Joe Towns is the Innovation Lead for Sport Broadcast Media in the Cardiff School of Sport & Health Sciences at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Joe travelled to Paris to work as a Senior Television Producer for Olympic Broadcast Services (OBS) during the Summer Games.
If you are an athlete, you dream about making it to an Olympics. If you work in sports broadcasting, it’s just the same – working on an Olympics is the ultimate goal. The pinnacle. The greatest show on earth. Admittedly, we don’t train as hard as athletes do and we can’t jump as high or run as fast. But, when you get to a Games, you find yourselves alongside some of the best in the business, the finest sound engineers and camera operators, the most experienced directors and editors, world-class commentators, presenters and reporters.
I was working for the Olympic Broadcast Services; the organisation responsible for filming and beaming the Games out to the world. Every single event. Nothing can be missed. The world is watching. The stakes are high. Mistakes are not really allowed. Everything needs to run like clockwork. My team were responsible for covering 329 medal events across 32 sports, more than
3,720 hours of content and
2,480 hours of commentary.
We were looking after continuous channels which broadcasters around the world could tune into, take live, and wrap their own coverage around. If you watched any of the Games on TV, it was OBS coverage, OBS graphics, OBS replays. In Britain, you might get bespoke commentary from the BBC, and in America, you might be watching on NBC; but it would still be OBS pictures. It’s fascinating, all over the world people watch a slightly different Olympics depending on their national sporting preference. In Germany, the Handball is the main event, in China, the nation stops for Table Tennis, and in Brazil, it’s Volleyball. In the UK, we don’t show much Greco Roman Wrestling – the less medal hopes, the less interest.
The atmosphere around the Games reminded me of London 2012. In the run-up there was lots of negative noise but once it got underway the French public and press got behind it, the sun shone, Paris was buzzing, and I’ve never seen so many jaw-droppingly spectacular stadia. The gamechanger was placing venues amongst the city’s most recognisable and iconic landmarks – it felt like an Olympics made for TV coverage. There’s big pressure on LA28 to top those visuals.
For me, it’s the scale of an Olympic broadcast that’s most impressive. The global audience and reach are reflected in the record breaking figures for broadcasters on linear and online across socials. The sheer number of technical staff involved (over 10,000 media on site) all have the same ambition to innovate, find new camera angles, deliver data driven graphics with real-time visualisation of speed and distance help illustrate those close calls – who can forget the men’s 100m final where Noah Lyles won by 0.005 of a second?! We had AI powered cloud-based replay systems fusing images from multiple camera angles to create highly detailed 3D reconstructions of major incidents; most people will have seen the
360-degree Matrix style replays.
That’s what an Olympics is about, doing things better, faster and performing at a higher quality in every field. Paris 2024 did that and it feels like these Games have shifted the dial forward in the broadcast world.
