Fan favourite Sky Sports host Emma Paton is helping to take darts to new levels alongside superstar players like Luke Littler but could have become a household name for an entirely different reason
Emma Paton will likely be on TV more over the Christmas season than the cast of Gavin and Stacey, but the face of Sky Sports’ darts coverage also has a surprising sporting background.
Fan favourite Paton, 30, is the host for the PDC World Championships at Alexandra Palace over the next two weeks and also fronts all the other major arrows events like the Premier League and World Matchplay.
And after a career behind the camera, she is now stepping in front of it – but Paton could also have been a household name in front of the camera for another reason.
Paton was originally an Olympic-standard 400m athlete who was training with Commonwealth Games heptathlon champion Kelly Sotherton and working with esteemed coach Aston Moore, who has also mentored Katarina Johnson-Thompson.
“Some of the best years of my life were spent training at Loughborough University and mixing with arguably the best 400-metre runners in the country,” Paton said.
“The coach who had the biggest impact on me was Kelly Sotherton’s first coach, Aston Moore, who is now working with Katarina Johnson-Thompson.
“Kelly was probably coming towards the end of her career in heptathlon because of injuries and focusing more on 400m, and she was dragging me round in training sessions.
“If I ever got close to Kelly, it felt like a win. For a while I was living the life of an elite athlete and they were really good times – some brutal, brutal sessions, but I probably enjoyed the training more than competition.”
Her decision to go into journalism came from wanting to still be around sport, even if it meant not actually being an athlete herself while completing her undergraduate degree.
Paton, who has a degree in Sport and Exercise Science from Loughborough and a Master’s in Sports Journalism from St Mary’s University Twickenham, joined Sky Sports in 2012.
She spent seven years working behind the scenes on Good Morning Sports Fans, but her dream was to be a Sky Sports presenter and, after broadcasting legend Dave Clark stepped back from his duties, opportunity knocked.
“I owe a lot of what I do now to a guy called Rory Hopkins, who produced the darts for decades on Sky,” Patton added.
“When Dave Clark, who presented our coverage so brilliantly for so long, decided to take a step back from doing it, I remember getting an email from Rory which simply said, ‘Do you like darts?’”
It’s fair to say that Paton has taken that opportunity and run with it. But what else would you expect a former track star to do?