News

Changing Times for tennis and F1 reporters

The Times has appointed new motor racing and tennis correspondents and updated their football line-up.

While there have been several women sports reporters working in the pit lane for TV and radio broadcasters in the past, and some women have reported on the sport occasionally for newspapers, The Times appointments make Rebecca Clancy the first woman to be the Formula 1 correspondent for one of the country’s nationals.

Rebecca Clancy: Times's new motor racing correspondent
Rebecca Clancy: Times’s new motor racing correspondent

Clancy replaces Kevin Eason in the high-octane world of F1, while Stuart Fraser will fill The Times‘s tennis vacancy created by Barry Flatman’s decision to return to Sunday Times duties exclusively.

Clancy has been a journalist since 2009 covering football and rugby for a series of publications before joining an FT trade magazine. She then became a business reporter at The Telegraph before joining The Times in 2014 as head of business breaking news.

More recently, she was appointed assistant news editor on home news.

Clancy moves to the sports department on January 30 as motor racing and sports reporter, as Eason – currently in the desert somewhere working on preview material ahead of this weekend’s season finale Abu Dhabi Grand Prix – bids farewell after more than a quarter of a century in and around the world of motoring for The Times.

Eason arrived at the paper in 1989 working on politics and industry, and after a spell as motoring correspondent switched to sport in 1998.

In addition to motor racing, Eason has covered three Olympic Games, the 2010 football World Cup, Wimbledon tennis, The Open golf, the Ryder Cup and cycling world championships. Abu Dhabi this weekend will be his final event.

Fraser, from Oban, takes up his position as tennis correspondent on December 1 after working as a freelance for Mail Online since 2013, where he also covered the sport for the paper. He has been employed by Wimbledon, the Australian Open and the International Tennis Federation.

On the football roster, Paul Joyce joins The Times from the Daily Express, to work the Merseyside beat in place of Tony Barrett, the paper’s former football editor who quit last summer in a row over The Times’s decision not to put the outcome of the Hillsborough inquest on the front page.