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March 15, 2012updated 14 Sep 2012 4:04pm

Huffington Post UK launches new sports section

By Andrew Pugh

Huffington Post UK has launched a new sports section with blogs from Olympics chief Lord Coe, former England rugby captain Will Carling and tennis player Andy Murray.

While the US version of the website has long had a sports offering its focus is on sports like American football, baseball and basketball, meaning there was little cross over for its sister site in the UK.

'We wanted something that was very much for British sports fans and we knew we needed to that ourselves,'HuffPo UK editor-in-chief Carla Buzasi told Press Gazette.

'It's something that we get a lot of emails about from people and we've also had lots of bloggers who want to write about sport coming to us. We've run some of those blogs but they haven't had a natural home on the site."

More importantly, said Buzasi, was that people visiting news websites 'want to be able to indulge all their interests and all their passions – and the British general public love their sport.

'It was just important to me that we had a 360 degree offering and sport was the missing part of that until now."

Samuel Luckhurst has joined the HuffPo team to cover sports content and executive editor Stephen Hull, who joined from Metro last year, will oversee the launch and some of its day-to-day operations.

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HuffPo's offering will have a strong focus on niche sports.

Buzasi said: 'We'll cover all the things that get people excited all the places where there are big fan bases, but I'm also hoping this is going to be a place where fans of niche sports come to write about the things that they love.

'Lots of those niche sports have really fervent fans who are really passionate about it and don't at the moment get any mainstream coverage. We've got a great blogging platform for them to come and tell us why we should all be watching synchronised swimming or trying rhythmic gymnastics.'

Since its launch in July the site has created several new sections including education, media, lifestyle and technology. Buzasi said she was now looking to bed those in and there are currently no plans to launch any new ones.

'I now feel with sport we've got the full range of news and entertainment, I think looking forward it's going to be about making sure we cover the big events in 2012,'she said.

The UK website saw 5.4m unique users in January including 3.3m from within the UK, according to figures form ComScore.

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