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How to tune into Sport NationLegendary caller Matt Hill opens up on brush with death
SEN • November 2nd, 2025 12:54 pm
Legendary sports and racing caller Matt Hill has opened up on his frightening brush with death in 2008.
Early in his career as a broadcaster, Hill was lucky enough to head to Beijing Olympics for Sydney radio station 2GB.
It was there after calling a few events that things went horribly wrong as he was hit with double pneumonia which caused his body to begin shutting down.
It wasn’t just that which he had to worry about, with it later being confirmed that he had melioidosis, a bacterial disease spread through soil, air and water which comes with a ‘95 per cent death rate’.
It was only an airlift out of China to Hong Kong that ended up saving Hill’s life, and he reflected on beating the odds to live another day.
“I was desperate to get to the Olympics and 2GB was the radio station covering it alongside Channel 7 in Beijing 2008,” Hill told This is Your Journey – thanks to Tobin Brothers.
“So, I got the opportunity to go… we were part of the opening ceremony, I called the rowing and a football game, but then I felt dreadful.
“It was like a bus just hit me, I was shivering a bit like if you had a bad infection, and they carried me out of a studio at one point, and I ended up in a Beijing hospital where I got progressively worse.
“It got to a stage where the Australian team doctors came to assess me, and the decision was made for me to be air-evacuated out of Beijing to go to Hong Kong.
“They realised I had something quite acute and quite serious… I woke up at the other side in Hong Kong, but the team doctors said to me, ‘We’re going to put you into an induced coma and we’re also going to tell you that your Mum loves you’.
“My Mum was told that if I made the flight from China to Hong Kong that I would live, so it was a pretty full-on time.
“In the end we survived. It was melioidosis… which has a death rate of 95 per cent, so I got that one beaten, an odds-on favourite.”
Hill discussed this scary moment, his broadcasting career and much more on this week’s episode.
Listen Hill’s full episode with Sam Edmund below.
