Olympics have gap that streaming platform Netflix is trying to fill: Report

Just as Drive to Survive forged a deeper connection between fans and Formula 1 auto racing, the IOC hopes these projects will pique awareness and interest among a new generation of Olympics fans

By Emmanuel Morgan

The four-person crew from Box to Box Films, the production company responsible for the hit Netflix motorsports docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive, has often shot in lavish settings like Monaco and Miami.
 

But one recent morning, it congregated in a far less glamorous spot: a set of flimsy bleachers next to a running track in the Paris suburb of Eaubonne, where it waited about an hour for a practice session to begin.
 

“This is our life,” Warren Smith, a top executive at Box to Box, said of the waiting. It could have been worse: Across town, a second crew was filming a runner having a haircut.
 

The footage from France will eventually be part of the second season of Sprint, a Netflix documentary following the American 100-meter stars Sha’Carri Richardson and Noah Lyles and a dozen or so other track athletes.
 

The series is one of three projects being filmed during these Summer Games as part of a partnership between Netflix and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), a latecomer to the sports-documentary genre that is now an eager participant.
 

Just as Drive to Survive forged a deeper connection between fans and Formula 1 auto racing, the IOC hopes these projects will pique awareness and interest among a new (read: younger) generation of Olympic fans. They include the track series, a gymnastics one called Simone Biles: Rising and one about the US Olympic men’s basketball team.
 

So far, the effort has worked: Both Sprint and Simone Biles: Rising have spent at least two weeks on Netflix’s top-10 most-watched list.
 

“You cannot be telling these stories only every four years and expect to remain relevant,” said Yiannis Exarchos, the chief executive of Olympic Broadcasting Services, the IOC media arm. “You need to be telling them 24/7 and do it in a compelling way.”
 

Through gold medal performances or memorable moments, Olympians become national celebrities overnight during this quadrennial three-week stretch. But after brief morning and late-night victory laps on television back in the United States, the athletes, in sports beyond soccer and basketball, are often forgotten for three years as they compete in far less publicised international events. Americans, at least, shift their focus to the major sports, which have round-the-clock coverage even in the off-seasons, with free agency and manufactured prime-time spectacles.

The IOC’s union with Netflix and its coveted base of 278 million subscribers is its attempt to mimic other sports organisations’ frenetic pace of documentary filmmaking, and a partnership it hopes to replicate with other streaming services. It’s also an exercise for Netflix and production companies to explore unfamiliar sports and their characters.
 

Exarchos, who has worked at Olympic Broadcasting Services for nearly two decades, said this strategy represented a cultural shift. Previously, he said, the industry viewed the four-year gap as an advantage: a period in which to build anticipation for the next Olympic cycle. But engagement on the Olympic social channels and website had noticeably dropped by 2016, he said, and international federations could not compete in promoting their sports. Brandon Riegg, the vice president for unscripted and documentary series at Netflix, said the platform was weary of NBCUniversal’s exclusive domestic broadcast agreement in the United States with the IOC. “We totally respected that, and it never crossed our mind to to engage with them,” he said.
 

Filmmakers have explored the athletic and geopolitical themes of the Olympics for over a century, but the on-demand presence of many of its sports has lagged. More popular sports have pursued streaming dominance amid the decline of linear television.

Fans now crave that format elsewhere. Data from the research division of United Talent Agency, which represents athletes and entertainers, found that 72 per cent of potential Olympics consumers aged 15-45 said they were more interested in behind-the-scenes content from the Paris Games than they were during the Tokyo Games in 2021.