Saturday, May 26, 2018

British sportscaster Rebecca Lowe

Rebecca Lowe has left an indelible impression on television viewers as an on-camera host of NBC's Olympic coverage, but she took an interesting career path to get there. 


The British sportscaster originally hoped to become an actress, and she got herself a job on a sports-talk radio station in the U.K. while looking for an agent.  Then in 2002, she entered a BBC talent contest for a reporter to cover "football" that is, soccer - and she ended up winning.

For the next five years, Ms. Lowe did interviews and features on the BBC soccer show "Football Focus" and reported Premier League matches on Saturdays for "Final Score."  She also had her own regular feature, "Football in the Community," on the BBC Sunday soccer program "Match of the Day."  She left the BBC for the Setanta sports channel in 2007, but that channel went off the air two years later.

Ms. Lowe was soon back on her feet, though, as she then joined ESPN's new British channel as a soccer commentator, and she soon divided her time between both ESPN's American and British outlets.  When NBC in the United States began showing British Premier League matches in 2013 in response to a growing American interest in soccer, Ms. Lowe joined the network as a commentator.  Sports Illustrated named Newcomer of the Year in its 2013 Media Awards, even though she was new only to American television.  She had been honing her sportscasting skills back in the mother country for a decade. 


It only made sense that Ms. Lowe would take on the task of hosting coverage of that other great international sporting phenomenon, the Olympics. Her posh accent and her personable charisma have won her fans among Americans who watch both the Olympics and the Premiere League.  She was the Olympic daytime host at the PyeongChang Winter Games in 2018 and will be back for more at Tokyo in 2020. 

Fun fact:  Rebecca Lowe first came to America as a scholarship student at the Mercersburg Academy, a prep boarding school in Pennsylvania.  

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