{"id":481040,"date":"2026-03-17T21:46:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T21:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/481040\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T21:46:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T21:46:07","slug":"armchair-fans-have-been-robbed-as-bbc-ditch-michael-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/481040\/","title":{"rendered":"Armchair fans have been robbed as BBC ditch Michael Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Armchair sports fans have been robbed. Just as John McEnroe has become the personification of Wimbledon on the TV, so Johnson was as essential a part of the BBC\u2019s athletics team as he was for the American 4x400m relay squad when they set a (still undefeated) world record in Stuttgart 33 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>However disappointed we might feel, the logic of the decision cannot be faulted. Johnson was the prime mover behind the <a class=\"ck-custom-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/athletics\/2026\/03\/10\/michael-johnson-accused-of-secretly-paying-himself-500000\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">failed Grand Slam Track project<\/a>, which folded in December with alleged debts of almost \u00a312m to more than 150 athletes and companies.<\/p>\n<p>Whether you consider Johnson to be responsible or not \u2013 and a surprising number of out-of-pocket athletes seem reluctant to blame him \u2013 it would be impractical to book a pundit who stands accused of owing money to the very people he is being asked to comment on.<\/p>\n<p>For BBC Sport, meanwhile, it is all too convenient to continue with a homegrown panel at this time of shrinking budgets across the department. When the European Athletics Championships are staged in Birmingham in August, they will probably continue to rotate the usual suspects \u2013 Ennis-Hill, Meadows, Denise Lewis, Greg Rutherford \u2013 and avoid having to pay for any international air fares.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Armchair sports fans have been robbed. Just as John McEnroe has become the personification of Wimbledon on the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[49288,243,5337,217,101,118,56,54,55,49084],"class_list":["post-481040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-athletics","tag-bbc","tag-comment","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-world-athletics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}