Walk about two metres and you can meet Eurosport’s Swedish-presenting equivalent of Orla and friends (pictured, above). They have the Arc De Triomphe behind them. Keep moving and, as the Sacre Coeur comes into view, you have Eurosport Italy-style, then the Polish, the French, the Germans and the Nordic nations. For good measure, there is even an open-air CNN studio — the US news channel also owned by Warner Bros. Discovery — where presenters Jenn Bernstein and Amanda Davies are preparing to ‘go live’.
And then everything briefly stops and people stand to applaud. Team GB’s Olympic silver medallist Anna Henderson has arrived in a glass lift to the seventh floor to talk about her big moment of glory.
This is the Paris base for WBD’s frankly mind-boggling Olympic operation, a hub from which UK viewers can watch their usual Eurosport channels supplemented by Discovery+ live streaming of every second of every sport over the next two weeks. It is, as they often point out, the only UK platform on which you can do that.
With wider coverage of the 32 Olympic sports beaming out to 47 countries in 19 languages, just one Eurosport day at Paris 2024 is reckoned to be equal in distribution and scale to an entire Fifa World Cup.
Ambitious vision
Scott Young, a vastly-experienced producer and senior vice president at WBD, says that it is the “biggest task I’ve overseen by a long way”. He got the idea for using this particular location after visiting shortly after the Tokyo Games and, over a drink one evening, conceptualising what might be possible. “Many of these great landmarks are venues for the sports, so the backdrop tells part of the story,” he says, admitting that he had no idea at this stage whether it was technically feasible.
Three years later and, after removing 78 tonnes from the roof in a four-day operation that required 340 crane lifts and an incoming 24 trucks of equipment — including a ‘telescopic jib’ that arrived by sea from Atlanta — every day in Paris is proof that, yes, it could be done.
Young won’t reveal the cost of the outlay but says that they are already seeing rapid global growth in viewers including significant ‘ripples’ among UK sports fans. They are again discovering that the BBC’s live offering is now limited to two channels.
Even on the first full day, this meant choosing between the opening morning’s swimming, a Team GB hockey match and the British diving bronze that was being won. France’s historic Antoine Dupont-inspired victory in the rugby sevens also has to be delayed in preference for home medal hopes. The BBC are up front about all of this, acknowledging that they will miss some important moments live, but explaining that they simply cannot afford to buy every sports right.