Speaking with SVG Europe after one of Team GB’s greatest days at a Winter Olympics, BBC Sport’s head of major events, Ron Chakraborty, explains the broadcaster’s coverage – and why there is no nightly highlights programme.
With Team GB scooping medals in the snowboard cross and skeleton, the Olympics was awash across the BBC’s many outlets and platforms when SVG Europe visited BBC Sport in Salford, with the medal-winning athletes sharing their success and tailoring soundbites for different audiences across various national and local BBC radio stations, in addition to the broadcaster’s main planned coverage.
On Sunday 15 February, Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale won mixed team snowboard cross gold, and Matt Weston and Tabby Stoecker picked up gold in the mixed team skeleton, adding to Weston’s gold in the men’s skeleton two days earlier. Given Great Britain had previously only ever managed a single gold medal at a Winter Games, the day was dubbed ‘Super Sunday’ by the British media.
“Whether someone wants snackable highlights, something where they get the whole story of the event, or to watch it all as it unfolded, it is all available”
While gold medals are never easy to predict, their success didn’t come as a surprise to BBC Sport’s head of major events, Ron Chakraborty, and his colleagues, who have been keeping a close eye on Great Britain’s winter sports athletes in the lead-up to the Milano Cortina Games.
“The question we set ourselves was: can Milano Cortina do for the Winter Games what Paris did for the Summer Games?” says Chakraborty.
“Paris was the best since London 2012 – it was in a European time zone of course, and I think our biggest audience [for a Winter Olympics] four years ago in Beijing was when the men’s curling team reached the semi-final; three and a half million viewers, and that was at 9.30 in the morning. So you think: if we’ve got primetime sport here, how well is that going to do? And sure enough, with the weekend just gone, we had two peaks of 4 million plus. So one thing was the time zone, but the other was Team GB. We knew they had some decent medal chances.”
With a favourable time zone and high-performing athletes, viewing figures – and interest from those responsible for scheduling content on the broadcaster’s main channel – has been strong.
Following the 2015 Warner Bros Discovery deal for European TV rights to the Olympic Games, the BBC is more limited than it was back in 2012 in how much Olympics content it can show, with two streams of live daytime action from Italy, alongside clips, highlights and live text updates across the BBC Sport website, app and social channels. On BBC1 there has been programming from 9am-12pm and 2pm-5.15pm, while BBC2 has featured Olympic programming from 1pm-2pm and 5.15pm-10pm. Plus, there’s an Olympics Extra live digital stream from 8am-11pm daily.
Explains Chakraborty: “BBC1 has been great, because those last two European Games – Sochi 2014 and Torino 2006 – I think 1% of the coverage was on BBC1; it was mainly shown on BBC2. But sport generally, and the Olympics, has kind of bucked that trend of linear decline; we still do well. So, with mornings and afternoons on BBC1, there has been around 40% on the channel.”
With action switching between BBC1 and BBC 2, helping viewers navigate and find content with clear signposting has been a priority for the broadcaster.
“Since we’ve had the rights deal with Discovery, we’re down to two streams, so making it really clear what you’ve got available on both is more important. When we were streaming everything – we had 24 streams for London and Rio – we could put it all out there and let viewers find it. Now, we’ve got to really point out where it is.”
With a studio setup in Cortina and a limited technical presence at the IBC in Milan, Salford is the heart of the BBC’s production operation, taking feeds from the IBC into two production galleries. It is also where clips and content for social media are produced. But, for the first time at a major event in recent years, there is no highlights programme.
Chakraborty explains: “When you think about the way people watch TV, especially highlights, to have a show that comes on air at gone past 11 o’clock in the evening…I think everyone’s seen it by then because there are only around eight medals a day. We made a conscious effort to have bite-size or 10-minute edits, for example, and we haven’t had any negative feedback. So we don’t really miss it.”
As well as being an editorial choice that reflects changing viewer habits, it was also a way to redirect budget towards the on-site studio in Cortina.
“We’ve got loads of old-school TV edit suites for craft editors, plus a short-form video team who predominantly make videos for the website and social. Now we’ve got the same edit platform working closely together. There’s a sweet spot in the middle where TV can take stuff these guys make, and some of the TV edits… and TV can make stuff for iPlayer as well. We’re just trying to make it as fluid as possible so that everyone’s making stuff for everything.”
Chakraborty explains that there are three levels of content: full, mid-form and snackable. “If you want to watch an entire curling match, for example, great – that’s available. But there’s also mid-form highlights of about 10 minutes, so you can see all of the medal-winning performances. And then, as you’ll have seen on the app, there are moments, and that could be a gold medal-winning run, or it could be something funny or a talking point. So whether someone wants snackable highlights, something where they get the whole story of the event, or to watch it all as it unfolded, it is all available.”
For digital, the online team has access to platforms such as Telescope (an internal BBC insights tool to help content creators understand how audiences engage with their work) and Chartbeat (a third-party website analytics platform) to provide feedback on what’s popular, alongside social platform data. That all provides insight, but the team also relies on experience from previous events.
BBC Sport digital video producer Andy Toft: “We knew yesterday was going to be huge. We thought we might get a medal – we didn’t know golds – but as soon as that happens, we of course know that’s going to be massive. So what you do in that instance is try to rinse the moment as much as possible. You’re trying to get as much reaction as possible.”
One example is a split-screen clip of snowboard commentators Ed Leigh and Tim Warwood inside their commentary box, commentating on and reacting to the gold medal in the mixed team snowboard. It is, Chakraborty says, an example of just the kind of content that helps to “keep the pot boiling”.
Toft: “We knew that if they did win gold, that would be an instant, relatively easy win for us. And then you have all the family reaction as well. We had people filming with the family – Jenny Jones (BBC pundit and Team GB’s first medallist on snow, back in 2014) was down there. So that all comes back to us. And that’s brilliant, and it feeds multiple platforms as well.”
Milano Cortina 2026 is also the first time the BBC has made content specifically for its YouTube channel, since a deal between the BBC and YouTube was announced in January this year.
Currently, the lead piece of content on the BBC Sport YouTube channel is ‘Zlatan Ibrahimovic opens the Winter Olympics for the BBC’, with the former Inter and AC Milan forward explaining what it takes to become a champion in Milan. So far, it has amassed 158k views.
Other content on the broadcaster’s Winter Olympics YouTube section includes highlights and behind-the-scenes action, with views eclipsing those for Six Nations and Champions League content. For example, a three-minute clip of Team GB figure skaters Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson’s qualification routine from a week ago has some 442k views, compared with all of the BBC’s Champions League highlights that have a combined total of almost 8k views.
“So far, we couldn’t be happier with how it’s all worked out,” says Chakraborty. “We know it’s a tight operation, but we’re getting so much content out to so many different outlets, and the figures and response have been great.”
