Trans World Sport ends after 38 years on air

Weekly global sports show Trans World Sport has come to an end, 38 years after it first went on air.

The long-running series was produced by IMG and shown worldwide on a variety of syndicated television channels.

Trans World Sport had been in continuous production every week from 5 May 1987 to 31 December 2025 and was shown in more than 50 countries.

Most notably, it was one of the first to profile rising sports stars, including 16-year-old Carlos Alcaraz, 14-year-old Tiger Woods, 16-year-old Rafael Nadal, a teenage Virat Kohli, Usain Bolt, Roger Federer, and 12-year-old Venus Williams and her 11-year-old sister, Serena Williams.

In the nineties it was shown on Channel 4 at 8am on Saturday mornings and later found a home on Sky.

More than 2,000 episodes of Trans World Sport were made, covering “everything and anything in the wide world of sport – reports from the biggest international competitions, in-depth features on lesser-known sports and profiles of rising stars of the future,” Danny Prior, exec producer at IMG, told Broadcast Sport. “In many ways it was ahead of its time, introducing viewers to sports that the internet would publicise more widely in recent decades.”

“I’m one of many people still working in the TV industry for whom the show was a training ground,” added Prior.

Some of the unusual sports shown on Trans World Sport include Japanese snowball fighting, Mongolian Yak Polo, camel jumping, the World Conker Championships and underwater chess.

Trans World Sport signed off with a 4-minute montage of clips from its many shows (see below). The YouTube post of the montage said, simply, “Thank you for growing with us. For watching, sharing, supporting, and believing in the power of sport.”