Alocal television expert with more than four decades of experience has travelled to France to cover the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics with Channel 9 after receiving the call of a lifetime.

Mount Gambier’s Don Dyson recently landed at his destination where he will commence his two month stint assisting in live broadcasting from Friday, July 26.

Mr Dyson said it was a once in a life time opportunity he can cross off his bucket list.

“I have been happy with my career so it is just a nice tick to say, ‘what a way to finish’. It is the pinnacle,” he said.

“I have done Melbourne Cups and I have done international sport but nothing is a patch on the Olympics. Being a sports tragic, this is just icing on my cake.

“This is the elite of the elite who compete once every four years and go for a gold medal, so their lives are going to that pinnacle and we’re there to cover their ways and means of achieving their goal, whether it be individual or a team effort.

“I had the pleasure of working on international sport with tennis, cricket and rugby so I thought the Olympic dream had long gone, but then Channel 9 got the rights.”

Mr Dyson retired from Channel 9 in April 2022, but upon getting a call by the director of operations earlier this year, he jumped at the offer.

“It is an amazing opportunity to be going over there to do both the Olympics and the Paralympics,” he said.

“I will be involved in looking after the operations and technology for swimming and the athletics and then back in the main broadcast centre called IBC.

“We have about 115 people going over there from Channel 9, so logistically it is a huge operation to do that.

“We are in the process of building a studio for the Olympics which will have vision that looks over the Eiffel Tower.

“You can almost get a little star struck at times, working with the likes of Ian Thorpe and Giaan Rooney OAM who are the commentators, these top line athletes who have been in Australia but they are there to commentate on the up and coming future.”

Mr Dyson moved to Mount Gambier from Adelaide in 1980 to begin his 42-year career in television broadcasting with a limited staff of two to three other employees.

Mr Dyson said he enjoyed the locality of his job at what was in those days SES-8.

“The big plus was that we were a local station and we had a local board so if you needed new gear you went to the board,” he said.

“We did local football, local horse racing and the Pioneers.

“If you can tap into the local community they love you.

“The people we were filming news stories on are the people we bump into down the street.

“What I did when in Mount Gambier when I first started with electronics, that career does not exist anymore so it is all now computer based.

“We had printing presses and people who set types and those things, they are long gone – but the theories of journalism still remain.”

Mr Dyson worked his way up to become chief engineer at SES-8 which was then sold to the WIN Network.

“I did a lot of projects with WIN around Australia and then we got sold to Channel 9 so I commuted to Adelaide for 10 years and I was the operations and technology manager,” he said.

“I had the chance to move and build news stations in Adelaide, Darwin, Perth, Rockhampton and Hobart so we went with a whole network which was great.

“It was good being involved with a network station because it was vastly different to Mount Gambier because it is a lot more cut-throat.

“I enjoyed the challenge of building and being involved in new technology but the plus is in Mount Gambier with Channel 8 we always had the latest and the greatest and with Channel 9 we had the same thing.

“When we built the station in Adelaide, we were the first station in the Nine Network to go with robotic cameras to go with automation so we ended up being a bit of a test for the Nine Network which was great.”

As an aviation enthusiast and head of management and governance for the proposed Mount Gambier Aviation Museum, Mr Dyson will detour through the United Kingdom to take a 30-minute flight in World War II Spitfire plane.

“I have had a dream for many years of being able to fly in a Spitfire so I am going to Duxford just out of Cambridge in the UK – and it is not the cheapest thing to do but it’s a bucket list thing.

“I have seen Spitfires fly, but to go in one is something you just dream of.”