Tracey Holmes might have been the first woman to host the iconic ABC radio sports program Grandstand but don’t call her a trailblazer.
“I’ve never thought of myself as that,” she says.
“My mum and dad were both pro surfers at the beginning of pro surfing and were exactly the same and I’ve never, ever liked that kind of distinguishing between one or the other, when it’s actually got nothing to do with gender, it’s a job and anyone should be able to do that job. It’s about the best person for the job.
“People talk now about ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’, and I don’t actually subscribe to that because I think you’ve got to look for where you can see yourself, even if there’s no one like you doing it.”
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Starting at the ABC in 1989, Holmes says she just modelled herself on the best in the business and, at the time, they were overwhelmingly men.
“Before me there was only men, all the national sports programs in Australia had only ever had men, and they were really good men doing that job. I learned a lot from them,” she says.
“I used to listen to them, and I’d look to men who were doing programs internationally and thought I’m going to be like that, or I don’t like that. It really should not matter what you are, male or female — and it does get on my goat that it does matter in some people’s eyes — you’re a human being. If you’re being discriminated against, fight that. But the whole thing about you can’t be what you can’t see, I think just look harder.”
Over 34 years since she started at the ABC, Holmes has become one of Australia’s most respected sport broadcasters and journalists and was recently awarded the Australian Sports Commission Lifetime Achievement Award.
Currently host of ABC Sport’s The Ticket podcast, a weekly in-depth analysis of the major issues in sports business, politics and governance, she also reports for ABC News and appears on News Breakfast.
Holmes has previously hosted programs and sporting coverages on commercial TV in Australia and internationally and covered 14 Olympic Games over the course of her career.
While she recalls encountering sexism when she started hosting Grandstand, Tracey Holmes says there were plenty of men who championed her.
“There was a lot of trouble that a lot of the men I worked with had to go through to enable me to host Grandstand,” she says.
“There was pushback, of course, all those usual things. Even though my voice was a regular voice on Grandstand, I hadn’t hosted, and people were saying no one can listen to a woman for that many hours a day, all the women do is laugh, their voices are too high pitched. But the men I worked with advocated on my behalf.
“John Parker, who was head of Sport when I started, was very supportive. Alan Marks, legendary rugby league commentator who organised ABC Radio’s coverage of the Olympic Games was amazing. Peter Longman, executive producer who ran Grandstand and was head of Sport for a period, put up with a lot over the years and was good at managing me and managing the program.”
While bristling at descriptions of her as a broadcasting pioneer, Holmes is proud of how transformative Grandstand was in the coverage of sport.
“I think we changed how sport was viewed,” she says.
“My passion has always been about this intersection of what sport tells us about our culture, politics, countries, not so much what’s played, who’s been injured, what the score is, it’s always been about that bigger picture.
“We started doing a lot more in-depth interviews with superstars from around the world, not just about their sport but as much about life and their lessons from it and now that kind of coverage is everywhere, which is fabulous.”
Chasing waves and confronting racism
Tracey Holmes had a somewhat nomadic childhood, growing up on Sydney’s northern beaches, then South Africa and Hawaii.
Her parents, as professional surfers, chased the best waves. It instilled in Holmes a love of exploring different cultures and exposed her to the inequality in the world.
She remembers her mother organising a surfing competition in South Africa during apartheid and the discrimination Hawaiian surfers visiting the country experienced.
“They were Hawaiian, so they weren’t white but were given honorary white visas,” she recalls.
“The reality was they couldn’t go into any place that was deemed for whites only — hotels, restaurants, cafes, even some beaches and they weren’t comfortable in the black areas either, because they weren’t Zulu.
“They were kind of stuck between surfing their heats, going back to their room and nothing in between. My mum noticed this and said, ‘well, that’s terrible, just come and stay at our place for the duration of your trip’.
“That started a journey for me of understanding how these clashes in culture and politics can happen and how you can actually play a role in overcoming those sorts of things.
“That led to us living in Hawaii because when the surfers went home, their parents wanted to repay this wonderful experience given to their sons, so we ended up living with them for a while. I’m still lucky enough to travel to different places, meet different people, tell their stories and how we’re all on this one planet together, despite our differences.”
Early on, Tracey Holmes was drawn to sport’s ability to bridge those cultural differences.
“I think what sport shows us is that we can coexist — we are different but it’s up to each of us to find a way to work together,” she says.
“So, when people talk about boycotting the Olympics or banning athletes from this country or that country, that’s not why or how the Olympics was set up.
“The Olympics was set up because people became aware that the world was fraught, there was tension so they created a place where soldiers would come and lay down their arms, put their differences aside, and would all agree to compete in a specific event, with the same rules and may the best person win.
“I think we can learn a lot from that, by not politicising it, not manipulating it. I often think if we didn’t have events like the World Cup football and the Olympic Games would the world be a better place?
“As far as I’ve been able to tell after all these years, I think the answer is no because sport is the one place where people can and do come together and we witness the beauty of it, the complication and difficulty of it.”
Should sporting organisations take a stand on the Voice?
Despite those lofty ideals, sport, in reality, is full of politics — for better or worse — and that has been a focus of Holmes’s journalism.
“I always think it’s really funny when people say to me, ‘I don’t really follow sport, I’m much more interested in politics’,” she says.
“And I say, ‘well, you’re really missing out because there’s more politics in sport than anywhere and the politics of any country inevitably overlaps with sport. Sport has never only been about what happens on the field or the court or the running track. There’s all this stuff that happens behind the scenes, so many strings being pulled, and it tells us a lot about the world.
“At the moment we are seeing the rise of athletes using their own voice to try and make the world a better place. Look at what happened recently at the BBC with Gary Lineker [former England footballer and leading TV host] making a statement criticising the UK’s refugee policy and being taken off air.
“It became a furore that made headlines around the world but 20 or 30 years ago a story like that was few and far between, an athlete making an impact beyond their playing days rarely happened, but now you can probably find a story like that every week around the world and that’s the biggest change I’ve seen over my career — you can’t separate sport from the rest of society.”
While she understands why individual athletes might take a stand on particular issues that prick their conscience, Holmes believes sporting organisations should stay out of politics.
As Australians prepare to vote on a referendum to install an Indigenous Voice in the constitution, Holmes, who is married to proud Wiradjuri man and prominent ABC journalist and Q&A host Stan Grant, says sports should be careful about expressing a view for or against.
“Obviously, we talk about the Voice in our house a lot and when we walk down the street people are constantly stopping my husband to ask him if they’re thinking along the right track, they want to know what is best for Indigenous people,” she says.
“My husband never tells them one way or the other but says ‘here are the pros and cons and it’s up to each individual to come to their own decision in their own mind on what is best’.
“And this idea that sport needs to buy into these things, stand up and support the Voice — I think sports need to be very, very careful about that because in sport, we have everybody. We have people who will agree with it and people who won’t agree with it.
“We have Indigenous people who agree and don’t agree with it, white people who agree and don’t agree with it and to say as an umbrella organisation we’re taking ‘this view’, well, what does that say to all your members who don’t have that view for many reasons, many valid reasons.
“I think that’s the difficulty and where sports can show leadership is by saying we are a diverse family, people come to us with all sorts of history and experiences and what we hope we can give them is that moment of inclusion of all of these diverse aspects and the space to be able to decide for themselves. Otherwise, sport becomes divided and sport is not supposed to be that.”
How women’s sport and women covering sport has changed
Growing up, Tracey Holmes played a lot of different sports — basketball, volleyball, athletics, surfing — but found herself more interested in conversation than competition.
“I was always surrounded by sport because I was always at a contest at the beach with my mum and dad, but my interest was less about the sport than the people, I love people,” she says.
“I never saw myself as a competitor — my sister got all the competitive genes and became a pro-surfer — but I’d be in school surfing contests and instead of rapidly trying to catch waves and beat my opponents, I’d be sitting out the back talking to them about their life story and letting them catch the waves. I’d come in, finishing last because I hadn’t caught any waves, but I knew everything about the people I was competing against in that heat. I just love storytelling.”
She loves any kind of sport and has no favourite.
“That’s like asking me if I have a favourite kid,” she laughs.
“I can watch anything. When I was living in Beijing, I was lucky enough to cover the Asian Beach Games, which Australia traditionally did not participate in. There were all these sports that are mostly played in the subcontinent and they’re fantastic. I love the psychology of sport, so it doesn’t matter what it is. In any game of sport, I look at the people.”
Tracey Holmes studied public relations and while working as a publicist for the 1988 Bicentennial sporting events she started providing reports for media organisations that couldn’t get to all the events.
She filed to radio stations around the country, including the ABC which invited her to then apply for a specialist broadcast cadetship and her career was off and running.
In 1989, she started a weekly segment on the ABC called ‘Women in Sport’ and her efforts over the years in reporting on women’s sport and mentoring women sports journalists has been recognised by the International Olympic Committee with the Women and Sports Awards for Oceania.
“We are so much further ahead than when I started 30 years ago, a lot has changed but then a lot just stays the same,” she says.
“We hear a lot more about women’s sport and there are a lot more women covering it, but when the big decisions are made, they’re still overwhelmingly made by men.
“The majority of boards are overwhelmingly men, editors — the people who decide what the sports story of the day is going to be — are still overwhelmingly men. To be fair, there are lot of men who are forward-thinking in that regard, like Peter Longman 30 years ago who I mentioned earlier.
“If the Matildas are playing a World Cup game, for example, it should rank far more highly than a round three NRL or AFL clash but we still see so often that that round three domestic football clash will take priority over an international tournament with one of this country’s most highly regarded teams, so there are those sort of things that haven’t properly found their level. Change is happening but it happens slowly.”
Tracey Holmes nominates covering Olympic Games as career highlights but as someone who is intrigued by the personal story interviewing tennis champion Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win the US Open, Australian Open and Wimbledon, is an experience that had a profound impact on her.
“Arthur Ashe was a tennis legend and a black man who played in the era when it was really only white people playing and what he put up with and what he achieved was phenomenal,” she says.
“In later years he had to go to hospital for an operation, required a blood transfusion and the blood he was given was infected with [HIV, which led to him developing AIDS], so his life was cut short.
“I spoke to him not long before he died and asked him about his phenomenal career and if he was angry about getting infected blood and his life being cut short. He said to me, ‘well no, because, if it wasn’t me it was going to be someone else, so why shouldn’t it be me? It’s the randomness of life’.
“It was just so powerful. When someone like him who had such an extraordinary life, been so significant, and he could pull back from it and see he was just a small part of this world and to have such grace through everything he confronted — those are the stories that amaze me. They are the type of amazing things that happen in sport that I think other sectors of society can really learn from.”
When the Australian Sports Commission got in touch about her Lifetime Achievement Award, Holmes was humbled but then wondered with amusement whether that meant she was old and her career was over.
In fact, she’s still a long way from the finish line.
“I consider it my ‘halfway there’ Lifetime Achievement Award because I’ve still got the second half to go,” she says.
“To be able to tell other people’s stories and for them to trust me enough to tell them and that people do listen to these stories, I hope that by the work I do, I can drive positive change and that gives me a lot of gratitude.”
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