ARCHERY: BETTER TOGETHER
Olympic sports must not exist in a vacuum.
Shortly after the archery World Cup event in Berlin this year, the Olympiastadion almost immediately geared back up for another archery event. This was the German national championships, but included as part of a weekend multi-sport event event called ‘Die Finals’ (The Finals). This took annual national championships in ten sports – archery, track cycling, road cycling, athletics, boxing, canoeing, swimming, triathlon, gymnastics and modern pentathlon – and bundled them together into a single event across the capital.
The results were spectacular. The organisers were hoping to sell 70,000 tickets, in the end, 178,000 turned out across the two days. Archery was free to attend – and packed out – but even more importantly, the accumulated viewing figures for the sport topped out at 1.5 million, beaten in the ratings only by athletics and swimming.
Crucially, there was very strong support for the event from two of Germany's largest broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, and a whole year of trails and planning, with each national federation running their own promotions that were marketed under a common umbrella.
Holding an event like this focuses enormous attention on Olympic sport. Indeed, the German national Olympic committee ended up putting in three million euros of funding for Die Finals – and with good reason. In the background, there is a huge goal on the horizon: the possible prize of an Olympic Games in Germany in 2032. The current favoured plan is a multi-city ‘Rhine-ruhr' bid across 13 cities in the north including Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Cologne and Bonn. With 80% of venues already built, it would be the model of a modern and sustainable Games that also minimised the tax burden on any one city. Recent attempts to get Olympic bids in Germany failed at the first hurdle, with local voters, in a referendum, narrowly rejecting bids from Hamburg for 2024 and Munich for 2022. Because of itchy local voters, big public displays of support are now considered vital to serious ongoing bids.
For most of the modern Olympic era, Summer Games were always awarded seven years before the event. In the new era, the IOC are increasingly keen to lock down plans in a world where voters and city governments, particularly in the West, are baulking at the vast costs of hosting the event. Thus, in 2017, eager to maintain the candidacies of both Paris and Los Angeles, an agreement was made that two Summer Games would be awarded simultaneously, for 2024 and 2028.
Now, Olympics can be awarded at any time – for 2032, possibly even as early as the IOC session in Tokyo next year. So it pays to be early and very public. A German bid for 2032 is probably facing the stiffest competition, at the time of writing, from sports-mad Brisbane, Australia.
London 2012 proved the appetite for Olympic sport in the UK, becoming the first (and quite possibly last) Olympics ever to be a complete sellout. Given that, archery in the UK is still reeling from not being included in the Commonwealth Games due to be held in Birmingham in 2022. Many expressed surprise, given the live and TV audience that archery generated in London, but that was almost the definition of a one-off. While the Commonwealth bid was acknowledged to be strong, several of the showcase events in the buildup were more sparsely attended; archery's potential as a live ticket draw outside of major events is more limited.
But a UK version of Die Finals, in a major UK city, with full support from broadcasters and a ‘park’ style ticket which allows access to multiple sports, on paper seems like it could potentially do huge business in the UK. The ratings success of the European Championships, a similar multi-sport, Tv focused event held in Glasgow and Berlin in August 2018, also seemed to prove that bundling Olympic sports together produced network effects far beyond the tallied reach of individual competitions. As with Die Finals, each sport and venue was managed by the relevant federation.
Archery, despite many years of increasing success as an international Olympic sport, is not invincible, and as a live draw it still does not punch above its weight. But it seems clear from recent history that pulling smaller and larger Olympic sports together in a festival atmosphere and allowing the public can take their pick is a powerful strategy for engagement and excitement.