As we near the official opening of the Paris 2024 Olympics, the rooftop of the swanky Hotel Raphael, a stone’s throw from the Arc de Triomphe and the Avenue Champs-Elysée, is a hive of activity.
The space will be home to Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe’s top presenter and commentator talent for the entirety of the games, with the space bannered the WBD House.
With a 360-degree vista on Paris, the terrace enjoys unbroken views on the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and Montmartre and a host of other Parisian landmarks.
Four versatile studios with breath-taking Paris backdrops and three stand-up positions have been cleverly slotted into the space.
The 2024 Paris games mark the first Olympics outing for WBD Sports Europe, and its main content production and broadcasting subsidiary Eurosport, since the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia into WBD in 2022.
Standing in the main corner studio overlooking the Eiffel Tower, which will host much of the UK coverage, WBD Sports Europe SVP Content, Production and Business Operations Scott Young says the rooftop hub will be a “game-changer” for coverage.
In the past, the Eurosport teams caught up with in athletes in ad-hoc venues such as their respective team houses run by their National Olympic Committee (NOC). The Paris space will facilitate in-depth interviews and storytelling, beyond interviews with athletes as they come off the field of play.
“Coming up here gives us landmarks, storytelling opportunities and a home,” says Young. “We’ll continue to work with all the NOCs, but we needed our own home in Paris and a place we could bring people to.”
Under the current IOC agreement, running from 2018 to 2024, WBD is committed to sublicensing a minimum of 200 hours of the summer games and 100 hours of the winter games to free-to-air channels across Europe. WBD holds the multiplatform broadcast rights in Europe to this year’s games in a deal stuck between the International Olympics Committee (IOC) and Discovery in 2015, prior to the merger.
But while free-to-air TV viewers will get a snapshot of the tournament and its events, subscribers to WBD’s streaming services Max, currently available in 25 territories in Europe, and Discovery+ in the UK & Ireland, Italy and Germany, will be able to watch Olympic events of their choice in their entirety on up to 54 simultaneous live streams.
After the locked down summer and winter Olympics of Tokyo and Beijing, the WBD Sports Europe teams are throwing their weight behind the Paris games, the first on European soil for 12 years, seeing it as a turning point for enticing sports spectators on to Max and Discovery+ in the region.
Eurosport will be producing coverage for 47 markets in 19 languages for Max and Discovery+ as well as for linear channels Eurosport 1 and 2, free-to-air channels TV Norge (Norway) and Kanal 5 (Sweden) and the Eurosport website and social media channels. The roof top of the Hotel Raphael will be the beating heart of this push.
Presenters from the CNN team will also be using the rooftop’s stand-up positions, as well as working out of the former WarnerMedia subsidiary’s permanent studio in Paris down the road.
As the operation takes off, there is a babble of languages, as gaggles of presenters and crew rehearse live shots and acquaint themselves with the studio stages. UK sports presenter Reshmin Chowdhury pops by for a recce. On the other side of the roof, CNN International sports presenter Amanda Davies is trying out one of the standing positions.
Alongside Laura Woods, Chowdhury will be one of the main reporters on the UK team, which also features Olympic Gold diving medallist Tom Daley and champion sprinter Iwan Thomas as expert commentators, and seven-time rowing world champion James Cracknell.
Behind-the-scenes shots of Warner Brothers Discovery studios; Laura Woods, Boris Becker, Reshmin Chowdhury and Amanda Davies
Getty Images, Chris Graythen/Getty Images for IOC
There are bespoke teams for 11 markets, also including Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden and a multi-territory unit for Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bulgaria.
Former sports champions among their ranks include German tennis star Boris Becker, compatriot gold medalist gymnast Fabian Hambüchen, Swedish heptathlon star Carolina Kluft and France’s gold medallist cycler and 14-time world champion Arnaud Tournant. Syrian former competitive swimmer Yusra Mardini, whose life story inspired The Swimmers, is also on board for coverage of the Refugee Olympic Athletes team.
“An athlete or VIP guest can hit seven to eight markets by walking across this rooftop, so instead of getting back in the car and going to the next location, they can do UK, Sweden, Italy, Poland, France, Germany and Norway… and then head to the lift,” says Young. “That’s a real superpower.”
The glass-doored lift in question will also play into coverage with plans to light up its interior with the colors of the medals for winners who stop by the WBD House.
Jennifer Bernstein Vice President at CNN Sports, who is also on hand, agrees on the pulling power of the studio space.
“This is the first Olympics for us where as a company, we’re one,” she says. “We really think that there’s a huge upside once the games get going, as athletes realize they can come here to talk to Eurosport, then CNN, the Bleacher Report, and the other affiliates that are here.”
Teams around Paris
Only part of the WBD Sports Europe’s Olympics operation is based at the Hotel Raphael.
Around 420 commentators will be covering the games, some on site at Olympic venues, others from booths in the Eurosports HQ in the southwestern Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux or their home bases outside of France, via live feeds. Production staff are also mainly based elsewhere, either at Issy-les-Moulineaux, the WBD production hub in London or other home bases around Europe.
Young reveals the concept for the WBD House was already being thought about during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. He says the difficult logistics of the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021 and the Beijing winter Olympics in 2022, due to Covid restrictions, led to a sense of disconnect from the athletes.
“Our role is to tell the story of the athletes and the games,” he explains. “OBS [the IOC’s in-house Olympics Broadcasting Services audiovisual unit] provides world class pictures of the competition, but we faced a real barrier, particularly in Beijing, in being able to access the athletes, to tell their story and share that moment, about them winning a personal best or a medal.
“Here, we can dive into the games in more immersive ways, even more than we would have previously, almost to right the imbalance of the previous Olympics.”
Finnish presenter Oona Tolppanen rehearses in one of the standing points of WBD Olympic studios
Chris Graythen/Getty Images for IOC
Young first scouted the Hotel Raphael in October 2021 on the advice of one of Discovery’s in-house hospitality specialists who was handling the VIP program during the Tokyo Olympics.
It ticked all the boxes with views on the main Paris landmarks and being in walking distance of Olympic sites at the Grand Palais, Place de la Concorde, and at a push, the Trocadero and Eiffel Tower.
“I stayed here, sat at a table, had a glass of wine and looked out at the view, and then got a pen and a piece of paper,” says Young. “Of course, that’s an outrageous statement. It took an enormous village to put this together with some very smart engineers and production teams who have worked tirelessly on this for well over two years. There have countless meetings and visits. The hotel has been phenomenal to work with. Their staff has allowed us to crawl over every inch of it.
“On the ground floor there is the technical operation that sends all the signals back. This [the rooftop] is only just one part of it. There’s a whole other level below where all camera operations are on done. On the ground floor are five conference rooms of technology.”
Reeling off figures prepared by his comms team, Young says 78 tons worth of plants and planters were taken off the roof to be replaced by 42 tons of equipment, including a telescopic jib with AR graphic capabilities, which was shipped over from Atlanta on loan from TNT Sports.
Quizzed on whether he thinks the Olympics will help boost subscription numbers for Max and Discovery+, Young says it is already happening but acknowledges bringing audiences over from free-to-air public broadcasters traditionally associated with the coverage of the games such as the BBC in the UK, or France Télévisions in France is tough.
“It’s a challenge to educate audiences how to watch content, irrespective of content and irrespective of the platform,” he says. “The media landscape is quite cluttered. What we need to do is tell the story in the very best possible way with the right storytellers and make it accessible to audiences so they will find it.”
“We’re very confident that the platforms we’ve developed, and particularly Max, are going to put together that environment where you’re enjoying the entertainment content you always love alongside the Olympic Games and vice versa.”
In a separate online media briefing Andrew Georgiou, Warner Bros Discovery‘s President of Sports in EMEA, said Discovery+ and Max provide “equally” good, “if not better,” value for Olympic Games coverage than Europe’s public broadcasters.
Young notes that WBD Sports Europe has also been attempting to reconnect its audiences with the Olympics with bespoke content for over a year, citing productions such as the Eurosport-produced documentary 4 August – An Olympic Odyssey about the history of the games, which premiered on July 3.
In a bid to draw in younger audiences, the company is also making a series of Looney Tunes: Sports Made Simple explainers, fronted by Bugs Bunny, some of which will be shot on the roof Hotel Raphael during the games.
Young is clearly relishing the opportunity of covering the games from Eurosports’ home turf of Europe.
“I’ve talked to my team for years now saying these are our Olympics,” says Young. “They are in Eurosport’s cultural backyard. The time zone makes a big difference for us — for us to be able to create programming in the morning leans into a full day and evening of programming. Paris is absolutely unique, in so many ways.”
Sports event coverage vet Young is already mulling plans for the upcoming Cortina-Milan winter Olympics and the L.A. summer Olympics in 2028, but says it’s too early to give details on plans for the latter.
“We’ll take lots of learnings out of here,” he says. “We certainly won’t replicate what we’re doing here in Los Angeles. We’ll lean back into the time zone and the relevant sports.
“We need to look at how the local organizing committee is going to map out their sports, to see full schedules and when those sports start and stop. We’ll take a lot of decisions off the back of that. Once you know how the Olympics is going to play out, you know what sort of programming and support you need, but we won’t be shipping what’s on this roof to Los Angeles.”
