Obituary: Clare McDermott

McDermott grew up in Edmonton, Canada, playing basketball, watching ice hockey and dreaming that one day he would be a sports writer.

“That boyhood dream survived an apprenticeship on the night shift of the Ottawa Journal and it came true for me at Reuters,” he recalled long after retirement in 1990. “It turned to ashes when, as the sports editor, I reported the 1980 ‘joyless Olympiad’ in Moscow, where America led a boycott by 40 countries in protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. In the half century since I became a journalist, politics gnawed at the Olympic ideal like a hungry rat and, when the politicians stayed away from world sport, it was the turn of money and drugs.”

Born in 1928, McDermott graduated from Carleton University and joined Reuters in 1954 on summer holiday relief during a hitchhiking tour of Europe. He served in London and Paris before being assigned to Beijing in 1960, later reporting from Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, Cyprus and Guyana and the United States before becoming editor in Asia, based in Singapore,  in 1969. He was sports editor from 1973 until 1980, when he became editor, general news. After retirement as a corporate marketing communications executive in 1990 he taught journalism.

“I wasn’t hired as a sports reporter, but I grabbed many chances to write about sport and early on in my time as a foreign correspondent: and – no – looking back, I know that there really was no excuse for being so sadly surprised at the way that politics intruded on those 1980 Olympics that I’d eventually cover as an editor under a sunny blue sky in Cold War Moscow,” McDermott recalled in Reuters’ 2001 book Frontlines: Snapshots of history.

“In the early 1960s I was based in Beijing, when we had a foretaste of what would later be called ‘ping-pong diplomacy’. Mao's China built a magnificent new arena to stage the twenty-sixth World Table Tennis Championships. Britain and Australia competed, but the United States and many others boycotted the event.

“It was a bizarre moment. I was out there writing about ping-pong, yet at the same time – forbidden to travel beyond Beijing and facing a wall of silence from Chinese communist officialdom – frantically trying to piece together scraps of information about the horrors of drought, famine and the chaos of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, when perhaps as many as 20 million people perished.”

McDermott lived in Shropshire, England. Cremation will be on Friday 15 July. ■