Lauren Day
Lauren Day covers sport as part of a wider current affairs portfolio at the ABC, using games and athletes to tell stories about inclusion, identity and public controversy. Her sports work focuses less on match results and more on what sport reveals about social change, access and the pressures on elite performers. She brings long-form investigative skills to sporting subjects, often following an athlete or issue over time and across formats.
Sport as a window into social change
Day uses sport to examine social and cultural shifts rather than purely on-field performance. Her piece on an Australian rules footballer “sacrificing it all for the AFLW” centres on the human cost of pursuing a professional women’s career, highlighting trade-offs in health, work and relationships that come with breaking into a still-developing competition.
Her reporting on tennis around the Australian Open looks at how a single player’s vaccination status became a flashpoint in public debate, placing a major tournament inside a broader story about protest, policing and civil liberties. Across these stories she treats sporting events as part of a wider public moment, drawing out policy, legal and cultural angles without losing sight of the athlete at the centre.
Inclusive sport and disability representation
Inclusive sport and disability representation are recurring themes in Day’s coverage. Her story “Dylan Alcott out to make disability sexy” follows the Paralympian’s effort to shift how disability is perceived in mainstream culture, framing his sporting success as a platform for advocacy rather than an endpoint. The focus is on how visibility, branding and language around disability can change when a high-profile athlete pushes against stereotypes, rather than on match outcomes. In these pieces she pays close attention to tone and framing, showing how interviews, visuals and language can either reinforce or challenge assumptions about disabled athletes.
This approach makes her well suited to stories where sport intersects with representation, accessibility or the lived experience of marginalised groups.
Sports culture and international stories
Day’s work also connects sport to questions of culture and place, including stories that follow athletes abroad. In coverage of an Australian baseball player bringing local flavours like Vegemite and Tim Tams into a US clubhouse, she uses small details of food and routine to show how athletes carry identity across borders.
The story sits between sport, lifestyle and cultural exchange, showing how a single player navigates homesickness, team dynamics and national stereotypes through everyday choices rather than big set-piece moments.
Her broader reporting remit includes North America and other regions, and she brings that international perspective into sport by paying attention to how rules, fandom and media narratives differ across contexts. When sport enters wider political or protest stories, she is comfortable covering legal action, public order and institutional responses alongside the games themselves.
Long-form investigations that shape her sports work
Day’s sports reporting is informed by extensive experience in investigative and long-form current affairs. Before taking on foreign correspondence duties, she built a reputation through work on programs such as 7.30 and Four Corners, contributing to multi-part investigations and complex broadcast pieces. She has played key roles in major investigations into the cosmetic surgery industry and health failures, including the “Cosmetic Cowboys” reporting that examined regulation, harm and accountability across multiple outlets and platforms.
That work has been recognised in Walkley and Kennedy Awards lists, underlining her strength in deep document work, source handling and sustained narrative construction.
The same skills are visible when she turns to sport: she favours character-driven narratives, places individual decisions within structural pressures, and is willing to follow a story through legal, medical or governance angles when a sporting issue exposes wider systemic problems. Her long tenure at the ABC and experience across domestic and international assignments mean she brings an institutional and global frame to even relatively small sporting stories.
4 more sports journalists.
Aaron Timms
Aaron Timms is a sports writer at The Guardian who treats sport as a way to interrogate power structures, media ecosystems and cultural currents rather than to file match reports or transfer gossip. He focuses on sports media, ownership and era‑defining stars, tracking how broadcasting, business and masculinity shape what fans see and feel. His work ranges across football, basketball, US sports media and cricket, with recurring attention to US television networks, commentators, podcasts and the “sports bros” manosphere, and to governance, regulation and money in elite football. He writes about figures such as Kylian Mbappé and Victor Wembanyama as markers of new epochs in sport. Timms has also written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Salon, The Daily Beast, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.
Adrian Proszenko
Adrian Proszenko is distinct for treating rugby league as a year-round ecosystem, with hard-news reporting on the NRL and the off-field decisions that shape it. He is a senior rugby league reporter for The Age, covering the NRL, State of Origin and elite club competitions. His beat spans player movement, governance and the business of the sport, with frequent reporting on squad changes, injuries, judiciary outcomes, selection calls, contracts, salary cap pressure and club politics. He also covers expansion discussions, franchise bids, venue decisions, broadcast and scheduling issues, and industrial disputes. His work relies on sourced detail from coaches, agents, club officials, administrators and players, and he uses reported news, direct quotes and specific facts to explain how decisions are made and what they mean.
Andrew Wu
Andrew Wu is a sports journalist at The Age whose AFL work uses game nights, especially for big clubs, to test how well teams are built, focusing on structure, depth and pressure rather than just the score. He writes where individual star performances meet system-wide problems, asking why a side can fail even when its marquee players deliver. His match analysis treats each game as evidence in a larger case about a club’s direction, with clear, direct reporting built from player roles, match‑ups and key passages that reveal mentality and adaptability. Wu covers major codes, particularly AFL and cricket, bringing a cross‑code view of how teams manage form, fatigue and selection over long seasons. He is drawn to list balance, system integrity and whether clubs and national sides can turn talent into reliable performance with stakes beyond a single match.
Andrew van Leeuwen
Andrew van Leeuwen covers top-level motorsport with a focus on how rules, governance and competitive dynamics shape what happens on track. He writes for Speedcafe about Supercars and international series, treating officiating and regulation as core competitive factors rather than background noise. His reporting follows how race control and judicial processes influence Supercars outcomes, unpacking stewards’ calls, penalties, protests and appeals and linking them to points, grids and race results. He also runs the week-to-week Supercars beat, tracking race weekends, team form, strategy, technical changes, balance of performance shifts and the driver market. Team principals and drivers feature heavily in his coverage of car development, engineering changes and intra-team dynamics. He consistently explains Gen3 regulations, parity debates, format and calendar changes, and covers major global series through the lens of governance, commercial shifts and high-level regulatory change.