- Matthew Syed
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Matthew Syed 
Born 2 November 1970 Nationality English Occupation Sportscaster Matthew Syed (born 2 November 1970) is a British journalist and broadcaster. He used to be an English table tennis international, and was the English number one for many years. He was five times the Men's Singles Champion at the Commonwealth Table Tennis Championships (in 1997, 2000 and 2001),[1] and also competed for Great Britain in two Olympic Games.[2]
Contents
Early life
His father is a British-Pakistani[3] and his mother is Welsh. He attended the Maiden Erlegh School in Earley near Reading, then studied PPE at Balliol College, Oxford where he was awarded a prizewinning First.
Career
A right-handed attacker, he now works as managing director of a sports marketing company, as a commentator for the BBC and Eurosport, and as a journalist for The Times since 1999. He also stood as the Labour candidate for Wokingham in the 2001 General Election, but was unsuccessful.[4] From 1999, he has worked as a Marketing Consultant for the English Table Tennis Association based in Hastings. He was one of the co-founders of TTK Greenhouse, a sports related charity. He is also a regular pundit on radio and television, commentating on sporting, cultural and political issues. His film, China and Table Tennis, made for the BBC, won bronze medal at the Olympic Golden Rings ceremony in Lausanne in 2008.
As a sports writer he has developed a distinctive style, with copious use of long non-sporting parallels, analogies and metaphors - many drawn from philosophy. The resulting style does not please everyone, even among those who take sport seriously, and snippets from his more overblown passages are often sent in to the satirical magazine Private Eye for use in its column Pseuds' Corner; the same publication also ran a longer review of his style in its Hackwatch column in April 2011, in issue no 1287. However he is respected within the sports-writing trade itself, winning Sports Feature Writer of the Year at the SJA Awards in 2008[5] and Sports Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2009. His first book, Bounce, published by Harper Collins, was published in May 2010.
Politics
Syed stood as a Labour Candidate in the 2001 UK General Election in Wokingham coming third in a safe Conservative seat. Syed won a place on the Labour Party's shortlist to succeed Ashok Kumar for the Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland constituency in the 2010 United Kingdom General Election. However, the party selected Tom Blenkinsop, who had worked in Kumar's constituency office for six years.[6]
References
- ^ "Championships". comtab.com. Commonwealth Table Tennis Federation. http://www.comtab.com/championships/index.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-23.
- ^ "Matthew Syed". olympics.org.uk. British Olympic Association. http://www.olympics.org.uk/athleterecord.aspx?at=2964. Retrieved 2008-08-23.
- ^ "Matthew Syed: An unlikely hero". The Independent (London). 2002-07-18. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/matthew-syed-an-unlikely-hero-648698.html. Retrieved 2010-05-12.
- ^ "Vote2001 Results & Constituencies". bbc.co.uk (BBC News). http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/vote2001/results_constituencies/constituencies/639.stm. Retrieved 2008-08-23.
- ^ [1]
- ^ Hetherington, Graeme (2010-04-05). "Tom Blenkinsop, a campaign manager with steel union Community, chosen". The Northern Echo. http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/7984771.Candidate_chosen_to_replace_late_MP/. Retrieved 2010-04-05.
External links
Categories:- 1970 births
- Living people
- People from Reading, Berkshire
- English table tennis players
- Olympic table tennis players of Great Britain
- English sportswriters
- English people of Pakistani descent
- English people of Welsh descent
- The Times people
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