Paul Tatnell
Paul Tatnell covers the power, money and infrastructure behind thoroughbred racing, treating it as an industry under pressure rather than just a calendar of meetings and results. His work focuses on how decisions by clubs, regulators and track operators shape the future of the sport and the experience of punters and participants.
Racing governance and club decisions
Tatnell spends much of his time on racing governance, following how race clubs and administrators manage their portfolios of tracks and major events. His coverage of Sandown and the Melbourne Racing Club, including the scrutiny on Sandown’s future as the club tackles ongoing track headaches, reflects a consistent interest in boardroom debates, strategic reviews and redevelopment plans. He explains the stakes around these decisions in plain terms, spelling out what they mean for race-day programs, member interests and the broader health of the local racing scene.
Tracks, safety and the racing calendar
Track performance and reliability run through his reporting. Using specific examples such as Sandown’s surface issues, Tatnell explores how track preparation, renovation and investment affect the viability of racing programs. He pays close attention to how surface problems, abandoned meetings or repeated “headaches” force changes to the racing calendar and place pressure on clubs to justify the continued use or upgrade of particular venues.
His stories tend to connect day-to-day operational problems back to longer-running questions about the number of tracks the industry can support and where future investment should land.
Industry pressures and stakeholder impacts
Tatnell’s work regularly links governance calls and track issues to their impact on participants and the wider industry. He writes about how decisions on venue use, redevelopment and scheduling affect trainers, jockeys, owners and punters who rely on consistent programming and safe, fair racing surfaces. He is especially interested in the tension between commercial redevelopment opportunities and the desire to preserve traditional racing venues, using concrete cases such as Sandown to show how clubs balance short-term financial returns against the long-term interests of the sport.
Across his coverage, he approaches racing as an ecosystem where club politics, track management and stakeholder confidence are tightly connected.
News-driven analysis on racing’s future
Rather than offering form guides or purely on-the-day race coverage, Tatnell uses news events as a springboard for broader analysis about where racing is headed. When a track faces ongoing problems or a club floats change to its venue strategy, he uses those developments to examine deeper structural themes such as consolidation of tracks, evolving expectations on safety and the shifting economics of running race meetings. This mix of timely reporting and longer-view industry thinking is what sets his coverage apart from more narrowly results-focused sports reporting.
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.