The UCI Mountain Bike World Series is in some ways the problem child as well as the flagship of Warner Bros. Discovery Sports’ cycling portfolio, as it is a complicated sport to bring into a live broadcast. However, the challenges it poses the team at the host broadcaster means that things get creative, and that creativity can be pushed out to other cycling events.
Chris Ball, Warner Bros. Discovery Sports’ vice president of cycling events, says to SVG Europe: “Mountain bike is a kind of incubator, if you like. It allows us to really get our sleeves rolled up and straight into the development, and then we try and push that into other broadcasts where it works. We work with Gravity Media really closely; I was talking with Gravity Media [at the last race of the first half of the season], and we were talking about mountain biking and just saying it’s such a huge production, but it is so incredibly challenging because we’re an outdoor broadcast faced with especially challenging the weather and environments.”
Location, location, location
The challenges are primarily the locations the series goes to, and the weather, says Ball. “There’s two main challenges. I think one is the fact that it’s not a football pitch, it’s not an open field of play. The field of play is so varied. We can be in the high Alps where everything’s out on ski piste and it’s very open, or we can be in a really dense pine forest in Poland. That means that the cameras that we use, the lenses that we use, the platform size, height that we use, have to change all of the time, so our camera planning and our recces are really important.
“It also means that in order to capture the coverage at the level that we want takes a huge amount of resource,” he continues. “When we came in [to this series] – not so much in cross country, but certainly in downhill – no run had ever been captured top to bottom because it’s so intensive on cameras. If you’ve got dense tree cover, you’ve got three seconds of footage and you’re off that camera onto the next. I said, “look, our goal here, first and foremost, is to cover the entire course; I don’t want anyone’s performance as an athlete to do this incredible thing in the forest and no one ever know about it!”. We’d been at the World Championships in 2022 that a French rider had won, and [a large chunk] of their performance was absent from the live; there was no camera coverage.
“To cover everything we’re upwards of 30 cameras on a course now, which is huge,” Ball adds. “Before we came in [as host broadcaster for these events] it was 20 cameras and below, sometimes in the low teens.”
Stable connections
Connectivity in these hugely varied conditions then becomes an issue, and that connectivity also needs to be sustainable across all the events, which move quickly through the series with multiple events in different locations each month.
Ball explains: “We obviously then need to somehow connect all those cameras stably to the OB van. So how we rig the courses – and how we do that in a very tight turnaround – is important. We’re in mountainous terrain so more cameras means more power, means more platforms, means more cabling,” he notes, referring to the fact that the majority of cameras used for the series are cabled due to the terrain and weather conditions.
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The locations of the events are the second major challenges, Ball says. “Terrain and trees and weather is the kind of second big part; the environment. We [have to] make something really stable that a fan can tune into and know that they’re getting something really, really good.”
As part of that, the operational level of the broadcast has come into play, Ball says. “We’ve changed the way we work on the ground operationally; the time to rig and derig, how we connect cameras via different nodes to make sure that we can be as quick and efficient as possible.
“Next year we take the sport to Asia for the first time. We’re in North America, we’re in Europe, so we’re in high Alps, we’re on coastal terrain, sometimes city centres, we’re everywhere. So that’s a big challenge.
Wild weather
Another challenge which is completely uncontrollable is, of course, the weather. From heavy snow in mountainous regions to wild wind and rain that grounds the production’s drones, everything has a knock-on effect for the broadcast, which must always remain consistently good.
Ball says: “We’ve got to make this production weatherproof. We have to make sure that our output’s really, really consistent. So we’re investing in drones, yes, but we also need to make sure that the whole production works in high wind, high rain, and snow.
“That’s where drone issues can come in,” he continues. “Recently in Andorra we had gale force winds so we had to change competition schedules to work with programming, and we had to take drones out of the sky and rely on everything else, so it was a very different broadcast that still provided something really, really quality for the viewer.
“In mountain terrain we had snow in May in Poland, and our opening shot looked like [we were broadcasting] skiing,” he laughs. “It was crazy.”
And back to the emphasis on operational consistency: “These are huge productions happening in very challenging terrain. The slower it takes to rig and derig, the harder it is then to move quickly; if we’ve got a big storm coming in and we need to move things around, we need to be much more agile.
“But the better we get at it [on mountain biking], the more it comes across so many of our other productions,” concludes Ball.
Haute-Savoie, France, is hosting the UCI Mountain Bike World Series from 22 to 31 August, spanning two back-to-back weekends. The action begins in Morillon from 22 to 24 August, as the venue hosts its first-ever UCI Enduro World Cup, followed by the ski and mountain bike resort of Les Gets delivering Endurance and Gravity formats, featuring Cross-country Short Track (XCC), Cross-country Olympic (XCO), and Downhill (DHI) UCI World Cup events from 28 to 31 August
