It’s A Date!
By Michael Weadock, Jan 2025
What to do when you get back to work after the New Year and the reality hits you that it’s not an Olympic Year? Well, you realise it’s going to be one year to go until the next Olympic Games soon and get planning! So, here’s a few big things which have been scribbled in the Anything but Footy diary for 2025 already.
6th February 2026: Exactly one year until the Opening Ceremony for the Milano Cortina Olympic Winter Games. Eve Muirhead will be Team GB’s Chef de Mission in Italy and will be overseeing a team with plenty of potential across a number of different disciplines and sports. The Paralympic Winter Games begin on the 6th March 2026.
There are plenty of events for winter sports fans to look forward to in the early part of this year. The Alpine World Ski Championships, Biathlon World Championships, Bobsleigh and Skeleton World Championships, Men’s and Women’s World Curling Championships, European and World Figure Skating Championships, Freestyle Skiing World Championships and Short and Long Track Speed Skating World Championships amongst others. We’ll be keeping an eye on how the prospects for the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic team get on during every episode of the podcast.
We’ll also be across the years other big events away from the snow and ice both on the podcast and for radio. Following their hugely successful coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games last summer, talkSPORT will continue to provide coverage on sports like athletics, cycling and swimming.
There’s a busy indoor athletics season to come over the next couple of months. I’m looking forward to being trackside in Birmingham for the British Indoor Championships in February and then following the World Indoor Championships in China and the European Indoor Championships in the Netherlands. There’s also a new event this year called the Keely Klassic which is being held on the 15th February and will see a whole host of big names taking part and an attempt on the indoor 800m world record by Olympic Champion Keely Hodgkinson.
The 2025 World Championships will be held in Tokyo in September and we are looking forward to covering that event and seeing the National Stadium with a capacity crowd in a way we couldn’t in 2021 at the delayed Olympic Games.
We’ll also be in London in April for the Marathon and seeing how World and Olympic Triathlon Champion Alex Yee gets on over 26.2 miles.
The World Aquatic Championships are being staged in Singapore this year and will take up much of July whilst there will be a history making World Championships in road cycling as Rwanda becomes the first-ever African host of the event. The Track World Championships are being staged in Chile in October.
In artistic gymnastics, Indonesia is the host country for the World Championships in October whilst British Rowing will be looking to build on their amazing success in Paris at the World Championships in China in September. Coastal Rowing is also on the programme for the next Olympic Games in Los Angeles so the European and World Championships being staged this year will be an early indicator to where the medals may be heading. The World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals are being held in Rio de Janeiro and will inevitably bring back memories of some happy times we spent in Brazil back in 2016.
There’s plenty more to follow as well – I’ll be watching triathlon’s World Championship Series which begins next month in Abu Dhabi whilst John is already engrossed in tennis’ first major event of the year – the Australian Open. He’s already got Wimbledon etched in his planner for the first two weeks in July.
