve always encouraged younger people who are newer to any particular area to come and find out more. I’ve always been really happy to work with them on something that is lower profile so that they can gain some experience, or they can come and shadow on something that is high profile.

“We’ve got to keep a constant churn of people going, because there’s a generation of people like me -and in the technical areas specifically – who are thinking about hanging up their faders or their cameras, and once they go, there’ll be a massive skills gap.

“When I first began as a PA in sport, my job was production assistant to Malcolm Kemp, a Kiwi who sadly is no longer with us. And he came over to work in in BBC Sport, and he brought with him a lot of new ideas. Back in the early 1990s, he was doing split screens when we were covering horse racing before they were really a thing.

“He introduced music on replays in live action, which hadn’t been seen or heard before.  It wasn’t very long-lived because of the tradition at the BBC, but he was very innovative in his coverage and I used to do an awful lot of things for him when we were in a truck; a bit of vision mixing, I was in charge of the graphics.

“I did a lot that was beyond the remit of a production system, which I think really helped me with my next step, which was to become an assistant producer. He had a really big influence on me.

“I didn’t go to university, so I don’t have a degree, and I didn’t have an editorial background; I had a secretarial background. So, I did have to make most of any opportunities – and create my own – and then grasp them.”