Marathon coverage ?

Woddle

I got emailed today by the race organisers telling me that setanta will show 30 mins of the marathon on the Monday night, so I was wondering do RTE show it live from start to finish ?
if not I think this is terrible considering the coverage BBC gave the great north run on the weekend gone.

cfitz

I don't know whether it's being shown on RTE or not. But the depth in the field at the Great North Run is probably a lot greater. It is a big event though, it'd be nice to see it on tv.

thirtyfoot

When you consider that RTE don't cover events live like Cork City Sports or Morton Memorial that may have World and Olympic Champions competing in then its a push to expect them to show 3 or 4 hours of an event that will have no big name athletes. Coverage of minority sports in Ireland is very different to the UK and the only live athletics you will get on RTE will be the National Seniors in July and then whatever major is on that year. World or Euro cross is occasionally shown. Although, the European Cross-Country Championships are in Santry next year and RTE will be supporting and covering that. I'm an athletics fan and I wouldn't sit down to watch 3 hours of the Dublin Marathon as its just not good TV if there aren't big names involved and I'd usually watch anything:) Now if maybe 3 or 4 Irish guys or girls were racing and hoping to get a world or Olympic standard I'd tune in but they will more than likely choose a faster course to get standards.

robinph

Seems that they are going to be showing more highlights of it later in the week though. Bit strange that they are not showing anything live though, there cannot be much else on in the way of live sport that morning that they'd be wanting to show instead, but then again if your family/ supporters had the choice of watching on telly or going out to stand on the side of the road then there might be a few less people cheering us all along. So we might actually appreciate that it's not on the TV live.

Peckham

Wasn't shown live last year or year before. RTE did used to cover it live though (fairly sure I can remember as a youngster), but not sure when they ceased doing it.

Am sure the logistics of covering something like this live is pretty substantial, so may be down to cost reasons.

Setanta did show two highlights shows last year - both were very much focussed on the front-end of the race as far as I recall, and didn't show much of the midpack action. Both were pretty poor too!

Racing Flat

Tingle wrote: »

Now if maybe 3 or 4 Irish guys or girls were racing and hoping to get a world or Olympic standard I'd tune in but they will more than likely choose a faster course to get standards.

If Pauline Curley, Maria McCambridge and Annette Kealy are all running as has been rumoured the women's National race could be a cracker.

hawkwing

RTE always had it live in the early 80's when there was damn all money about--now they just show John Giles ranting for hours and reality TV and then we wonder why the kids are getting fat.:(