Harold Anderson heads up television for Volvo Ocean Race

Ex editor of BBC Grandstand and Sportsnight, Harold Anderson, has joined the Volvo Ocean Race to head up the television team responsible for producing and delivering the official Volvo Ocean Race weekly highlights and seven one hour documentaries.

Anderson’s background is wide and varied. In the late ‘70s to the mid ‘80s, Harold Anderson was deputy of head of sport for the BBC. He produced coverage of the Olympic Games, Open Golf and Wimbledon. He then returned to his homeland to become controller of programmes at Television New Zealand before developing and launching Sky Television, New Zealand’s first pay TV service. Moving overseas to Singapore, he launched ESPN’s pan Asia sports networks in the early ‘90s, creating two sports channels for South East Asia and India. Most recently, Anderson was director of sport and Olympics at Channel 7 in Australia, where he was responsible for setting up and producing the coverage of the Sydney Olympics for the Australian audience.

In his role as executive editor of the Volvo Ocean Race he will be responsible for delivering the official Volvo Ocean Race programming and ensuring a true reflection of the event in an authoritative and entertaining style.

“The Volvo Ocean Race is the world’s premier ocean race”, said Anderson. “It provides unique challenges for the television production team. We will meet those challenges with the use of remarkable technology that will bring a new, exciting perspective to yacht racing viewers as well as attracting a new group of devotees.”

A quietly spoken New Zealander with two grown up children, Anderson is presently based just north of Brisbane, at Noosa Heads in Queensland. This will all change when he transfers his base to the UK for the duration of the Volvo Ocean Race 2005-06 later next year.