Changing the world: Behind the collaborative production of the 2025 Special Olympics World Winter Games
Snowboarding at the 2025 Special Olympics World Winter Games
The 2025 Special Olympics World Winter Games took place over the week of 8 to 15 March in Turin, the first time the event had been staged in Italy. Featuring a wide variety of sports for participants with intellectual disabilities, including figure skating, floorball, alpine skiing, snowshoeing, and dancesport, the championships involved 1,500 athletes from one hundred countries, and was the first Winter Games since 2017.
This important return to the international sporting calendar received extensive broadcast coverage, with live presentation of the opening ceremony and figure skating and short-track speed skating. The remaining competitions – floorball, alpine skiing, snowshoeing, dancesport, snowboarding and cross-country skiing – were recorded and then made available to participating broadcasters through the Global Media Hub.
An hour-long ‘Recap Show’ will be broadcast throughout the US by ABC on 6 April and also air or stream in select regions, including Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean through Disney+, as well as on Sky in the UK and Ireland and beIN in France.
Special Olympics are, as Chris Wragg, senior director of broadcast communications and social media engagement for the organisation, explains, more a movement than a conventional sports event like the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Which is why, he stresses, it is not referred to as ‘the’ Special Olympics: “It’s important to clarify that the big difference between ourselves and the Paralympics and definitely the Olympics is that we’re not just about games or sports every two years. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of events monthly throughout the world.”
The credo of Special Olympics is “Changing the World Through Sport”
Changing the world
The credo of Special Olympics is “Changing the World Through Sport”, with the aim being to encourage acceptance and inclusion, but Wragg adds that non-sporting aspects are also key to the programme. “Improving health outcomes for people with intellectual disabilities is a big part of our movement,” he says. “Things like seeking help with their hearing or their teeth, as well as education in general. It’s an all-year round thing and although sports is our raison d’être, the reason we’re here is not just for that but also to help our athletes in their everyday life, even outside of sport.”
While the existence and purpose of Special Olympics is known and understood in the US, Wragg says, the situation is different in other parts of the world, including Europe. “We’re constantly getting conflated with the Paralympics as a brand, which is a problem but one we are hell bent on fixing,” he comments. “The way we do that is through media coverage, messaging and marketing. We’re not in competition with the Paralympics. We do work together and have the Olympic name but there are differences.”
A crucial part of the media coverage for Special Olympics is broadcasting the Games – both Summer and Winter – to as wide an audience as possible. For this Winter Games, Special Olympics partnered with a group of broadcasters and facility providers to cover each event and make footage available to media outlets. Wragg explains that while there was no host broadcaster in the conventional sense – “for various reasons” – these responsibilities were split between several organisations.
Collaborative production
The world feed of the Opening Ceremony was produced by Italian live event management and entertainment group Balich Wonder Studio (BWS), with supplementary equipment and commentators provided by ESPN, which Wragg describes as Special Olympics’ “global broadcast partner”. ESPN was also involved in the live world feed of the short-track speed skating and figure skating, produced by Sky Germany, which brought in its own OB vehicles alongside HD18 and Tender 18 from NEP Italy.
The Opening Ceremony was staged at the Inalpi Arena in Turin, while the skating events were held in the city’s Pala Tazzoli Ice Arena. Other sports took place in the Piedmont ski resorts of Sestriere, Bardonecchia and Pragelato. Due to their locations in the mountains and each being well over an hour away from Turin, the events at these towns were recorded by ENG crews, with the footage returned over Wi-Fi to the Global Media Hub for editing.
This area was overseen by UK-based production company Restless Films, which Wragg explains has been working with Special Olympics “for many years” and provided the ENG crews for this year. “They gathered interviews and highlights, which, at the end of the day, were fed into a very simple system based on Dropbox,” he says. “In the absence of a host broadcaster we managed to make a patchwork between the live coverage and the Global Media Hub, with recorded coverage.”
Wragg comments that during the Opening Ceremony the Hub editors, also supplied by Restless, were, “squirreling behind the scenes, furiously churning out over a hundred clips,” that were available within two hours of the event. “It was a big undertaking but they delivered, as they have before,” he says. “To give you an idea of the scale of footage, it was coming from the live world feed to provide clips for the media from each country of their delegation coming out of the tunnel.”
The aim of Special Olympics and its broadcast partners, Wragg states, is to have the technical broadcast presentation, “on the same pedestal as other international events, because we think our athletes deserve that”.
The editing set-up, ENG coverage and OB facilities for the 2025 Special Olympics World Winter Games will be further explored in Part 2 of this feature. Read now.