Scott Russell’s career has taken him everywhere
By: Rachael Bishop
RP Show Intern
Scott Russell is one of the most well-known and beloved sports broadcasters in Canada, having covered 14 Olympic Games for CBC. It’s an event which Russell has now become synonymous in the sports media world to the point that when Canadians think of the Olympics, Scott comes to mind.
Not only has he become the face of the Olympics in Canada, he’s also been rewarded for his incredible work over the years, including in 2005 for Best Host or Best Interviewer in a Sports Program or Sportscast for CBC Sports Saturday; an honour he was given at what was then known as the Gemini Awards. Russell also won the 2017 Canadian Screen Award for Best Sports Host in a Sports Program or Series, beating out fellow Canadian broadcasting giants James Duthie, Brian Williams, and his former CBC colleague, Ron MacLean.
Russell’s passion for the Olympic Games first started at his all-boys sleepaway camp in Haliburton, Ontario, about two and a half hours north of downtown Toronto. The camp is known for its mini-Olympics, which have occurred every summer there since 1932.
“The baseball diamond was all decorated with bunting and torch bearing runners arrived by the war canoe on the beach and lit the cauldron atop the baseball diamond and the entire camp was divided into country team’s; we built embassies and there was an opening and closing ceremonies,” Russell says via a Zoom call, “ that’s what I love about the Olympics, it’s the greatest recurring spectacle on the face of the earth, and there is no event on the earth that is ambitious as the Olympics and aspires to be all things to all people. And I love it because it’s much more than a sporting event, it is an event which is about humanity.”
“To hear our [camp] director say those famous words of [Pierre] De Coubertin when he said, ‘the Olympics are about more than victory, they are about the struggle and taking part’, was hugely important as I’ve evolved into what I’ve become today, which is the Olympic host on CBC.”
Career Transition
Born and raised in Oshawa, Ontario, Russell completed his Master’s of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Western Ontario in London, ON in 1985 (he also received his undergraduate degree in arts from Western in 1980). Not long after graduating, Russell was hired by CBC Charlottetown to work as an agricultural reporter on the dinner-time local news show Compass– a show which still continues today.
From there, it was a quick transition to sports, and Russell hasn’t looked back.
“What happened what, Diana McDonald, who was one of the first female sportscasters in the country was the sports anchor at CBC Charlottetown, and she left to go to TSN, and that opened up to be the sports anchor, which I readily went for,” Russell says. “And I got that, and covered everything from harness racing to local curling, to the lobster carnival, it was fantastic. And I went from there.”
Just two years after graduating and arriving in Prince Edward Island, Russell was called by the main CBC network to cover the Canada Winter Games in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he reported on alpine skiing and cross-country skiing.
As Russell explains, “the Canada Winter Games was always kind of a training ground for the network for CBC Sports,” he says. “And if you proved yourself there, there was a chance you might get on with the network, and so I had a great experience in Cape Breton, and soon after that, I moved to Montréal, became the weekend sports anchor there, and that’s when I started covering Hockey Night in Canada. I was there for five years, and then I got the job at the network full-time in 1992, and the rest is history.”
While at Hockey Night in Canada in Toronto, Russell was the rinkside reporter in addition to the studio host of the late-night Western games (10 pm EST) Ron Maclean of course, was the host for the primetime 7 pm games, a role which Maclean. Russell spent 14 years between Montreal and Toronto at Hockey Night in Canada, during this time Russell was also the sideline reporter for the CFL on CBC (CBC lost the CFL rights to TSN in 2007).
Because Russell had so much experience working as the field reporter for live sporting events, the transition to him becoming the full-time in studio host for the Olympics was a natural one; he finally earned the job for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
He claims that working as the CFL sideline reporter, Hockey Night in Canada ice-level reporter and western games in-studio host was “a great proving ground” (for his current full-time job as the primetime host of the CBC’s Olympic Games coverage, as well as the in-studio co-host of the CBC Sports weekend show Road the Olympic Games). For Russell, “being on site for a big athletic event, whether it’s professional or high-performance amateur is a great learning experience, because you have to find out how to relate to the athletes, and you can actually get to the story, and the lay of the land by being there.”
Career Highlights
Russell has covered some of the best Olympics in recent memory, including Salt Lake City in 2002 when the Canadian men’s hockey team won its first Olympic gold medal in 50 years, and when the women’s hockey team won its first of four straight gold medals, and Rio de Janeiro in 2016, when Canada set a new national record for medals. However, three Games in particular stick out: the Summer Olympics Athens in 2004, and the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008, and the Torino Winter Olympics in 2006.
“2004 in Athens was terrific because it’s ostensibly the home of the Olympic Games, and to be able to see Panathenaic Stadium, which is the first stadium used for the Modern Olympic Games, to see that history and so and so on,” he says. “I really liked Beijing in 2008. That was my first Olympic Games as a host, and the great moment there was to be outside the Bird’s Nest Stadium with 90,000 people in it when [Usain] Bolt ran the 9.69 and won the 100 metres,” (an Olympic record that still stands), “you talk about spectacle, that was absolutely amazing.”
Russell also points to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy as one of his favourites due to the sheer geographic beauty of the location. “The Italian Alps are terrific, absolutely spectacular.”
Broadcasting in the Pandemic Era
In addition to his hosting and sideline reporting duties, Russell also provides play-by-play commentary for alpine skiing, and the Olympic marathon races for CBC Sports, a job made much harder this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in his CBC broadcasting career, Russell will not be on the ground at the event, but rather in the main CBC studio in downtown Toronto, calling the marathon races on a television monitor as opposed to live at the track in Tokyo.
“Technology has evolved to the point where we are virtually at the field of play,” Russell says. “The way we can get access to athletes through the mixed zone, through virtual studios which will be in Tokyo, so I can converse with those athletes as if they came into the studio onsite. But listen, from thousands of miles away, you cannot see everything that takes place, as you can when you’re on site at the Olympic Games.”
Russell, who has been onsite for every single Olympics except for Tokyo; says he and his fellow announcers and studio hosts will have to lean on their excellent team of digital and broadcast reporters more than ever before in a year that one can argue sports are more important than ever before.
“I think the values of the Olympic Games are needed now more than ever, there’s no question about that,” he says. “I think there’s a real desire for the world to come together and begin the healing process after what’s happened over the course of the pandemic.”
