Sports broadcaster Eilidh Barbour is blazing a trail that’s stopping viewers in their tracks

It is a truth universally acknowledged that sport never stops – and our appetite for coverage seems evermore insatiable. With Old Firm games setting new viewing records for the Scottish Premiership (to the tune of more than 1.4 million for last year’s Celtic-Rangers derby at Ibrox) and live sport being broadcast simultaneously across every time zone, it’s a round the clock job keeping a handle on its Usain-Bolt-speed movements.

 When Eilidh Barbour describes the buzz of sport, it’s infectious just to listen. The roar of competition and fandom; the fire in the belly of the teams. Even with a broadcasting career that’s spanned 15 years, Barbour still finds being pitchside as thrilling as ever.

“Seeing it, smelling it – I still get that same feeling when I’m on the ground, especially at cup finals or major tournaments. If I could have competed in sport I would have, so the next best thing is being at the stadium or golf course and having a part to play in people enjoying that event – even if I’m not actually out there kicking the ball.” 

As the lead anchor at Sky Sports for Scottish football coverage as well as the face of golf on the BBC (she’s presented from all four men’s majors, as well as the Ryder Cup), the juggle between pitches and putting is real. 

“I’m covering football for around 50 weekends of the year, so you can’t really do a golf tournament and disappear to Ross County for the final day to cover a match. I’d love to do more golf, but trying to balance that out over the season is quite difficult. I used to work on a lot of rugby and I covered the Winter Olympics in 2018, but I’ve never done a Summer Olympics – that would be amazing.”

In any field where there hasn’t been equal gender representation, there’s an element of encapsulating the change you want to see – or taking note of the go-getters who have gone before. In Barbour’s case it was Hazel Irvine, a well-kent face who pioneered across sports presenting. Irvine was the first woman to become the dedicated anchor of a football programme in the UK, as well as the first to host full live coverage of golf’s Open Championship and the Masters at Augusta. 

“I was a complete sports geek when I was a kid,” says Barbour. “I had wall charts, I cut stuff out of newspapers and I had all the match-day programmes. I remember the first day that Hazel Irvine presented Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon. I would have been 13 or 14 years old. It was such a big moment, because it was somebody I could relate to: a Scottish female doing the biggest sports programme of the week. It was always these London voices, always men, and now you had this Scottish woman. I just thought, ‘Oh my God, that is what I want to be.’”

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