Ken Sutcliffe

Loyalty is rare in sport, but it’s something Ken Sutcliffe knows a lot about. During a 50-year career in sports broadcasting, he spent 37 years with one broadcaster, Nine Network, the highest-rating network in Australia. Nearly 20 of those were spent as the lead sports presenter on Sydney’s evening news. From the 1980s onwards, he became the face and voice of major sporting events for millions of Australians, fronting Nine Network’s coverage of numerous Summer and Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games, as well as hosting coverage of Wimbledon, the US Open, Rugby League Grand Finals, and America’s Cup.

Sutcliffe’s media career began back in the mid-1960s in Mudgee, a town in New South Wales. Starting in radio, he became a newsreader for local station CBN-8 Orange. He worked for Queensland station TNQ-7 during the mid-1970s, but his big break came in 1979 when he joined World of Sport, a long-running programme broadcast on Nine Network’s flagship Sydney channel, TCN-9. Having built a successful profile presenting sporting events and other programmes in Nine’s Wide World of Sports brand, he became the sports presenter for the Sydney Evening News in 1988.

During his career, Sutcliffe has received a number of awards and accolades. In 2014, he received the Australian Sports Commission Media Award for Lifetime Achievement. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours List of 2019, he received the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to broadcasting. His long, eventful career gave him ample material for his memoirs, The Wide of World of Ken Sutcliffe, which were published in 2009.