“For the majority of my career, the backbone has been motorsport, whether that be two wheels or four.”
Leigh Diffey’s announcing career has gone full circle. Starting out announcing at a local flat track motorcycle track down in Brisbane, Australia, the two-wheel enthusiast has since climbed the ladder to the top level of off-road motorcycle racing commentary: play-by-play of the Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship. But the 53-year-old’s road to get here—announcing in the U.S.—was not even a dream goal back when he first got on the microphone as a public address announcer. The then-physical education teacher came to a juncture in the road where it was time to go all-in on an announcing career in 1996, and he hasn’t turned back since. Diffey has called much more than you may know, ranging from two-wheel motocross racing around the world to multiple disciplines of four-wheel racing to all sorts of events at the Olympics and winter games. With the 2024 Paris Olympic games coming up soon (running the final week in July through early August), we sat down with Diffey for a deep dive on his background, his start in announcing, his top personal achievements, and much more. Diffey has been calling an exciting USA track and field Olympics trials this week on NBC’s Peacock—tune in as the trials run through Sunday, June 30.
Racer X: Give us a little bit of background information. Talk about where you grew up and what hobbies you were into as a child and your experiences growing up.
Leigh Diffey: So, I grew up in Brisbane, Australia, and I grew up as a motorbike kid. And I'm really so thrilled to say I still have my first motorcycle that I ever raced when I was six years old, which is a Honda MR50. So, a 50cc Elsinore Honda three-speed. And just a couple of years ago I got it totally restored. So, it just takes me back to my childhood. So, I grew up, I wasn't a football kid. I did kind of play all sports but competitively, as a young kid, I raced bikes, cause my older brother did. My dad was a motorcycle guy, my grandfather raced bikes. So, motorcycles were our life. We were that family in the neighborhood where everybody else was either cricket or football or swimming or something or tennis, the Diffeys were the motorcycle family. So, I grew up doing that and I stopped riding when I was about 16 or 17 but still hung around the motorcycle scene. A lot of my friends and a lot of my brother's friends, my brother, kept riding and I focused on my studies and that's how I ended up. …It's one of those stories, I fell into commentary because the local motorcycle club when I was at university, they were looking for an announcer and I'd made a couple of acceptance speeches on behalf of my brother or whatever. And they said, “Oh, you seem confident behind a microphone, would you like to come and call?” And I was calling flat track races. The first time I ever commentated, I was 20 years old, I got paid $60 and I called just under 100 flat track races. It was a long day!
The early days of the announcing, who did you look up to? Were you watching a specific sport on TV or going to events and hearing people announce? Who did you look up to that kind of got you really more involved in doing it?
I didn't grow up dreaming of being a sports broadcaster. I thought I was going to be everything from, at one point in time, a farmer to, I didn't know what. And when I went to university, my formal education is in education! I'm a schoolteacher. I didn't have a journalism degree or a communications degree and ended up getting into television through my commentary. And it started out a very basic level doing public address at a flat track. And then a couple of months later at a club up the road, they heard me at the other club, and they said, “Hey, would you like to come and work for us?” And then it kind of grew, I hate the word grow organically, but it did, it grew that way. And over a few short years from doing the flat track circuit in Australia, it went to motocross and then I started doing supercross in Australia. That the series then was called Supercross Masters and [I was] working for a guy called Phil Christensen, who his series was responsible for breeding the likes of Chad Reed and Michael Byrne and guys like that, Aussies. Jeff Leisk in the earlier years who came over and raced in America. And when I started doing [Austrailian] supercross, it was at big venues, Sydney Entertainment Centre, Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Flinders Park in Melbourne where they play the Australian Tennis Open, so, it really stepped up a notch. And at that stage, I was like, “Wow, I've made it,” you know, I'm calling supercross. “This is unreal!” And little did I know, I still wasn't even dreaming of doing television. Because at that stage, I was a schoolteacher, and I was a PE [physical education] teacher outside of Brisbane. And then the commentary jobs started coming a little bit more frequently. I started getting into cars. I was traveling more interstate from Brisbane. I was traveling to Sydney and Melbourne and Adelaide and having to get back scramble to get back on a Monday to teach school. And it got to a crossover point where I had to make a decision. “Well maybe I can have a career at this.” That was in the mid-1990s, that was in 1996, I pursued the dream of television.
You mentioned, kind of growing up a little bit different from the families around you, in terms of hobbies. So, when did you kind of branch out and start doing more sports and covering different sports? I know you cover everything from the different Olympic sports and car racing and just all sorts of sports. Talk about that and kind of the transition to cover other sports.
For the majority of my career, the backbone has been motorsport, whether that be two wheels or four. But in my early years in of television in Australia, I worked as a freelance reporter on a nightly sports show, kind of like ESPN’s SportsCenter, but it was for Network 10 in Australia, and it was called Sports Tonight. And we used to have to write stories, voice stories, cover anything from cricket to tennis to soccer to baseball, NBA, NFL, Australian football, motorsport. And so that really was the beginning of giving me a great foundation to understand that side of journalism and reporting and presenting and covering a broad base of sport. I left Australia after just over three years in television. And I moved to the U.K., I was in my late twenties, and things happened for me very young. I was calling the Daytona 500 of Australia—the Bathurst 1000— when I was just 26 years old. So, things happened for me really fast. And then I moved to the U.K. and joined the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] to commentate World Superbikes. And my old friend and my old colleague who was a two-time 500cc world champion, Barry Sheene, had a big hand in that. And so, I traveled the world for a couple of years doing World Superbikes and covered the World Rally Championship and I did some correspondence work for Channel 10. And then in 2002, I came to America.
Going back to your early years and how your name and announcing work spread organically. Can you kind of compare that now with people having LinkedIn and social media and an online presence versus like you were just at a race talking and somebody heard it! A lot of differences to nowadays.
Oh my goodness, yes! I think about, and I quite often get asked by young, aspiring journalists or reporters or commentators or presenters, “How do you do it? What's your advice? How do I break into television or radio?” or what have you. And the fact that we all walk around with cell phones, and everyone's become an expert camera person and recorder themselves. Yeah, in those early days, for me it was telephone calls and badgering people and trying to convince people that you were good enough to get that next opportunity, whatever it might be. And then relying a lot on word of mouth from motorcycle club to motorcycle club in those early days. “Hey, we used Leigh Diffey, and he was pretty good, and you should give him a try.” And we're talking, you know, very low money and a lot of miles in Australia. It's a big country and a lot of miles for not very much money. But when I look back at it, it was the platform that I built my career on and I'm so thankful for it. When you're stuck out in the middle of the Aussie bush at some motocross track or I did supercross in Rodeo, places in Australia and some pretty crazy venues but I'm very thankful that I did do that because it gave me a really great foundation to do those reps and do the hard yards for later on.
Talk about some of the transitions between technology even back then compared to today. Of course, there's technology now, the graphics on TV, we've got leaders lights [on bikes], there's on board cameras. Talk about the differences now between growing up when you first got into TV. How has the TV game changed?
Well, here, especially for you being a journalist at Racer X, I'll tell you something that was massive is when I first got into television, there was no internet! So, we were relying on press releases to come through the fax machine. So, phone calls and fax machines. And then in the late 1990s, that's when the internet became available and that was a game changer. We could do research on sport that was happening in America and the U.K. and all around the world. And then as far as just over the decades I'm now in my third decade of broadcasting, I've been at it for 27 years. And the advances in technology within broadcasting, within timing and scoring and within just the quality of camera, going to HD and just maybe when you're dealing with latency issues, like just how fast everything is now. Just, yeah, technology has been a wonderful…I think sometimes people get scared by technology, like right now we're dealing with AI [artificial intelligence], but it has been a massive aid to broadcasters and whether that be broadcasters in terms of the job we do or broadcasters like NBC and who I work for, it's been amazing.
That’s what Davey Coombs always tells us. He traveled across the world for different races and he said the internet now has connected and made the world almost smaller. You can see stuff, like you mentioned, they were watching the MXGP race earlier, checking on Jorge Prado and everyone else while watching qualifying for the race we’re at now in person. So, talk about your position with NBC and kind of how that came about.
So, I was with a 24/7 Motorsport Network or channel called Speed Channel, the beloved Speed Channel, so popular and so beloved by so many. And that exposed me to different people in the industry. And I was covering a variety of series—motorcycles, sports cars, IndyCar, I would fill in on Formula One, I did a bunch of different things, did some outdoor motocross back in the day when Ricky [Carmichael] and Chad [Reed] and James [Stewart] were still riding. There were some opportunities to be involved in NASCAR and I did a little bit of that. That exposed me to some different people and then low and behold, I met some of the executives at NBC and some friends helped me get in front of the right people and NBC was getting Formula One and IndyCar at the same time and they were looking for a change. So, I just happened to be in the right time at the right place. So, at the end of 2012, the beginning of 2013 is when I joined NBC. And my boss, the big boss, Sam Flood, he just said, “Well, listen, you're here primarily for Formula One and IndyCar.” But he said, “You're a race caller. We have a lot of sports that are races.” So, he said, “I'm going to throw a bunch of different stuff at you.” And over my career, I'd done golf and I'd done some sailing, I'd done boxing, I'd done a variety of things—commentated on them—outside of motorsport. And, he said, “We're going to throw a bunch of different stuff at you.” And so in my time at NBC, that's been the greatest point of diversification because NBC has had me call… I've done five Olympics, so far, Paris will be my sixth and at the Olympics, at the winter games, I've called Bobsled, Skeleton, Luge, which are all races are a lot faster. So, yeah, Luge is the one where you lie on your back and Skeleton is the one where you go headfirst. Pretty scary stuff at 80 miles an hour! Bobsled is like a freight train coming down the mountain. I called rowing and the flat-water sports at the Rio Olympics. And then, Paris will be my second games doing track and field. I don't want to say a race is a race is a race, but a race has the same characteristics, right? It’s just, whatever the medium is changes and you've got a story to tell within a race, whether it is a 20 minute plus two lap main at supercross or whether it's a 38 second bobsled run. Or it could be, I just did the Olympic Marathon trials in Orlando. A race is a race, but you've got to figure out how you do the best storytelling within the time span of that race. And then you have the variables of the athletes, whether they're riders, whether they're runners, whether they're whatever it is, and I find that fascinating. Because everyone has a really cool story to tell no matter who you are or where you're from, everyone has a story.
That is exactly why I got in journalism. I always like taking pictures and I like talking to people and hearing their stories. I'm kind of more introverted but if I just talk to random people, I always find they have interesting stories and even just asking my family, you know, “Tell me about this back in the day,” and people I meet, just hearing their stories. So, you mentioned covering the different sports. I'm sure like you mentioned, there are similarities between them. What are some similarities, what are some differences like between track and field and say supercross? Can you compare and contrast some of the sports?
I think the sprint races when I do track and field, when I do the shorter distance races, it's obviously it's very explosive and it starts and it's over in the blink of an eye. Ten seconds, 11 seconds, whatever it might be, sub-10 seconds even. And so that's really when you do a lot of the storytelling beforehand and afterwards. In the moment you're just calling what you see. But I have said this for a number of years now, being a track and field commentator has made me a better motorsport commentator and being a motorsport commentator has made me a better track and field commentator because there's a lot of crossover, especially in the distance races on the track and distance races in sports car races or the Indy 500 or whatever it might be, the Rolex 24. Those stories evolve over a longer period of time. And so to see how an athlete starts, what happens in the middle, when did they make their move? Are they a come-from-behind-athlete or are they a get out in front and stay out in front and you learn the nuances and the characteristics of the athletes, whether they're out on a track by the ocean or they're behind the wheel of an IndyCar doing 240 miles an hour at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Learning the athlete's character traits within the competitive environment is really fascinating.
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Mitch Kendra ![]()
Mitch Kendra
On that topic, how do you keep up with all of the sports and athletes? There's a lot of things that you are coming back and forth between motocross and the other sports and disciplines you're calling. The marathon trials and everything and Olympics coming up. How do you keep track of everything?
You, well, you asked me before about technology. Technology makes it a lot easier than what it used to be. But I do a lot of reading. You have to. You just got to do your homework and I'm on a plane a lot. I spend a lot of time in the home office. I have two sons who are actually here this weekend. They're always saying, “Dad, come outside,” or, “Why are you in the office again?” I'm like, “Cause I'm doing more homework now than I did when I was at university!” [Laughs] So yeah, it's that and relying on the different teams that we have. Here at supercross, we have Clinton Fowler and the We Went Fast group. They’re unbelievable with their stats and facts and you rely on them. We have an Olympic research team, at IndyCar we have statisticians and research people. And so, it's a blend of what you do yourself and you lean on that research department or that statistician and then just the nature of it. You're doing it every day. I'm doing it every day. We're on social media, we're on the internet. It's almost, it's not a point of pride, but we have been educated along the way to just keep staying up on top of the stories. You have to. And it's part of our everyday life, whether we realize it or not, you're always going to your phone, you've got your favorite news outlets there are, whether that be real news or sports news. And then you've got your social media accounts that you follow. And so, it's hard not to stay up with the information. And for me bouncing across different sports, I do it to the best of my ability until I get to that sport and then you dive deep into it. So, this week I'm doing supercross, next week I'm doing both IMSA SportsCar and IndyCar at Long Beach. So, I can't think about that right now, because tonight we're doing supercross. I'll think about SportsCar and IndyCar and I was doing some homework this week in preparation for next week. So, you’ve got to compartmentalize and take it one step and one sport at a time.
The Olympics trials coming up. What are some of your milestone things, some of the big things that you have been able to call? From announcing flat track back in Australia then eventually supercross in Australia then where you are today in supercross in the U.S., being able to cover the Olympics too, I’m sure. Is this kind of like the pinnacle? You never knew that you'd get to this stage, but do you feel like you've made at the top level? Even though obviously there's more to grow in that position once you’re there. What's the ceiling?
Well, I think the ceiling is the ceiling that you put on yourself. I always like to… my dad used to always say to us as kids is to, “Have a go.” Just try. And I'm really proud to say that I had a go and here I am. I'm an Aussie in America, but I'm also a proud American. I've been a naturalized American citizen for 13 years and there's a lot of people in this country and there's a lot of good broadcasters in this country and I'm very fortunate that NBC has chosen me to do things like the Indy 500 and supercross and track and field at the Olympics. I mean, I get to call the 100 meter final at the Olympics. It's unreal! Like I still pinch myself.
I was watching an NFL football game and I think you came on like immediately after on Peacock announcing, I don't remember if it was bobsledding or one of those events and I was just like, “Man, it's just crazy.” Like I wasn't even aware that the events were going on at the moment and then all of a sudden it was like, I was just watching it and you're right in it. And I honestly don't watch that sport naturally, bobsledding, but it just came on next and I was like, “Man, it's just cool to see Leigh calling this,” and like you mentioned perfecting your craft and so many different areas. It’s just really cool to see you excelling in all the different aspects.
Thank you. You know what that was, what you're referring to was the Super Bowl, the last time that NBC had the Super Bowl and it was the Beijing Olympics. And straight after the Super Bowl they came straight to us to do the final run of the women's monobob, which was the first time monobob had ever been in the winter games and it was only for women. So, there was a two-person bobsled but only one female athlete in it. And it went 10 down through one, you know, reverse order, which it always goes for the medal run, and it turned out that team USA got gold and silver in those runs, which were the only two gold and silver medals for the team USA at the sliding center. And because we'd come off the back of the Super Bowl we had 30 million viewers for almost half an hour watching us do women's monobob! So that was pretty cool. That was a huge moment.
If you could tell your 20-year-old-self something, what would you tell him? Like, would you tell them just like you mentioned, have a try at it. Like, “Hey, I'm proud of you and what you're going to do, sit back and take it all in.” What would you tell yourself back?
That's a really good point. Take it all in. I'd say to my 20-year-old self, “Take more pictures.” You're in these amazing moments and not always, well, it's easy now with these things with cell phones, but not always were you in a position to take a photo or something. Or I would have told myself to maybe document things more, to write a book one day just. There's been so many amazing experiences and I think what makes it all is so many amazing people. I've had my incredible family my mum and dad, my dad's no longer around but my mum and dad, my sister and my immediate family now my wife and sons just have been so supportive because I'm away so much. And the people I get to work with, the people I get to sit side by side with. Like when I do track and field, I sit beside Ato Boldon, who won two silver, two bronze in 100/200meter [dash], I sit beside Sanya Richards-Ross, four-time Olympic gold medalist. Here I get to sit beside Ricky Carmichael. When I do IndyCar, I sit beside Townsend Bell and James Hinchcliffe…I've got to work with some amazing people over the years. And it's the relationships that you build, and I wouldn't do anything any different, Mitch, because it has been, I'm not saying it's been the perfect ride, but it's been just a fantastic ride. And I'm really grateful to everybody, whoever took a chance on me and believed in me. And I feel like I have repaid them for that faith and I'm going to continue to as well.
I’ve learned it's the people too. Like I said I always try and take pictures of people and talk to people and hear their stories. I feel like the people make it what it is too because yeah, it does get long, long weeks of the travel, long days and everything.
The fans, like when you talk to the fans about how long they've been fans of a particular sport, how long they've been going, where did they travel to and from? It still to this day blows my mind. Fans’ dedication. And that's what makes the sport, right?
Exactly. Sometimes you see a guy with his son and I'm like, “Oh, is this like your local race? Where are you guys from?” You can just kind of tell, they're excited, you know. “Tell me your story.” I always try and find like somebody that either I don't know or just trying to find their story for the day. Continuing that though, what advice would you give to young media students? I've actually been able to speak at my alma mater a couple of times just to some photography classes, some journalism classes and you have way more experience than me. So, what advice would you give to the younger generation of media students?
I would say that you can never substitute passion or enthusiasm. And if you're passionate about something, it could be volleyball, or it might be moto or it could be anything, if you're passionate about something, you're already a step ahead of the next person because enthusiasm always wins out. And then you just bathe yourself in preparation. There is no substitute for preparation because if you have the foundation, that bedrock of preparation done, then that's going to enable you to have the confidence to make good decisions based on what you've done and what you know, and the information that you have, whether it be in your head or at hand. And decision making is key because there are opportunities everywhere. There are—there really are—there's opportunities everywhere but there's a very select group who that plenty of people can see those opportunities or be made aware of those opportunities, but there's a huge difference between acknowledging the opportunity and acting on the opportunity. And I would say, never be afraid to act on the opportunity. Have a go. Set yourself up with your passion, your enthusiasm, your preparation and your decision making and then recognize that opportunity and act upon it because what have you got to lose, right? Ask the question. Have a go cause if you don't, the answer is always no.
I agree with you on the being passionate aspect because I told the students, I get to travel with my company, and I get to go to different cities. But I’m still doing something that I love. Yeah, there's long hours but I always tell them, if you're passionate about something, no matter what it is, if it’s writing about ballet dancing or taking photos of this thing, whatever it is, find something you're passionate about and just go after it. Just go practice your skill, so when the opportunity comes up you can take advantage of it. So, I always tell him like you mentioned, be passionate about something and take advantage of the opportunity. Or even make one if you don't have an opportunity.
And you did it. You did exactly that cause you had a go. You backed yourself, you believed in yourself. You know, it’s just that self-belief can be the deciding thing between two people, one person has that self-belief, the other one doesn't. And you know, so person, A and person B: person A might be better equipped and maybe more qualified, but person B's got the bigger self-belief, person is going to win out every time.
With the technology, it's so good because we can connect everybody. And like you mentioned, we can do research and kind of wake up and catch up on the other side of the world with their news. The one downside is the negative comments and the push back and that kind of side of the internet. How do you deal with that? Is that stuff that you do see? How do you navigate through that?
Well, nobody likes it, right? We're all humans and it's not nice when you see that stuff. But A, I don't read forums so but, you know, people will jump on social media, and they'll say whatever it is they're going to say, and everybody's entitled to their opinion and not everybody's going to like you, right? And that's just a fact. And in our job for you being a journalist and for me being a broadcaster, we're not going make everybody happy all the time. You might like toast and I might like muffins, right? We like two different things and I'm not always going be somebody's cup of tea and but for somebody else I might be the best. Like it's just, it is what it is, and nobody, I mean, you can be a legendary athlete like Ricky and people are going to disagree with things he says or his opinion or they were a James Stewart fan, they weren't a Ricky Carmichael fan. You're not going to please everybody. So, it sucks. It hurts sometimes because sometimes some people can say some pretty nasty things, but it's part of it and you’ve just got to roll with it, and you’ve got to try and remember the nice comments. They actually mean more and they outweigh the negative comments.
What are you most proud of from your career? What's the one thing that you hold yourself high on?
Well, I would say to be the first to do certain things is always really special. So, for the American audience, and you’ve got to remember, I have a foot in both camps because like I said, I'm a proud, naturalized American as well, but I was born in Australia. And no Australian has ever been the play-by-play for track and field at the Olympics or for NBC on track and field, all the sports that I've done. No Australian has ever been play-by-play for the Indianapolis 500. No Australian has ever been the play-by-play for NASCAR. You know, some of the biggest motorsport events I've done. And what I'm probably most in with all of those marquee events that's naturally a headline, right? But what I'm most proud of is that, I don't think that there's anybody in the world who is called the breadth of motorsport that I have from two wheels to four wheels, you know, Bathurst 1000 and V8 Supercars, Formula One and the Monaco Grand Prix, IndyCar, and the Indianapolis 500, 24 hours at LA Man, Rolex 24 at Daytona, Sebring, at Pro Motocross outdoors, supercross, MotoGP, World Superbikes. I've done a heck of a lot and I'm not sure that there's anybody in the world who's done what I've done and I'm really proud of that.
Honda HRC’s Jett Lawrence is also from Australia as well. He's coming up, he's a new phenom in the sport. I guess you kind of have a connection being the Australian natives, does it feel like cool that you're being able to call what he's done as well?
Yeah, 100 percent. One hundred percent. And we're from the same home state. I'm a lot older than him, I'm more of his dad's vintage than for Jett and Hunter. But of course there's a connection because we're both from the same home state. But I just get excited about when there is anybody with that level of skill doing what they do. It could be like for you and me talking about track and field, it could be a young javelin thrower, or it could be the latest sprinting sensation. I think when you see anybody with that amount of skill doing what they do. And for me, one of the highlights has been well, calling some of his biggest wins, but standing track side with Ricky Carmichael and listening to Ricky and Ricky pointing things out about Jett…so I'm standing there with the GOAT and the GOAT’s looking at Jett, just amazed at his skill level. So, there is a connection there, but I've commentated and I'm friends with a lot of different Aussies in different sports and I've commentated on them but we've got to keep a pretty straight bat and just call it as we see it be neutral for it, but I'm pleased for him because he's a nice kid and he's comes from a great family and he's doing amazing things.
