Inside the Games: The Milton Keynes-Based News Service Reporting the Politics of the Olympic World
Inside the Games, published at insidethegames.biz, is a specialist news service covering the business, politics and administration of international sport, with the Olympic Games at its centre. Based for most of its life in Bletchley, near Milton Keynes, it built a reputation as essential reading inside the Olympic movement — the place where host-city bids, federation elections, doping disputes and governance scandals were reported daily for officials, journalists and commercial partners who needed to know what was happening inside sporting institutions, not merely on the field of play. Founded in 2005, it grew alongside London's preparations for the 2012 Games, changed ownership in controversial circumstances in late 2023, and became a story in its own right when the International Olympic Committee refused it accreditation for the Paris 2024 Games. Its history is therefore both a media history and a case study in how dependent specialist journalism can become on the institutions it covers.
Founded in 2005 After London Won the 2012 Games
Inside the Games was launched in 2005 by sports journalist Duncan Mackay, originally under the address insidethegames.com, following the announcement that London had been chosen to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. The timing was astute. Britain was about to spend seven years building venues, reorganising transport and debating the cost and legacy of the Games, while the international Olympic movement generated a continuous flow of decisions, inspections, bid races and disputes that general newspapers covered only episodically. Mackay, an experienced Olympics writer, created a title that would cover that world every day. In 2009 the site's name and address changed to insidethegames.biz, the identity it retains. The editorial premise was distinct from conventional sports reporting: athletes and results mattered, but the primary subject was power — who ran world sport, how money moved through it, and which cities and federations would win the prizes it awarded.
What Inside the Games Covers
The site's coverage extends across the Olympic Games, the Paralympic Games and the Commonwealth Games, together with the dozens of international federations, continental bodies and multi-sport events that make up the Olympic ecosystem. Typical subjects include host-city selection, International Olympic Committee sessions and commissions, federation presidential elections, anti-doping policy, athlete eligibility disputes, sponsorship and broadcasting arrangements, and the politics of countries seeking influence through sport. It formed official media partnerships with the organisers of some of the events it covered, a common arrangement for specialist titles that also underlines the closeness between the publication and its subject matter. For readers in national newspapers and broadcasters, it functioned as an early-warning system: stories about bid irregularities, governance reforms or Russian doping frequently surfaced in its pages before reaching mainstream agendas. That agenda-setting role, out of proportion to the size of its staff, was the foundation of its influence.
Duncan Mackay and Award-Winning Olympic Journalism
For eighteen years the title was inseparable from its founder. Mackay edited and wrote much of its defining coverage, cultivating contacts across federations, bid teams and Olympic institutions worldwide. His work was recognised in 2009 when he won Internet Writer of the Year at the British Sports Journalism Awards, presented by the Sports Journalists' Association, for his writing on Inside the Games — an early acknowledgement that a small online specialist could beat larger organisations on a major beat. The site was not without friction: in 2010 it was involved in litigation with Zulu Creative, a web design company it had previously used. Such disputes aside, the Mackay era established a consistent editorial identity — news-led, insider-focused and willing to report internal sporting politics in detail that governing bodies did not always welcome, even as the publication depended on access to those same bodies for accreditation and information.
The Dunsar Media Years
Until 31 October 2023, Inside the Games was published by Dunsar Media, the company through which Mackay's operation ran the title from Bletchley, close to Bletchley Park. Under Dunsar the publication covered successive Games cycles — London 2012 on home soil, Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 held in 2021, Beijing 2022 and the long build-up to Paris 2024 — as well as the upheavals that reshaped Olympic politics in that period: the Russian state doping scandal and its long aftermath, the award of the 2032 Games to Brisbane under a new bidding system, and recurring governance crises in sports including boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon. Its business model reflected that of many trade titles: a specialist, influential readership of officials, sponsors, federations and media, monetised through advertising, partnerships and the value of reaching decision-makers rather than through mass consumer traffic. By the early 2020s it was widely treated within the industry as the trade paper of the Olympic movement.
The 2023 Takeover by Vox Europe
On 1 November 2023 the site was taken over by Vox Europe Investment Holding Ltd, ending the Dunsar Media era. Spanish sports journalist David Rubio became editor-in-chief of the relaunched title. The change of ownership attracted immediate scrutiny within sports media, because the new investors were reported to have links with Umar Kremlev, the Russian president of the International Boxing Association, and with sports officials sympathetic to Vladimir Putin — links the new owners denied. Kremlev's IBA was itself in deep conflict with the Olympic movement: the IOC had withdrawn recognition of the association in 2023 over governance, finance and judging concerns, removing boxing's long-standing federation from the Olympic system. The possibility that a title covering that dispute might be connected to one side of it raised obvious questions about editorial independence, and those questions followed the publication through the following year.
Ownership, the IBA and Editorial Questions
After the takeover, observers noted a marked prominence given by the site to the International Boxing Association: it published multiple exclusive interviews with IBA members, reproduced IBA press releases, videos and statements in detail, gave prominence to statements from the association's supporters, and in August 2024 published an editorial by IBA chief executive Chris Roberts. Supporters of the new regime could argue that giving a platform to a major federation excluded from the Olympics was legitimate journalism about a significant sports-political conflict. Critics, including rival Olympic journalists, argued that the pattern of coverage, combined with opaque ownership, compromised the title's standing as a neutral observer of the movement. The dispute matters beyond one website: Olympic media is a small world in which access, accreditation and hospitality flow from the institutions covered, and Inside the Games became the most prominent recent test of how that system responds when a title's ownership itself becomes contentious.
Transfer to Dubai and the Paris Accreditation Refusal
In May 2024 control of the site was transferred to ITG Media DMCC, an entity registered in Dubai. Weeks later the ownership question had a concrete professional consequence: the International Olympic Committee refused Inside the Games press accreditation for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, because the publication declined to disclose the ownership information the IOC required. Losing accreditation for the central event in its field was a serious blow to a title built on insider access; accredited Olympic media receive entry to venues, mixed zones, press conferences and the main press centre, and a title outside that system must cover its own beat from a distance. The episode was reported internationally, turning a specialist British website into a reference point in wider debates about transparency in sports media ownership, the influence of state-linked money in sport, and the leverage accreditation gives governing bodies over the journalists who scrutinise them.
How the Site Works as a News Service
Operationally, Inside the Games is best understood as a wire for a professional community rather than a consumer newspaper. Its stories are typically short, factual and frequent, reporting appointments, decisions, statements and disputes as they happen, supplemented by interviews and occasional longer analysis. Its value lies in completeness on its beat: a federation election in a minor Olympic sport that no national newspaper would staff will be covered, because for its readers that election may determine funding, selection or commercial rights. Other media draw on it accordingly, and its headlines are monitored by press officers across world sport. That model explains both its resilience under its founder — authority accumulated through years of comprehensive coverage — and its vulnerability after 2023, since a professional readership that suspects a title of serving an owner's interests can withdraw the trust on which a niche service depends.
Britain's Specialist Sports Media Landscape
The title's trajectory also reflects the economics of British specialist publishing. Founded in Buckinghamshire rather than London, run for years by a small team, it demonstrated that a digital-native niche publication could achieve genuine international influence without the scale of a national newspaper group, provided it owned a definable beat and served a community that needed it daily. Similar dynamics produced strong British trade titles in sports business, law and media, but few combined daily news, genuine insider access and a founder's personal reputation as completely as Inside the Games did under Mackay. Its Bletchley base, near the wartime code-breaking centre, became a small in-joke of Olympic journalism: a great deal of what the movement knew about itself was, for years, published from an unassuming corner of Buckinghamshire.
Legacy and Continuing Significance
Whatever judgements are made about its current era, Inside the Games changed expectations for Olympic coverage. It showed that the politics of sport — bids, ballots, budgets and bans — constituted a daily news beat with a committed professional audience, and it forced governing bodies to reckon with continuous scrutiny between Games rather than attention only every four years. Its founder's award-winning work set a standard for specialist digital sports journalism in Britain, and its post-2023 history has become a cautionary and contested chapter in debates about ownership transparency, which the Paris accreditation refusal brought into the open. The site continues to publish at insidethegames.biz, covering the Olympic and Commonwealth worlds for a global readership. For a directory of news agencies and media services, it belongs in the record twice over: as a working news service for international sport, and as one of the most discussed British sports media stories of recent years.
