ABSTRACT
Radio sport, certainly when compared to television sport, is a somewhat neglected object of study. It can at times be a quite invisible object of study: thus the publisher's flyer for a recent book on radio announced that it would cover 'all principal radio genres', listing these as 'short stories, plays, documentaries/drama documentaries, talks and features, adaptations/ dramatizations, poems and advertisements'1 - sport merited no mention at all. It is likewise almost entirely absent from Understanding Radio, despite this book having an entire section dedicated to phone-ins, a key element of radio sport reporting.2 There are of course exceptionsPeter Dahlen's comprehensive study of sport radio in Sweden from its inception until the mid-1990s is a major contribution to the field3 and there have been useful studies analyzing the link between sport on radio and broader nation-building processes.4 Even so, academic interest in the phenomenon of radio sport seems to lie some distance behind its actual social importance.
