Congratulations to Jacquelin Magnay who will be inducted into this years Roll of Excellence in the Achievers Category.

Little Athletics Career

Jacquelin was a keen and enthusiastic member of the St George Little Athletics Centre in Sydney during the first few years of the NSW Association from 1972 until 1976, finishing only after becoming ‘too old’, with U12 being the oldest Little Athletics age group.

In her final year of Little Athletics, Jackie was selected for the LANSW State Team that travelled to Adelaide for the 1976 Australian Little Athletics Teams Championships. Jackie was named as the NSW Girls State Team Captain and at the ATC she participated in the shot put (finishing 10th), discus (finishing 4th) and the 1500m walk (finishing 7th).

Journalism Career

Jacquelin is currently the European Correspondent for The Australian newspaper, based in London and covering all manner of big stories across political, business, Royals and security issues. She is a George Munster and Walkley Award winning journalist with decades of newspaper experience in senior media roles in Australia and the UK, including The Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Age, and the Daily Telegraph in London. Her voice is also heard on the BBC and Australian radio.

Trained as a teacher, Jacquelin started in journalism with a cadetship at the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader in Sydney, and within six months was the sports editor. Jacquelin then worked briefly at The Australian and Channel 10 before making the move to Fairfax Media in 1992, where she ruled the sports roost at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Sun Herald.

Jaquelin made headlines in 1993 by demanding access for female reporters to after-game locker rooms for interviews. She was prompted to take action when radio commentator and Balmain Tigers coach Alan Jones, told her to stop behaving like a temperamental schoolgirl. She was successful in her complaint to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission about dressing room access, forcing the Balmain rugby league club to issue a public apology in late 1995. This action set a universal standard of gender equality involving sports journalism across Australian sports.

Jacquelin was appointed as the Herald’s Olympics writer in the lead up to the Sydney Olympics and continued to cover the Olympics for the paper.

In November 2009 Jacqulin was appointed to the new post of Olympics editor for the Telegraph Media Group in the United Kingdom, covering the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, making her one of the most senior women sports journalists in Britain. As a highly regarded sports journalist across the globe, Jacquelin was recruited to this position after London was awarded the 2012 Games, following her long and highly decorated career as a senior sports correspondent at the Sydney Morning Herald, where she had performed a similar role for the 2000 Olympics.

In 2013, Jacquelin was appointed as the European correspondent for The Australian, still based in London.

Jacquelin has also been a regular contributor to the Sunday morning ABC sports program Offsiders, hosted by Barrie Cassidy; a regular panelist on The NRL Footy Show and contributed a weekly radio segment on 666 ABC Canberra.

Awards and Recognition

In 2004, Jacquelin was awarded a prestigious Walkley Award for excellence in journalism, for a series of articles on a drugs scandal involving Australian Institute of Sport cyclists; she was highly commended by the Walkley judges in 2003, along with colleague Roy Masters, for the coverage of the Shane Warne drug scandal; a finalist in 2007 and 2008, with co-author Gerard Ryle for investigation of the Firepower Pill; and a finalist again in 2018 as part of a team from the ABC, The Australian and The Weekend Australian, for the investigation into war criminal Captain Dragan Vasilijkovic.

Jacquelin has won two Sport Australia Media Awards, which recognise excellence in Australian sports journalism and broadcasting. In 2005 she won the award for ‘Best Journalism on Australian Sports Commission-related Programs’ and in 2008 for ‘Best Reporting of an Issue in Australian Sport’.

Jacquelin was the joint winner of the George Munster Award in 2008 )presented by the Australian Centres for Independent Journalism) for her investigation and coverage, with Gerard Ryle, of the scandal involving failed fuel technology company Firepower. The judges praised Jacquelin for her “dogged determination and hard work in exposing a major fraud”.

In 2013, one of Jacquelins stories was short listed for the Sports Scoop of the Year prize at the British Sports Journalism Awards.

In 2016, Jacquelin was among a group of international journalists, honoured by their peers for years of experience covering winter and summer Olympics. A host of Olympic champions, including the five-time gold medal-winning sprinter Michael Johnson, Brazilian footballer Cafu and South African golfer Gary Player, were on hand in Rio as Jacquelin received a special honour from the International Sports Press Association (AIPS) for having reported on 10 or more Olympic Games. At the time, Jacquelin had been to 11 Olympics, starting with Atlanta in 1996. She received a special replica of the Rio Olympic Games torch.

Whilst reporting at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Jacquelin was rewarded with another ceremony, this time to celebrate he twelfth Olympic Games.

The Harry Gordon Memorial Award for Olympic Journalism the Harry Gordon Memorial Award for Olympic Journalism was introduced in 2017 to acknowledge excellence in the coverage of Olympic competition. In 2018, Jacquelin became the awards second ever winner following the Winter Olympics in Korea. The judges announced that they were unanimous in their selection of the winning entry – “Lydia’s Finale on Empty Hill” by The Australian newspapers Jacquelin Magnay.

The judges stated that the reason behind their choice of winner was the “bittersweet reports on the final night of a champion – the last flight of our most senior and decorated athlete, aerial skier Lydia Lassila. With two other journalists, Jacquelin had stayed on the icy hill at Phoenix Snow Park to interview Lydia – with the temperature at minus 20 degrees. It was surely with frozen fingers that she wrote her evocative story, headlined: ‘Lydia’s finale on empty hill – in which she captured the loneliness and heartache of this ending of a very special Olympic career. It was ‘stay-late’ sports journalism of high quality”.

The 2019 Roll Of Excellence will be held at Aloft Perth on 19th October 2019.