European Sports Championships: launch of new spectacle of sport

A neat trick involving a sleight of hand is about to be performed in front of our eyes and the illusionists trust we will marvel at the spectacle and beg for more.

The first European Sports Championships begin in Glasgow on Thursday and conclude in Berlin 11 days later. Eight sports are stacking their continental showpieces in a single deck and allowing the organisers and television producers to shuffle the cards around in a game of who has top trumps next?

There will be athletics in Berlin, swimming, cycling and gymnastics in Glasgow, and diving in Edinburgh. Rowing and triathlon will take place in a country park in Motherwell. Oh, and there is golf at Gleneagles. All packaged together for the first time and offered to the world.

“The key thing is to create something which has much broader appeal than stand-alone championships,” the co-founder and director, Paul Bristow, says. “Most of them lacked any general cut-through with the public. So you transform something which only appeals to dedicated fans of the sport.

“You might be a cycling fan who knows when the track cycling championships take place and where they can be found on your TV guide. But if you’re a casual sports fan, you won’t know where or when, or the winners. They’ll know when the Olympic Games are on. When the Commonwealth Games are on.

“The athletes in these sports come to life. They become personalities and people realise their phenomenal achievements. We felt that being the best out of 850 million people on the planet was something that needed to be properly recognised.”

It is a reasonable ambition and has persuaded the BBC to carve out 12 hours per day to dart from one venue to another on the promise that co-ordinated timetables will concoct a seamless stream of highlights. “And to the TV viewer,” Bristow says, “it doesn’t matter if you go 2,000 metres from the velodrome to the track or 2,000 kilometres across Europe.”