(ATR) Anthony Edgar kept order among the media at the Olympic Games for 18 years.
As media operations director for the IOC, Edgar was the overseer for the hordes of media covering the Olympic Games. The Australian native announced on Facebook Jan. 27 that he will take early retirement and return to Sydney. He says he will spend time with his children and father.
As a sports photographer and journalist in Australia, Edgar was recruited to handle sports-related publications for the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games.
In 2001 he left Australia to become media chief for FIVB, the international volleyball federation.
In 2003 Edgar joined the IOC staff as the first head of media operations for the Olympic Games.
Beginning with the Athens Olympics, Edgar brought order to the mobs of media that would form at the Games once a crisis erupted. In Athens, even before the Games began, Edgar had to deal with a media frenzy over a motorcycle crash involving Greece’s two biggest athletes. The crash occurred as the pair made a getaway from the Olympic Village to avoid drug testing.
Two years later at the Turin Winter Olympics, Anthony faced media swarms after Italian police carried out raids on living quarters of Austrian athletes suspected of blood doping. Edgar could be a firm and imposing presence, asserting order over the pack of media nearly without fail.
In his farewell on Facebook, Edgar notes that he began work at the IOC just as the social media revolution was beginning to gather speed.
"At the time no one knew the epoch of change was upon us. Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone were each launched over the next 40 months of my starting at the IOC, ushering in a new social, digital and mobile future, triggering tumultuous change globally that would turn the media landscape upside down, impacting how sport would be consumed, broadcast and reported on in the future," Edgar writes.
"To have been in a leadership position during these turbulent times and to work hand-in-hand with the international news agencies and news networks to navigate a course forward will stay as one of my fondest of memories," says Edgar.
Dozens of tributes from colleagues and friends follow Edgar’s Facebook posting, a testament tothe regard he built in the media across two decades at the IOC.
Reported by Ed Hula.
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