Welcome to the Wild West of online athletics coverage

Never before has there been so much live athletics on the internet, but actually finding it each week is easier said than done

One of the most common questions we hear whenever we post articles about upcoming events is: “How can I watch it!?”

Surely there has never been so little athletics on mainstream television, yet at the same time an enormous amount is available as live streams on the internet. The problem for many, though, is working out how and where to watch it.

Take last weekend’s events, for example. The Sportsshoes Podium Festival in Leicester and the Laredo 10km in Spain were streamed on YouTube for free. Also on Saturday, the English Schools Cross Country Championships in Pontefract enjoyed brilliant coverage but was behind a paywall via Runnerspace and Vinco Sport costing $12.99/month (or cheaper if you commit to a year).

Similarly, The Ten in San Juan Capistrano, California, was only available via Flotrack for $29.99/month (again, cheaper if you sign up for a year). So if you were a friend or relative of Megan Keith or Paddy Dever and wanted to get up at 4-5am in the UK to watch them race live, you effectively had to pay more than a typical pay-per-view box office fight night from Las Vegas in order to watch one or two 10,000m races.

For me, the Runnerspace/Vinco price for the English Schools was reasonable but the Flotrack subscription costs go beyond what most people could stomach. However, I did cough up and watched it. I’m not related to Keith or Dever either but needed to report on it for AW.

To add insult to injury, The Ten cost only $5 to watch last year via Tracklandia with some of the money going back to the athletes. As one of the parents of the competitors in The Ten told me last weekend: “The sport has shot itself in the foot” by creating such an imposing paywall.

In Flotrack’s defence, their coverage isn’t cheap to produce and they need to make it pay somehow. Also, one of the problems is that modern athletics fans have simply got used to watching a huge amount of coverage for free. What’s more, Flotrack, Runnerspace and Vinco would all point out that they provide coverage of a lot of meetings during the year for the cost of a subscription.

The good news for athletics fans is that at least these meetings were available to watch, albeit at a price. They were hardly the only events streamed either last weekend.

According to an avid poster in the AW online forum who goes under the handle of Lucky Spikes, there were streams for the Rome Marathon, NYC Half, Seoul Marathon, Dudinská 50 race walking event, the White Cross World Cross Country Tour event in Belgrade, the Velocity Fest 14 in Jamaica, the New Taipei City Wan Jin Shi Marathon, Lille International Half Marathon, Vittoria Half Marathon, Los Angeles Marathon and Lisbon Half Marathon. It was not an unusually busy weekend either.

Sometimes these are free streams on YouTube or random websites created by event organisers or national athletics governing bodies. Often they are geo-blocked in certain countries. When it comes to the latter, the more determined and technically-minded athletics fans use a VPN (or virtual private network) to effectively trick the system into thinking they are in a different country. As you can probably gather by this point, older or less technically proficient fans are oblivious to much of the available coverage of their favourite sport.

To add to the confusion, live streams for many events aren’t even publicised until the eve of an event. This has even happened for national championships and other major events, with fans never quite knowing if something is going to be streamed until the last minute.

When it comes to Diamond League and Continental Tour meetings, these are often available for free online but it depends where you live and whether one of your local television channels has purchased the rights. If this happens, you may then have to pay a subscription fee for that channel.

With the internet still relatively in its infancy, the world of online athletics coverage is a bit like the Wild West. It’s disorganised, haphazard and difficult to navigate your way through. In years to come, though, I expect it to iron itself out and we could feasibly end up with a more structured and fan-friendly list of events each week or month, a bit like the typical and general TV guides that we’re all so accustomed to.

World Cross coverage guaranteed

The World Cross Country Champs takes place next week in Belgrade and I can hear you asking already: “How can we watch it!?”

The answer for now is “watch this space” although for viewers in the UK I’d be surprised if BBC don’t show it, albeit on the red button and website.

One thing’s for sure, AW will be there reporting on the action. The last time I was in Belgrade was for the European Cross Country Champs in 2013, where a young Sifan Hassan was among the winners, less than a month after she was declared eligible to represent the Netherlands. Next week the Dutch runner is among the entries for the World Cross, too, with athletes racing in the same Friendship Park on the banks of the Danube.

Regardless of who broadcasts the races, keep an eye on the AW website and social media channels for interviews and reports.

Four years since athletics went into Covid-enforced shutdown

It’s almost four years to the day since the English Schools Cross Country Championships unfolded in slightly surreal circumstances in Sefton Park in Liverpool.

With the Covid pandemic increasingly in the news, the 2020 event tentatively went ahead. As I reported at the time for AW: “Only around half a dozen children were pulled out by nervous parents. Otherwise, county teams travelled from every corner of England to compete and dutifully followed the official advice from organisers to ‘bring soap or hand sanitiser to wash their hands in the toilets on the site’.”

I remember at least three older officials shaking my hand that day before I travelled home nervously on a packed train where a tiny handful of people were wearing masks. I passed Cheltenham en route, where the annual horse racing festival that week was later denounced as a ‘super spreader event’. Relieved to get home, the nation went into lockdown just over a week later and athletics ground to a halt with even the Olympic Games being postponed.

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It also turned out to be one of the last weekly magazines we published before entering a six-month-long Covid-enforced hiatus and then relaunching as a monthly magazine with a beefed up online offering.

Given this, it was great to see the 2024 event last weekend in Pontefract as busy as ever with lots of future Olympians no doubt in action.

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Welcome to the Wild West of online athletics coverage appeared first on AW.