News02 Apr 2004


IAAF Open to Change over TV Suggestions

FacebookTwitterEmail

Alex Gilady, President IAAF TV Commission (© IAAF)

The International Association of Athletics Federations yesterday responded positively to challenging suggestions for change made by broadcasters at the first day of its two-day world television seminar in Athens.

Alex Gilady, the chairman of the IAAF’s television commission and an International Olympic Committee member, who was chairing the seminar, said: ‘The IAAF is open to change, wants to change but faces many difficulties in rising to the challenges laid out by television.‘

Gilady said that the IAAF was aware that many issues needed to be tackled to improve the television package offered by athletics.

However, he argued that while the format of televised athletics needs to change and programmes need to be made shorter and more concise, athletics is a very complex sport that faces many difficulties. Gilady said that, unlike soccer, athletics and the nature of each discipline needs explanation. Television could play a part in explaining the story.

Gilady was responding to presentations by representatives of several top broadcasters, including the US Olympic broadcaster NBC and the European Broadcasting Union, the umbrella body of mainly public-service broadcasters, which had proposed changes including shorter, reliably-scheduled events that are easy to understand, and that contribute to an overall ‘seasonal drama.’

Peter Diamond, NBC’s senior vice-president of Olympic programming, had warned delegates that athletics’ ‘primary problem’ is the length of most athletics meetings: usually at least four hours, compared with two and a half hours for American football, basketball or ice hockey matches.

In this context, Adrian Metcalfe, a member of the IAAF’s television commission, had questioned the scheduling of medal ceremonies during evening coverage of athletics, pointing out that, typically, seven medal ceremonies throughout the course of a two-and-a-half-hour programme could take a 42-minute bite out of a broadcaster’s coverage of the action.

Diamond was supported by the EBU's head of sport Marc Joerg, who argued that television audience ratings are damaged by events that are too long, unreliably scheduled or that have little spectator interest in the first place.

Zhang Wei, a director of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, had encouraged the IAAF to focus on star athletes and allow flexibility in the programme to ensure that local stars in different territories were given the opportunity to be promoted to their respective audiences at key times.

Wei argued that this was particularly important for China, in the build-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, where there was a need to raise awareness of who the stars were.

Luis Fernando Lima, head of sport at Brazil’s TV Globo, argued that broadcasters needed to ‘understand the challenge,’ that athletics faced from competition from new radical sports and to develop a series of campaigns to educate the public about athletics.

He said that traditional sports needed ‘to adapt to survive’ and he encouraged the IAAF to offer rights for free in certain territories to build up knowledge and interest. Then, when a sponsor could be found or competition developed for the rights, it would share in the benefits.

Lima added that, ‘when the whole world is watching, the evening session should be as breathtaking as possible,’ advocating new competition formats including even novel individual event circuits, such as ‘long jump on the beach.’

Dapeng Lou, an IAAF vice-president, welcomed the broadcasters’ suggestions, saying that ‘the timetable must be spectator-friendly, a compact script of exciting actions and emotion.’

He said that the sport faced many challenges because of traditional factors such as developing a timetable, competition rules, ensuring the athletes’ needs are met and conforming with local conditions and capabilities, but he added that the sport must now learn to account for new factors such as worldwide television audience interests and limited airtime.

He encouraged early discussion between television rights holders, organising committees and technical directors, involving the presentation manager drafting a script to ensure that the timetable meets with the approval of all parties involved. He said that the event needs to be balanced to meet a wide range of requirements.

Ernest Obeng, the IAAF’s newly-appointed director of television, welcomed the broadcasters’ contribution, saying that a television seminar had not been held by the IAAF for 10 years and was therefore long overdue.

Gilady welcomed the honesty and openness of the panel, which also included EBU consultant Markku Vainikka and Larry Atiase of URTNA, the umbrella body of African broadcasters.

He said that the IAAF would consider all of the proposals, but warned that changes would not be possible in time for this summer’s Olympic Games in Athens and perhaps not even for next year’s World Championships in Helsinki, for which tickets are due to go on sale next month.

Sportcal.com

Pages related to this article
Disciplines
Loading...