The UCI Track Champions League, a collaboration between Discovery Sports and the UCI cycling association, is back for the second edition of the world’s most popular short track race. This time, however, the best-of-breed competition will be held in neutral.
The competition will begin this month with six fast two-hour races scheduled to be held on Saturday afternoons on consecutive weekends. The system is designed to recreate track cycling and is made easy to connect fans around the world with Sprint and Keirin features for Sprint, and Scratch and Scratch for Endurance competitions. This is the second time of the event, with the beginning of November 2021 confirming the success after months of preparation in the restrictions of Covid.
“Season Two has come very quickly,” said Scott Young, SVP content and production at Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe. “It’s been a very busy and successful year for our company. Discovery Sports creates the ownership and management of content that we can design as a concept to work with sports organizations like the UCI, to convince them to trust us with important properties like cycling. His main focus is to provide live sports experiences for audiences, and to find new ways to engage with audiences who may not come to watch cycling.”
“There was a lot of shock, surprise, surprise and excitement when the first season came out,” he added. “I was in the middle of the field watching the players who have been in this game for a long time, they are very happy with what they have achieved and what they are now. There is no guarantee of the best. “
“We are looking at new ways to satisfy the track racing fans but also to expand the fan base,” said François Ribeiro, president of Discovery Sports. “The material we’re going to deliver this year is exactly what was shown in Season One. It has great quality and efficiency when you experience it in the event, but also on the screen. This year we are pushing the boundaries on the technical side. All the information from the riders – power, intensity, speed, heart rate – not only on the app but also on the LED screen that surrounds the track, so that any spectator or spectator can see how riders. they work with the information provided.”
“The big new thing will be a preview of the metaverse we’ll have in London,” he added.
This ‘all-zone’ VR experience for the final of the European Championship in London is the result of a collaboration between Discovery Games and the technology and entertainment company Infinite Reality (VR).
“We will be the first [as sports] to offer 100% of the broadcast feed we produce in the metaverse. There will be more than 10 TV feeds; this is not only the global feed and the feed on board , even a camera on the UCI referee, a camera on the dance director in the OB van, and a camera on the play caller, to provide a deeper experience and a [higher] level of access to the fans back. They’re going to see content that’s never been available before. We see it as the entirety of what we’re producing online, digital and social media.”
The preview experience can be accessed using an iPad or PC, but Ribeiro said development work is underway to enable the third season next year through VR headsets and similar devices.
“We will be the first [as a game] to offer 100% of the broadcasts we produce in the metaverse”
“This experience will already provide unprecedented opportunities in the sports industry. We have a unique market position of being a TCL promoter, we manage the event system and do the event production, broadcast programming and distribution. We own all the media and commercial rights in the world, so it is entirely up to us to define what we want to include in this meaningful experience and define the rules of the game in terms of permission for each third party.
“Our two main goals are always the same in all of our businesses: improving how you interact with your existing fan base, and how to grow it. We see the metaverse as having the potential to achieve both of these goals. “
“Web 3.0 standards are new to most of us,” he added. “We will be a laboratory for the rest of the group.”
For each round of this year’s UCI Track Champions League, Warner Bros. Discovery’s coverage will begin with a 30-minute preview show as excitement builds ahead of the evening’s action with 30 minutes of research and rider questions surrounding each broadcast after the live bike ride. .
Global coverage will see the events broadcast live on Discovery +, GCN + (world) and the Eurosport app as well as Eurosport channels 1. Warner Bros. Discovery, Quest (UK), Kanal 9 (Sweden), 6’eren (Denmark), Max (Norway) and Kutonen (Finland), will run a slide show after each round while Germany’s free-to-air Eurosport 1 channel will live broadcast of each round.
“Our two main goals are always the same in all of our businesses: improving how you interact with your existing fan base, and how to grow it. We see the metaverse as having the potential to achieve both of these goals. “
“NEP provides the tools of [OB], but the people and the ideas, and the implementation of everything in it,” said Young. “There are 23 cameras that we use for photography. With the addition of a lot of other cameras that we put around [control] and the cameras that are there are doing collaborative content for our stations, which can come back in coverage, which is about 30.
“I don’t think it’s about the number of cameras anymore. It’s about how you can play this game. Sports is the ultimate source of promise for viewing – everything that can be downloaded or streamed on YouTube. The fact that it lives just once is the best thing about games. If you have interesting content, you connect with players and you find new ways to bring new generations through moderation, that’s how you make your game more relevant. “
“If you go back and watch [the footage] from Mallorca in Season One, the loud noise from the crowd when the match started, with the bell ringing, was amazing,” Young said.
“I always pay a lot of attention to sound,” Ribeiro said. “With most sports, I would like to hear more of the sound of the crowd and have a balance with the sound of the commentators. With this crowd, we are in a position to define the sound. We don’t put the microphone on the riders, but we have the mic a lot of people around them, to record what they’re saying, to take conversations between riders of different genders. This [was evident during] the lessons we produced around Season One [Back on Track]. So getting the confidence of The confidence of the players, to be close to them, has proven to be beneficial to our production.”
“We are in an exciting time,” Ribeiro said. “A year ago we were not in lockdown, and ten days before the first meeting in Mallorca was the first time I met the entire 140-strong Track Champions League team. Until then we were working together It’s just on Zoom.”
“There are fewer unknowns in Season Two,” he added. “We have a great field team. We know what to deliver. The biggest satisfaction is seeing the level of cooperation of the riders themselves. They have a better understanding of how we work and what they can expect from the European Championships, for their own benefit, to raise their profile, to earn UCI points, and as part of their Olympic journey. So, we’re definitely less stressed than in Season One, but the excitement is still the same. “
