Archery on TV: Part 2

Archery has had a great year on TV. Chris Wells explains.

Chris Wells talks stats, stats and more stats

Archery is on television. It’s not on every television, nor is it shown as regularly as football or tennis or rugby, but it is very much there.

There’s not much use in comparing it to those other sports, either – because with large differences separating them from archery in terms of situation, finances and worldwide participation, there’s little that can be gained except a general groan of ‘why aren’t we that popular?’

Better, then, to compare to archery’s own situation 12 months ago. The Hyundai Archery World Cup Final in Rome had just finished with strong results on Italy’s Rai network, in France, the USA and in Korea. There were also follow-ups on World Archery’s highlight network, headlined by Eurosport.

One year later, the Hyundai Archery World Cup Final in Samsun had similar local success in Turkey, not least thanks to national interest in budding superstar Mete Gazoz. Live or near- live coverage was also aired in the USA, Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, India and the subcontinent and Latin America – and then followed up with highlights on Rai and Eurosport and the rest of the network.

It’s not a jump to the levels of football or tennis but, across a year in which television coverage of the Hyundai Archery World Cup circuit doubled in hours worldwide, it’s a substantial one.

Lucky 13

Back in an article named ‘The Golden Screen’ in Bow International 123, I posed the question whether archery needed to be on television or not. My answer (although opinions differ) is that the exposure that news content is of exceptional value because it reaches a wide public while live content is less important as long as the footage is available online for the archery audience.

It’s a view that I still hold, although our understanding of what makes a good archery broadcast has progressed. Like many things in a sport that’s on the Olympic programme, the television offering is rooted in archery’s history at the Games. More specifically, the switch from the Grand FITA in 1988 to the head-tohead format used in Barcelona in 1992.

It's not a secret that it was introduced to deliver a television-friendly production, but it’s more than the sudden-death elimination style that makes archery successful at the Games. And archery is quite popular on television during the Olympics – so, why?

Television channels aren’t showing the long sessions lasting two to three hours in full. They’re dipping in and out when one of the 13-minute-long matches is relevant.

During a period in which broadcast is dominated by Olympic sport, each national rights-holding channel picking and choosing what to showcase – and, of course, focusing primarily on nationally relevant athletes –

archery is the perfect length. It’s quick, fitting in the normal gap between adverts on commercial television, it rarely runs off schedule and it’s an easy-to-understand, interesting contest.

The Olympic schedule is slightly different to that at international events. At both London 2012 and Rio 2016, the broadcast schedule ran as follows: team eliminations and finals on the first two days, then three days of early individual finals, finishing with two days of individual eliminations and finals.

Even those days with individual finals consist of up to 16 matches: eight in the thirdround eliminations in the morning, and then four quarterfinals, two semifinals and medal matches in the afternoon.

Hyundai Archery World Cup stages and the World Archery Championships have two days of televised finals, one recurve and one compound. A morning session has two hours of team finals and an afternoon consists of two-and-a-half hours of mixed team and individual finals. It’s all bronze and gold medal matches and it applies to the same principle as the Olympics. It’s the perfect collection of 13-minute matches for a broadcaster to easily dip in and out of.

But without the backbone of broadcasting that is the Olympic Games, with so many other sports and content filling the airtime, those 13-minute matches become a harder sell. There’s less flexibility in the scheduling with regular programming, less open-ended hours to fill and simply less people interested in flicking on their television to watch whatever sporting success their nation is having.

There’ll always be the archery audience – and that’s why streaming and retaining digital rights remains central. Understanding that it’s unlikely that most broadcasters will show the full live sessions from events is also important, because then efforts can be focused on offering alternatives. Which is why, in 2018, progress was made with archery’s exposure on television.

Products

Delayed highlights: World Archery signed a significant broadcast deal with NBC at the start of 2017, with the US channel adding coverage of international events to its stable of sports in time for the launch of its own branded Olympic Channel.

NBC has consistently continued to show archery since – but its own variation on the

"Television channels aren’t all showing the long sessions... They’re Usually diping in and out when one of the 13-minute-long matches is relevant."

programme you might see on the Youtube live stream. Instead, the US broadcaster picks three to seven matches to put into its own one- or two-hour highlights show.

It’s technically pretty easy and, while it means that there are then decisions made about what and what not to include, allows them to build whatever archery television show they want into their own schedule. And it’s an approach that’s not unique to the US.

Highlights: Mexico is a country that is passionate for sport. And, since Aida Roman and Mariana Avitia’s medal-winning performances at London 2012, a country that’s been passionate about archery.

The Archery World Cup Final in 2015 and World Archery Championships in 2017 had both incredible on-venue crowds and strong national coverage. That’s why, in 2018, World Archery launched a Spanish-language version of its highlights show, in an effort to consolidate interest in the market. One Mexican network showed 26 hours of archery on television in 2018.

Digital first: For the first time, the BBC – via its online and red button service – showed archery in 2018, broadcasting a finals match from the fourth stage of the 2018 Hyundai Archery World Cup in Berlin and footage of the European Archery Championships. With the world of television changing and more opportunities with digital platforms, archery

is in the right place to take advantage of the opportunites available.

The future

There have been other things that have helped archery take great steps forward. A change to the schedule of the Hyundai Archery World Cup Final, moving to the Olympic-style of quarterfinals to final for each of the four sessions, brought huge benefit.

Before, all quarterfinals took place in the morning and then medal matches in the afternoon – with genders mixed – which meant that a television station didn’t know whether they would need the footage in the second session or not. It’s the kind of uncertainty that doesn’t fit well with TV scheduling.

The change made things clearer and easier to explain, which is what all of this comes down to and will always make the difference for a more niche sport like archery. Getting the sport on television in parts of the world that do not have overwhelming support – like Korea, for example, where one news clip from the 2018 Hyundai Archery World Cup was seen by around 15% of the adult population – is about making things easy. The more the content is available in formats that are easy to use, easy to understand and easy to access, the more television stations will show it.

That’s really the same as the sport itself. The easier archery is to access, to understand and to participate in, the more people will do the sport. The two go hand-in-hand; it’s just a slightly different audience.