Spot the athlete: Making progress in graphics on supertri Toulouse with Aurora Media Worldwide, AE Live and Matsport
The world’s best triathletes descended on the southern French city of Toulouse earlier in October to provide some electric racing on a fast-paced street course for supertri Toulouse.
After a swim at Port de la Daurade, the athletes pushed on their trainers and tackled the technical and demanding course around the city.
Graphics are an integral part of the supertri broadcast, and even more so in Toulouse. With athletes either running and cycling together in tight packs through the narrow streets of the city, or splashing through the harbour in matching black swimming caps, working out who is who and following the leaders can be tough.
Kate Andrews, Aurora producer and for supertri Toulouse, the graphics producer, comments: “With following the story and finding the right people in the pack, we’ve been really lucky that this year was the Olympics; a lot of our big name athletes are Olympians and they’re just so well known that we know that even if they’re not in the top of the running for the story of the race, people will know how they’re doing, how they’re faring against each other, so we do have our big names that we keep an eye out for that further down the pack. Also, this is my third season working on site, and fourth season of supertri overall, and you start to develop knowledge of who holds back in the first couple of rounds, but they’ll be there in the final run and stuff like that.”
Making progress
For this season, Aurora has developed new graphics for supertri. Andrews explains: “We have developed this new progress bar that sits along the bottom of the screen. For anyone that’s new to triathlon, trying to explain that each one is three triathlons back-to-back, it’s quite hard to visualise what that exactly means. So we’ve created this progress bar that sticks with the leaders, so you know that if – for instance – they’re on the second bike of the nine disciplines they go through, even though the larger picture might be the transition zone where people are still coming out of the swim, the people on the bike are the people that we are following on the progress bar.
“We’ve also introduced a guide to the format, which is a VT, that was made by one of our onsite shooting editors. It is an explanation of the graphics because again, it is a sport that’s unlike any other, so it’s for anyone that’s new to be able to pick up exactly what’s going on, what you should be looking at, what a short chute is [a shortcut that is awarded to a team]; it’s all part of the storyline of what’s going on.
“Trying to keep track of that is something that we do quite well with graphics,” Andrews continues. “It’s taken a few years to get there, to find what is easy for people to read at home for people that know the sport, love the sport to follow along, but then also for brand new viewers. I think we’ve almost nailed it now.”
Spot the athlete
In Toulouse with its thin roads and high buildings, Andrews used a graphic to help viewers understand what is going on, particularly on sections where it is hard to see who’s who, such as during the swim.
Andrews says: “We have mini graphics cards that we use to update any latest information. So if there’s any penalties that you might not have seen, or something happened in transition that viewers weren’t able to see but a penalty wasn’t awarded till the next lap, these little mini cards say ‘penalty’ and how long and who’s received it. That just gives a prompt to the commentators to be able to explain it fully.”
The graphics need to be as simple as possible – including using as few words as possible – to enable the same content to work for all rights holders, says Andrews. She explains: “We work for a worldwide audience, so we have to think about using as few words as possible, but also to get what’s happening across so that the commentators are able to describe exactly what’s going on in their own language.
“We also use those mini cards to tell us who’s won the short chute, who’s been allocated the short chute, and who might be, and who the leaders are in tightly grouped together sections. Those kind of help things when it’s a little bit harder to decipher what’s going on. The same within swim; it’s hard to see who the athletes are as their heads are underwater.”
This season, supertri host broadcaster, Aurora Media Worldwide, worked with AE Live, its graphics partner for supertri, as well as a new timings operator, Matsport, which has provided all the technical timing data.
On the latter, Emily Merron, technical producer for Aurora, says: “They are completely new to supertri. It’s been really refreshing to work with them. They’ve been really eager and really they want to know more about what we need and what we want to work with and what we want to develop.”
However, she adds on working with a new partner for the backbone of the graphics: “But it does bring that extra layer of worry and anticipation before you come into an event; we had a few hiccups in the first couple of races, but they fixed them quickly, and I think with the way that it’s going, I just can’t see it getting anything but stronger; they have been working really well with our graphics team, AE Live.”
supertri Toulouse took place on 6 October 2024 in France