Conveying emotion: BBC Sport on bringing the 45th London Marathon to viewers
BBC Sport lead director for the London Marathon, Matt Griffiths, being interviewed by the One Show on The Mall
With a record number of race finishers – 56,640 exhausted but exhilarated people – packing the streets of Britain’s capital on Sunday (27 April), the 2025 London Marathon once again gave everyone involved fantastic memories.
The production of the London Marathon was, well, a marathon event, complicated not only by the epic route through central London and the vast number of runners, but also by around 800,000 spectators packing all the leftover space.
Gabby Logan presented live coverage of the 45th London Marathon for BBC Sport, as world-class runners joined tens of thousands of fundraisers and personal record-setters on one of the most inspiring days in the British sporting calendar.
EMG / Gravity Media was the facilities provider for BBC Sport, headed up by unit manager, Greg Livermore. New for the 2025 London Marathon was a refreshed graphics package from Moov. London Marathon Events teamed up with Moov in 2024, and this year the decision was made to revamp the suite of graphics with a new colour scheme, new mile splits, and added information on some of the runners as well as some of the iconic sights of the city they pass through.
We caught up with Matt Griffiths, BBC Sport lead director for the event, about how it all came together.
BBC Sport team pulling the final programme of the 2025 London Marathon together from the TX OB at the finish line: Matt Griffiths, lead director, and Emma Cook, the programme editor and at the back, production coordinator Lorna Dalgetty
Conveying emotion
Griffiths comments on BBC Sports goal for this year’s London Marathon, one – if not the – most iconic long distance races in the world. “I think the goal is always the same. It’s such an amazing and unique event, to have literally the best marathon runners in the world running on exactly the same course, going through exactly all the same iconic backdrops, then half an hour later you’ve got your next door neighbour, a man running with a fridge on his back, and people dressed in fancy dress running for all sorts of charities and some really inspiring personal reasons; to have all that in one day, and trying to convey all that emotion and all that human spirit, that’s what we want to do. That’s what we try to do.”
The Mall, prior to 56,640 exhausted but exhilarated people crossing the 2025 London Marathon finish line
Says Griffiths on the complex workflow for the Marathon: “As you can imagine, it’s quite a big production, being 26.2 miles across central London. Louise Flynn and Susie Cooper led the production management team who sorted all the planning and logistics. We’ve got six different OB sites. There’s an OB at the start, which is directed by one of my colleagues, Kelly Faulkner. There’s an OB at Cutty Sark directed by Chris Graham. There’s an OB at Tower Bridge directed by Tim Bennett, and all of those OBs have somewhere between six and 10 cameras covering all the runners and riders. And then we’ve got a position with LiveU cameras at Rainbow Row, Limehouse, and a position on Embankment. Then we’ve got the other OB at the finish, directed by Mike Burke, which has got about 12 cameras. Then there’s my TX truck, which it all comes through to put the programme out.”
Adds Griffiths: “We have a fantastic working relationship with the London Marathon Events team who work closely with us to help us achieve what we want from our coverage.”
The cameras at the OBs are mostly cabled, other than the LiveU cameras, with the bikes using RF cameras.
On the cameras around the route, Griffiths says there were many: “We had six electric bikes, which obviously had radio cameras on them, two helicopters, a plane for relaying all the signals.”
Comments Livermore: “This year the Finish Presentation Truck has 26 incoming remote feeds. We are following more specific runners and bringing them into the show live via the LiveU phone app.
“We had an extra motorbike camera for 2025,” continues Livermore. “We expected full coverage across the entire route this year, including the tunnels! EMG-C are blending bonded cellular and the COFDM systems that go via the plane for the first time. It’s an exciting development for 2025. It was the best RF coverage on any marathon yet. The bikes were solid all the way, including tunnels.”
Cine cam and polecam action
The finish line, at the end of The Mall, was covered by a plethora of cameras designed to capture all the emotion – and exhaustion – of the thousands of runners at Sunday’s race across the city centre. These included a couple of new types of camera, including a cine cam and a polecam.
States Griffiths: “We had a cine cam at the finish for lovely depth of field shots of finishers, and all that emotion. That’s new for this year. And we trialled a polecam at the finish issue as well, which we haven’t had before. We got some interesting stuff out of that, which was exciting. It was just behind [the finish line] because we haven’t tried it before, and obviously it gets very busy at the finish, as you can imagine, so we can’t really take too many chances having people walking around with equipment there. We got some quite unique shots.”
On other cameras at the finish line, he says: “There’s three pres cameras at the finish as well when Gabby [Logan] sits at the end of the programme, and we have two RF cameras on the finish as well: one on the finish line and one on the finish gantry. So we have one camera that gets them coming across the line and another camera that gets them coming through the gantry. We have a high mo on the finish line as well.”
He adds: “We’ve got a rail cam at the finish as well. It starts at the bottom of The Mall by the Victoria Memorial, and goes up all the way to the finish, which is pretty cool. We’ve used the rail cam before, and we get great use out of it; it’s gone very well since we’ve been using it over the last few years.”
Notes Livermore on the finish line fan cam: “The fan cam is a FX3 on an RS4 pro gimbal. EMG-C provide the radio link, which sits in a backpack. ”
The 2025 London Marathon finish camera listing:
Camera Hoist 40m
Jimmy Jib
Rail Cam
100x Lens rigged on platform
Radio Camera
Radio Camera
Super Slow Mo Camera
Funnel Camera HDC3500
Funnel Camera HDC3500
Presentation Camera HDC3500
Presentation Camera HDC3500
Pole Cam
Drone
ACS Fan Cam
Drones at the Palace
There were also two Batcam drones being used to bring in close overhead shots of the throngs of runners and excited members of the public at the beginning and end of the race.
Says Griffiths: “We had two Batcam drones, one at the start and one at the finish. We had them for the first time last year and they we were really successful, so we’ve got them back again.”
On the difficulties of using drones above people, Griffiths says, “the Marathon is like the antithesis of something you want to use a drone camera on; lots of complications!”.
However, Batcam came to the rescue: “Batcam was so good at sorting out all the permissions and speaking to people, that we haven’t had any major issues. [Not flying above people] just limits where you can use them, obviously. So at the start the take off and landing zone is in an area they refer to as the Deer Park in Greenwich Park, which a wooded area where people don’t go. So we still got great shots of in and around the start; it just means we’re not flying over people.
“And at the finish, the original idea was to ask permission if we could take off from the garden of Buckingham Palace,” continues Griffiths. “That was absolutely the ideal place, and everybody did think that we might get that over the line. But in the end we didn’t, so the take off and landing position is by the Queen Victoria Memorial (QVM), which is alright because it’s not going directly over people, but we still get some fantastic shots.”
All the effort
Comments Griffiths on how BBC Sport’s goal for the race had been reached this year: “That’s what all the cameras are for, to reflect all that emotion. To cover elite races, which are in and of themselves, fantastic; the best runners in the world, the best wheelchair athletes in the world. But it’s also about that human race after it.
“That’s the thing,” continues Griffiths. “You talk to people and somebody always knows somebody who’s running. There are so many great reasons to run – for a charity or for your own personal reasons – so many inspiring stories, and we got lots of inspiring stories in the programme on Sunday.
“The hope is always that we get to share a lot of that with the viewer, so it’s not just about load of people running; it’s the reasons why they’re running, and all that effort.”