Live From World Athletics Championships: Production Head Alastair Waddington Talks Complexity and Collaboration

Live from Budapest: World Athletics Productions head Alastair Waddington talks complexity and collaboration By Heather McLean

Friday, August 25, 2023 - 12:02

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The purpose-built National Athletics Centre stadium is hosting the spectacular that is the World Athletic Championships between 19 to 27 August in the heart of Budapest

Nestled on the banks of the Danube in the centre of Budapest, the purpose-built National Athletics Centre stadium is hosting the spectacular that is the World Athletic Championships between 19 to 27 August. This event is laying down the lines for the best athletes in the world to compete in Paris next year at the Olympics. Coverage of the Championships is produced by World Athletics Productions, a joint venture between the World Athletics governing body and ITN.

In the humid 34 degree heat of Budapest this week, SVG Europe spoke to director of ITN Sport and managing director of World Athletics Productions, Alastair Waddington, about the intricacies of running this massive broadcast in an air conditioned, beautifully constructed double story portacabin settled in the TV compound outside the stadium.

Stadium and Compound Fly Through

The foundations for what you see here were laid 12 months ago, when we sat in front of all the rights holders and said, here are our production plans at the World Broadcaster Meeting. We'd been coming here for some time before that to develop production and camera plans down to the last detail.

Servicing rights holders is a really, really important part of what we do. The product has got more and more sophisticated but also more and more end user friendly. So the old days of the host broadcaster putting their cameras up around the stadium and just shooting everything wide and then leaving it to the right holders to do their unilateral add-ons [are gone]. We've really focused on making that process as easy for the rights holders as possible.

There are a lot of rights holders here because of the time difference. European broadcasters are big supporters of athletics and the time zone in Doha and Oregon was much more challenging for them. And so as World Athletics is back in Europe, they're here in numbers, and we just see it as our role to make their job as easy as possible. And the better we do and the more they take of our content the more we take that as a compliment.

Complicated sport

Producing athletics at this level is hugely complicated. There's a lot going on in the stadium at the same time, and the competition timetable dictates how many galleries we need based on concurrency. So during the decathlon or the heptathlon there might be a whole lot of disciplines going on while there's also main events on the track, which is why we have so many control rooms.

The marathons and race walks sort of take of themselves. It's more of a traditional one-day OB. It's two trucks up at Heroes' Square. There's a small compound, trucks, production office, and catering tent. Kind of separate, but very much part of the whole.

Our job is to try and be something to everyone, and sometimes that's quite a tough balancing act

Down here [at the TV compound at the stadium] we have nine galleries and everything feeds into the integrated gallery, which produces the world feed. Everything on the track has its own gallery, and that's directed by West Gillett, who you will know from Formula E and Xtreme E. He's a specialist in directing sports which go around in circles quickly!

Then we have horizontal jumps, vertical jumps, shot puts and long throws, and [each of those has] an A and B gallery to cover both qualifying pools in those events. Take the high jump for instance, there are two beds running simultaneously, and we have to cover them seamlessly as one event, although each has its own mini-OB.

Each control room has its own team; producer, a director, vision mixer, and then EVS operators. They operate as a team and they eat, live and drink as a team as well, so we try to put them together in the same hotel. We're split across five hotels here, but you are always with your teammates. That works really well because they're cohesive units, but also there's a little bit of friendly competition between them too; one team gets a world record and everybody else wants a world record; of course they can't do anything about it but it adds a little spice to the banter in the bar afterwards!

Alastair Waddington, director of ITN Sport and managing director of World Athletics Productions, hard at work in his office in the TV compound in Budapest

Feeding the machine

This all then feeds up into the integrated feed which is effectively an aggregator. The integrated feed can be broadcast as you if the rights holder is on site you can take the whole thing and put it on TV straight away. It's got commentary on it, English commentary. Some broadcasters sit across the integrated a lot and essentially put all our coverage to air.

Or, in some cases NBC for instance they cut their own show. They take all our feeds, they take them all back to Stanford, Connecticut, and they cut their own show in their remote gallery. Then it's all points in between, really. Because of its remote production, NBC has a couple of commentators and a couple of people in the mix zone, and that's it, whereas TBS have got 200 people here. Each broadcaster is in a different stage of their evolution towards remote production, and we try to cater for them all.

Because we run the feeds, we know that any broadcaster could take any feed at any time, so there's no cameras upside down or people moving between [the camera and the athletes]; they're all live the whole time.

The broadcasters make a decision before they get here about which feeds they're going to take, and then in

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