Focused on the slopes: How production partner NRK has prepared for the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships 2025

By
Monday, February 24, 2025 - 16:21
Print This Story

Biennial Nordic skiing event, the International Ski Federation (FIS) Nordic World Ski Championships, is about to hit the snow in Trondheim, Norway at the Granåsen Arena.

World Championship events include Nordic skiing’s three disciplines: cross country skiing, ski jumping, and Nordic combined, which combines both cross country and ski jumping into one big snow-fest.

Taking place from 26 February to 9 March, the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships will see NRK as the host producer for host broadcaster, Infront, which is also managing the rights-holding broadcasters on site as well as the distribution of feeds that NRK creates.

“The spectators are quite important so a big part of the plan for the camera positions is to make sure that I’m on the correct side of the course all the time to see the athletes and behind the athletes, thousands of people.”

NRK has its hands full with what is essentially three productions; it is running the host production for Infront, the medal ceremonies production for the world feed, and its own domestic production as well.

To find out about the big picture for this epic production, SVG Europe caught up with Øyvind Nyborg and Espen Skretteberg, who are both directors at NRK Sport, as well as Espen Hansen, NRK’s technical project manager for the Championships. For the Championships, Nyborg is director for the cross country and Skretteberg is in charge of the production for the ski jumping, and both are working together for the Nordic combined.

Stepping up

NRK stepped up to do the host production of the Nordic World Ski Championships for Infront two years ago, after the previous holder of that position, Viasat, backed out. Comments Hanson: “It was pretty short time to do all the planning for this production because normally for World Championships, we would’ve been started earlier, but we had the World Championships in Oslo in 2011, and the Biathlon Championships in 2016 in Oslo, so we have some experience so it was okay.”

However, he laughs: “It’s burning a little bit now to get all the people; I have about 70 people on cross country production from the technical staff. That [is almost the entire] market for camera operators in Norway; we’ve vacuumed the market! And at the same time we are also producing the World Cup for alpine skiing in Kvitfjell.”

Crewing up for the Nordic World Ski Championships is complicated for Hansen as in the relatively compact market of Norway, staff are already being pulled onto the 2025 FIS Alpine Skiing World Cup is being held in Kvitfjell, Norway from 26 February to 2 March, as well as competing with Super-G skiing events.

“So we have almost vacuumed everything up, and woken up everyone including some people that have retired, who we have bought brought back in, and so on,” says Hansen. His team has engaged well over 200 people to work across the host broadcast and the NRK Sports domestic broadcast.

Focused on the slopes

However, even though the planning for this event has been going on for just 18 months, NRK has been working with FIS on how the Granåsen arena could best be developed for ski sport productions for much longer. Skretteberg explains: “They built a new hill in Trondheim for the ski jumping and we have been a part of the planning for many years before we knew that we would be doing this Championship. So it’s intensive planning in the last few months, but the planning has been [going on] for the last couple of years; my first site visit was two and a half years ago.”

Nyborg adds: “Since then has been a process, going up quite a few times, meeting people, getting to know the courses, slowly building up. We had test events last winter, so since April 2024 I guess we’ve known pretty much how we’re going to cover it, camera-wise, for positions and such. Now we’re into the details.”

Ski jumping director Espen Skretteberg and team in the gallery prepping for the start of the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships 2025

Nyborg notes that in early 2025 the work was more focused on nailing down the final details and ensuring crew was scheduled accordingly. He says: “It’s been about making sure that working hours are correct, that we have correct crew on a daily basis. Especially for my production [on cross country]; it goes up and down a bit from day to day depending on the race format we’re covering. So we have everything from 25 cameras to 50-plus depending on the course table. So it’s just going through the list day by day to make sure that we have the correct number of people.”

The team treat the biannual event like an Olympics, focusing far ahead on the production. Skretteberg explains: “Every production has a long and short horizon and this for sure has a long horizon. A lot of stuff has to be planned before even we know how we are going to do it; we have to start before the people in charge make their minds up. So we have to have a lot of juggling balls in the air at the same time. But at the same time in Norway a ski world championship happens every 15 years or so, so to us this is close to Olympic coverage I would say; it’s a big thing in Norway for sure.”

Spectators everywhere

This Championship is going to have one aspect of the production that the previous one did not have – well, 300,000 of them – and that is spectators. This will add a fantastic sense of atmosphere to the production, as well as complications in camera angles, drone no-fly zones, and more.

Comments Nyborg: “I think what’s going to be special compared to the last championship, is there’s going to be tens of thousands of people out there. Especially in cross country, and I think they will be expecting more people outside of the ticket area, as you can easily walk into the course and be a spectator without paying anything if you know where to go.

“For me, the spectators are quite important,” continues Nyborg. “Not as important as the sport of course, but it’s important to show the festival of people. They hope people will be almost around the entire course, so that has been a big part of the plan for the camera positions to make sure that I’m on the correct side of the course all the time to see the athletes and behind the athletes, thousands of people. If the thousands of people are behind me, I don’t see it. So those kind of details, I think that’s going to be important. I think that’s going to make it stick out compared to other events.

The cross country is running from NRK’s largest truck, OB24 (Picture from TVC Solutions)

 

“Cross country skiing is big in Norway and of course big in Sweden, Finland, and smaller countries. But when you watch the World Cup on a weekly basis, you have a few spectators in the stadium, but outside they usually go in this massive field without people in it, or through the forest without seeing many people, so this is going to be spectacular in that way. And I think to show that it’s quite important.”

Nyborg notes the spectators will have an effect on the athletes as well as the production: “It’ll impact the athletes for sure. It’ll impact us as well because this gives us more pictures to tell the story.” Nyborg adds that ski jumping, which is marginally less popular than cross country in Norway, is also set for a full house: “Here we hopefully will have a full stadium with I believe 17,000 people watching.”

Fast set up

Set up for the cross country begins around one week out from the Championships, and a couple of days later for the ski jumping set up. Comments Nyborg: “For the cross country, the last couple of days before the Championship starts, we have to be ready because then all the athletes will come in and ski and they will do their training in the courses. So by then we’ll have pretty much done. That kind of forces us to start a bit early.”

A large IBC has been built for the Championships, and it will be converted to become a football venue afterwards. The entire NRK operation for the host broadcast is OB based, plus the broadcaster has built a small control room inside the IBC for its own domestic coverage.

The ski jumping production is being run from a large NEP truck that is being driven up from Belgium, and the cross country is running from NRK’s largest truck, OB24.

The Opening and Medal Ceremonies will be held in the city centre in the Trondheim City Square. A third host director from NRK will be covering those events in the evenings from Trondheim City Square, and, says Nyborg, “on top of all this, NRK has a massive domestic production as well as the host production for the entire world, with our own production on top of that, so there’s a lot of people going to Trondheim.”

The FIS Nordic World Ski Championships will take place at the Granåsen Arena, Trondheim, Norway from 26 February to 9 March

Read more:

Subscribe and Get SVG Europe Newsletters