At home on the road

At home on the road

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It is 7am on Saturday 6th April and Stefano Bernabino is at the office early. It is the day before the Paris-Roubaix one-day cycling race,

one of the early-season classics and a landmark on the annual cycling calendar, and Bernabino is heading up Eurosport’s production of the event.

The 39-year-old Italian has been at Eurosport for nigh on a decade and a half, leading the broadcaster’s soccer and cycling output for much of it. He had stayed late at Eurosport headquarters on Friday evening to oversee the editing and packaging process of some footage his team had captured of the race favourite, Fabian Cancellara, falling on a training ride. Nevertheless, on this grey and quiet April morning, he is pacing with excitement, displaying neither physical fatigue nor the apathy that sometimes comes from knowing one’s job inside out. Paris-Roubaix is one of the big ones, and Bernabino can’t wait to get stuck into it.

Later that day, the rider presentation will take place in Compiegne, a pretty town some 60km north of Paris that has hosted the start of Paris-Roubaix, confounding the race’s name in the process, since 1968. Bernabino and his team need to be there, but first they have arranged to film a piece on one of the cobbled sections of the race route. Hence the early start.

Professional cyclists spend hours in the saddle every day, out in the fresh air putting kilometre after kilometre into their legs whether racing or training, but it’s easy to overlook the amount of driving involved in the organisation and production of cycling events. While the teams have spent the week leading up to the race on reconnaissance rides on sections of the route, the Eurosport team have been trailing them by car. The 100 kilometres or so they have to drive to the

famous Trouée d’Arenberg this morning will turn into thousands by the end of the race, more, in fact, than at many of the other races they cover since the route is close enough to Paris to come back to Eurosport HQ every evening to process the day’s footage.

Eurosport will be broadcasting the race in 56 European countries and territories, and across 16 in Asia through its Eurosport Asia platform. The live broadcast on the Sunday will air for around four hours, while news clips in the build-up to the race will run throughout the preceding week.

ASO, the organiser of the Tour de France, runs the event and has licensed host broadcasting rights to France Télévisions, who both air the race on French terrestrial TV and produce an international feed. ASO has sold that feed to the European Broadcasting Union, which in turn has sold it to Eurosport.

Because it is not producing the event, simply covering it, Eurosport’s mandate is quite simple: take the international feed and customise it with editorial extras.

Earlier in the week, Eurosport’s director of broadcasting and programmes Julien Bergeaud and his director of acquisitions Laurent Prud’homme sat down to explain the group’s strategy with cycling.

“Cycling today is clearly a pillar of the Eurosport offer,” says Bergeaud. “Number one we have winter sports, number two we have tennis, and then I

would say that cycling is number three and very close with tennis.”

Bergeaud and Prud’homme confirm that cycling also occupies third spot in terms of driving commercial revenue – advertising and subscriptions – for Eurosport, and a similar position in Prud’homme’s acquisition budget.

With over 200 days of cycling on offer in 2013, Eurosport is billing itself as the home of cycling and it’s clearly a position that both Bergeaud and Prud’homme are proud of. Nevertheless, with that much content to put out, the budget can’t stretch to treating all 200 days of cycling the same editorially.

At Paris-Roubaix, Bernabino is using one ENG crew consisting of video journalist Vincent, professional cyclist-turned-cameraman Pierre-Henri, and an editor.

Vincent and his team have been shooting since Tuesday, previewing the new sections of the parcours, interviewing key figures from ASO, and tracking and speaking to the teams as they prepare for the race. Those pieces go into news clips and go out as daily teaser features for the race at the end of Eurosport’s coverage of the less-renowned Tour of the Basque Country, which runs in the week preceding Paris-Roubaix.

Eurosport has been covering cycling for 20 years and the relationships it has built with figures inside the sport are invaluable for gaining the kind of access that elevates the broadcaster above its competitors.

With over 200 days of cycling coverage this year, pan-European broadcaster Eurosport is calling itself the ‘home of cycling’ in 2013. But its offering is not simply quantitative. Shadowing the team as they cover the Paris-Roubaix one-day race, it is clear the broadcaster’s involvement reaches to the fibre of the sport itself.

At home on the road

By James Emmett. Photographs by Graham Fudger.

“We need to customise here at Roubaix but we don’t want to do too much to detract from the race.”

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In the week leading up to the race, Cancellara’s fall on the cobbles has been the single biggest talking point. Vincent’s footage of the incident – taken with a GoPro camera mounted to the bonnet of a team car – was beamed around the world, but he wouldn’t have got it had his relationship with Cancellara’s Radioshack team not been what it is.

“We have a lot of different cycling races,” explains Prud’homme. “For some we are exclusive, for others, like Paris-Roubaix, we act as a complementary channel. I think people will watch Paris-Roubaix on Eurosport because they are looking for expert commentaries; they like

the way we treat the race because we have very good pundits and a good name.”

In many of the territories to which Eurosport broadcasts, a race as big as Paris-Roubaix will also be available on a free-to-air channel. Because of that, Eurosport’s positioning as the home of cycling is crucial. To achieve the audience figures that Bergeaud has targeted, Eurosport needs to make cycling fans feel that its coverage goes deeper than what’s available elsewhere. Customisation, therefore, is key.

Ultimately, it is Bernabino’s job to take the feed from the race and add as much value as he can, delivering an access to

the mechanics of the race that none of Eurosport’s competitors can.

“What’s happening at Roubaix,” explains Bernabino, “is the first level of customisation. The most basic.” Eurosport’s coverage of the Tour de France, which will celebrate its centenary edition this year, is at another level. During that, there are two crews at the start of each stage doing interviews with as many people as they can get their hands on. Eurosport’s live shows during the Tour make use of three of its own cameras at the finish as well as its own production truck.

“We need to customise here at

Fabian Cancellara crosses the line in the old Roubaix velodrome in front of the France Télévisions cameras providing the international broadcast feed


Eurosport HQ is an unassuming building in Issy-les-Moulineaux in the Big Media region of

Paris, to the south-west of the city, just inside the encircling Périphérique. Most media companies moved en masse here around the late 1990s. The headquarters of TF1, Canal Plus, and ASO are all nearby.

Set over seven floors, Eurosport HQ houses between 500 and 600 people. The first two floors are dedicated to production.

Available in 59 countries across Europe, and with offices in almost as many, Eurosport has commentary booths and audio mixing facilities dotted all over the place, but the two big offices capable of full-scale production are the HQ in Paris and the British Eurosport headquarters in Feltham. For Paris-Roubaix, the Eurosport production is done in Paris.

Eurosport takes its own audio feed from Harmon and Kelly via ISDN, but the international video feed from France Télévisions. That feed could come in via satellite or fibre link to the traffic room, the first port of call for the 50,000 hours of programming that Eurosport receives each year. In the traffic room, the feed is verified as being in the correct video and audio format and then transferred to the recording facility next door, where it will be stored in HD and in 50 megabits per second (Mbps), and to one of the building’s eight master control rooms (MCR). Every time Eurosport wants to customise a signal for a particular channel in a particular territory, it needs to open up an MCR.

The Paris-Roubaix feed goes to the Eurosport International MCR, the largest facility in terms of households served. The clean feed is distributed from the MCR to Eurosport’s 14 production offices across Europe, from the Nordics in the north to Turkey in the south, and from Portugal in the west to Russia in the east. The clean feed is accompanied only by ambient sound and a time code. Commentators across the 14 offices make their commentaries, read their scripted interviews and take instruction from the director back at the MCR. Audio

technicians in the local offices mix the commentary with the ambient sound from the clean feed, and that mix is then sent back to the MCR via fibre where it will then be combined with the picture and dressed up with Eurosport graphics before being distributed to the majority of countries across Europe via the Hot Bird satellite, space on which Eurosport rents from Eutelsat. The time it takes to get the signal from the traffic room, send it to the local offices, get it back with commentary, add graphics and send it on its way is just under two seconds.

The mechanics of a pan-European broadcast

Eurosport editors prepare footage of Cancellara’s ill-fated training ride for use in daily news clips

The Eurosport International master control room (MCR), the broadcaster’s global technical hub

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Roubaix,” Bernabino continues, “but we don’t want to do too much to detract from the race.”

Snippets from the week, as well as a reel of rider and team manager interviews gathered at the team presentation, will all be edited down and packaged up ready to be employed, if needed, during the race itself. Depending on the race situation,

Eurosport could mix in a split-screen interview every ten minutes, or every half an hour. For other races, they would normally include live phone interviews with team managers travelling behind the race in cars, too, but Paris-Roubaix is always such an incident-packed affair that that particular editorial flourish is not necessary here.

The main Eurosport International signal for Paris-Roubaix comes with 16 different audio feeds and Bernabino explains that, because of that scope of languages, they are in a unique situation. All the interviews are transcribed and then scripted for the various Eurosport commentary teams dotted across the continent. Such a process could easily


become complex, and the need to keep it simple is paramount. During the live race coverage, the director makes sure to announce to commentators during the ad breaks what’s coming up in the next section – in the parcours, in the race situation and in terms of editorial extras.

Customisation of an international sports feed normally means a focus on riders from a particular country, but with Eurosport’s breadth of distribution, Bernabino and his team also need to be wary of national bias.

When it comes to adding value to a cycling broadcast there are few better decisions than employing the third most successful cyclist of all time as a co-commentator. It is he that Bernabino and Eurosport’s long-time lead cycling commentator David Harmon are driving from Paris to the Arenberg forest to meet on Saturday morning.

Known as the ‘Hell of the North’ on account of the bleak surrounding landscape and the historically harsh economic conditions, at 254.5km

long with 52 kilometres of those over cobblestones, Paris-Roubaix is also perhaps the most gruelling race in cycling. First held in 1896, it is as soaked in history as its competitors invariably end up caked in mud. It takes a special kind of masochism to enjoy riding it, and a ruthless indifference to pain to end up being awarded the cobblestone trophy of the winner.

Irishman Sean Kelly is known as ‘Mr Paris-Nice’ in the cycling world on account of his seven overall wins in the race of that name during the 1980s. He is also one of a very select group of riders to have won Paris-Roubaix twice.

Kelly generally works two grand tours and a handful of monuments for Eurosport each year. He combines that role with the management of his own second-tier professional cycling team.

When he arrives at the Trouée d’Arenberg in his team car, clad in his team’s lycra, the slap on the back he immediately receives from Harmon reveals the strength of their relationship.

The team has gathered at the Arenberg in order for Kelly to shoot a piece to camera as he rides the cobbles. As he decreases the pressure of the tyres on his feather-light bike – a far more sophisticated piece of equipment than what he used to win the race in 1984 and 1986 – a mob of well-wishers surrounds him. He is worshipped in this part of the world.

He rides thrice through the woods. Once to do a piece to camera as Pierre-Henri rides ahead of him on a motorbike, the other to do a piece with a GoPro portable camera attached to his bike, and another because the GoPro camera stand has broken. Pieces will be used on the Roi de Pedales studio cycling show on French Eurosport that evening and spliced, with the rest of the footage Vincent’s crew has gathered, into the live coverage on Sunday.

Kelly is understated, authoritative, patient and game. Harmon explains that filming with Eurosport once in the Alps during a Tour de France, a crew member presented Kelly with a 100-year-old bike, which he duly rode all the way up the mountain.

Bernabino explains the next day that the team back at HQ had a laugh reviewing the rushes from the morning’s filming in the Arenberg when they found that Kelly had forgotten to remove the GoPro camera from his helmet as he trudged off into the woods to relieve himself. It wouldn’t have bothered the Irishman a jot.

Kelly describes how the best way to go across the cobbles is as fast as you can, so you float across the top, and if possible, along the ever so slightly flatter ridge in the middle, the ‘donkey’s back’. If you grip too hard, he explains, the constant battering of the cobbles will make your hands freeze in their curled position and you won’t be able to open them for a week. However you take the cobbles, he says, you will not be able to pee properly for days.

With time getting on, Bernabino shouts “cut”, claps Kelly on the back and gets back in the car to head to the team presentations.

The picturesque Place du Palais in Compiegne is crammed. Gigantic team buses line the one road leading in and team press officers hand out posters and photographs to grease their riders’ paths

The riders gather in Compiegne for the start of the 2013 edition of the Paris-Roubaix one-day race


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through the crowds.Bernabino radiates bonhomie as

he backslaps and cheek-kisses his way through the cycling circus, switching effortlessly from Italian to English to French. Vincent, a camera, and a Eurosport-branded microphone are his unflinching companions.

Having tracked down the ten key favourites for the race for interviews, as well as one or two team managers, it’s back to Paris with the tapes. Sylvain Barreau is the director for the race, although Bernabino would normally take that role, and he will be in charge of cutting to ad breaks and splicing in pre-recorded material on the day. He will have looked at the parcours, along with Bernabino, to determine roughly where those ad breaks should come.

Eurosport ad breaks vary in length, but one minute and 20 seconds is the average. Paris-Roubaix is one of the more difficult cycling races to schedule breaks in, but

Bernabino and Barreau will stick to their golden rules throughout: a maximum of three breaks per hour, with no break whatever in the last hour.

Back at HQ, Barreau and an editor go through the rushes, editing the interviews and preparing for the live show from around six until midnight.

With most of the key material already in the bag, there is less to do when Bernabino and the team return to gloriously sunny Compiegne on race day to see the 198 competing riders off on their journey through a Somme landscape so redolent with history.

As the riders pull away and the snake of branded vehicles begins to follow, there is time for a coffee and a croissant as the accoutrements of a race departure are rapidly packed away for another year. The race starts at 10.30, but ASO and France Télévisions do not provide their broadcasters with pictures until 13.00, when Eurosport is due to go live.

Bernabino scrutinises L’Equipe, although he hardly needs to. He knows the route like the back of his hand already. A long phone call to Barreau back at HQ, confirming when to go to the initial ad breaks, predicting various race situations, and then it’s off on the long drive to the velodrome in Roubaix, the finish of the race since its foundation and a venue as tattered as it is renowned.

In the car, Bernabino discusses his favourites for the race. He picks Cancellara but bemoans the fact that, since Paris-Roubaix is a World Tour race – one of the premier events on the calendar as defined by world cycling’s governing body, the UCI – the riders will be allowed to use race radios, nullifying, as he sees it, much of the potential for animated racing.

The practice is polarising in cycling, but Bernabino speaks for most broadcasters with his criticism. “We don’t want robots on the bike,” he says. “We want

Eurosport journalists collect ten rider interviews for use in the live race programme

Eurosport International co-commentator Sean Kelly delivers a piece to camera on the famous Arenberg cobbles on the eve of a race he won twice at the peak of his cycling career in the 1980s


We increase the number of viewers when we have sport on a live basis,” explains

Eurosport’s head of acquisitions Laurent Prud’homme. 45 per cent of Eurosport’s output is live, a figure which takes some maintaining. “The good thing about cycling is it provides us with live content during the day.”

Founded in 1989, Eurosport made its first venture into cycling just a few years later. The broadcaster has been covering the Tour de France for 20 years and the Giro d’Italia for almost as long. When Eurosport calls itself the home of cycling, it not only means it shows the most, but that it also knows the most about the sport. “We do see the relationship with the sport as a long-term partnership,” says Heather Bowler, global communications director for the Eurosport group. “We have a role; we’re number one a broadcaster, but we feel we have a role in the development of a sport and its popularity. It’s less of a slogan, and more of a posture and an attitude and an approach to cycling. We feel we have a very fundamental role in marketing and promoting the events.”

“The only thing I’m missing, to be perfectly honest, is that I don’t have a big ambassador, a big consultant to go deeper, like I have in tennis, for example, with Mats Wilander, or in athletics with Maurice Greene, or in swimming with Pieter van den Hoogenband,” says Julien Bergeaud, Eurosport’s head of broadcasting and programmes. “I think we are missing one big face. That’s my objective: to find that for cycling.”

Cycling has seemingly lurched from one controversy to another over the last decade, but Eurosport has stuck with the sport, its single biggest media partner with deals in place with myriad race organisers and rights holders. “Some time ago German national TV decided to quit the Tour de France,” says Bergeaud by way of example. “At that point, just to go back on this partnership concept that we have built with the federations and organisers, we

have stayed with our partners at ASO and the Tour de France and we are like an insurance for them to still exist in a big country like Germany. We are also quite happy because for our ratings it was good to be exclusive for a couple of weeks. But as we said, cycling is a sport we believe in. Even if there are all these stories at the moment, we still believe in cycling as a sport that can be clean. They are taking the necessary measures so we support them.”

Bergeaud is happy to admit that he is actively pushing Prud’homme to go out into the market to secure the broadcaster more cycling events. This year, Eurosport has wall-to-wall cycling from the beginning of March to the end of July, and plenty more outside that period. The three grand tours of France, Italy and Spain are joined by most of the other World Tour races, which include many of the prestigious one-day monuments like Paris-Roubaix. And

while Eurosport will not be showing the UCI World Championships this year, the loss of those rights opened up opportunities elsewhere. “Unfortunately the UCI had very high expectations for their world championships – financial expectations,” explains Prud’homme. “We can understand this; when people are facing a complicated economic situation, sometimes they want to get the money immediately and we were not inclined to match their expectations. With the budget dedicated to the UCI World Championships, we got the rights for the Four Days of Dunkirk, or the Three Days of De Panne, or the Grand Prix Plouay; new races, exclusive, which provide us with live content – maybe more than what the UCI World Championships could provide us with. So we have to adapt ourselves to new situations. And it’s a new opportunity for us and we were able to increase the number of races within our portfolio.”

How to build a home for a sport

“ Eurosport’s Julien Bergeaud and Laurent Prud’homme

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intelligent people who have personalities and can make decisions for themselves.”

Team managers, he continues, “shouldn’t be able to play PlayStation with the riders.” He does concede that it would be fantastic to have a rider miked up for in-race interviews with Eurosport, although the chances of that happening are slim.

The wider commercial battleground in world cycling is centred on the scrap for broadcast monies. In short, the teams don’t receive any. As such they are becoming more and more protective of their perceived rights.

Bernabino bemoans the shift in attitude within the teams that has seen the practice of filming within team cars during races dry up.

He recalls one of his favourite moments in his cycling broadcast career: French Cofidis rider David Moncoutié’s emotional stage win in the Tour de France on Bastille Day in 2005. Bernabino was riding in the team car, filming as Moncoutié’s team manager blubbed with joy. The footage, he says, was some of the best he’s ever taken. He was even crying himself.

“But now, increasingly, the teams argue they own that footage and demand a fee for it.”

In the vast press room at the brand new velodrome in Roubaix that sits opposite the more famous one it has all but replaced, Bernabino is greeted warmly by Julien Goupil, who, as media director at ASO, is Eurosport’s point man on the race.

Goupil has arrived straight from the finish line of the Paris Marathon, which ASO has also organised that day, and for which in fact France Télévisions has also provided the host broadcast.

“It’s a busy day for us,” Goupil explains as Bernabino heads off to the commentary tribune in the old velodrome. “First the Paris Marathon, and then Paris-Roubaix. Basically I would say that Paris-Roubaix is the equivalent of a mountain stage of the Tour de France. All the means are quite the same as on the Tour de France: you have five bikes for images, two bikes for sound, two relay planes and two helicopters.

“Eurosport is one of the main partners of ASO for sure,” he continues. “It’s one of the biggest broadcasters in cycling; they broadcast almost 95 per cent of the cycling races; we work with them not only on cycling but also on motorsports and marathon. So clearly we exchange ideas all over the year. It’s even more than organiser-client. It’s about good personal relationships. We have known Stefano a very long time and he’s a really good guy. At the end of the day our role here at ASO is to put cycling on television as much as we can and get maybe less football, less tennis. Between Eurosport and ASO it has been a very good collaboration. Eurosport is doing a good job and they are very important for cycling.”

Bernabino, meanwhile, has joined the two Eurosport commentary teams – German and English-language – on site in the tribune to watch the final 20 kilometres unfold.

Harmon and Kelly sit with two monitors in front of them, one with the live feed direct from the host broadcaster, and one, complete with Eurosport graphics, a couple of seconds behind, from Eurosport HQ in Paris. Harmon flits effortlessly from the informative and enthusiastic patter of the veteran cycling commentator, to his notes, to his Twitter feed – to which Eurosport directs its audience to get in touch. Eurosport is proud of the fact that many established commentators on national broadcasters across Europe learned their trade in the little booths of Eurosport’s pan-continental commentary empire. Harmon has been happy to stay put, which is a credit to the depth of the broadcaster’s cycling portfolio. If Eurosport is the home of cycling, then Harmon’s is the voice of the head of the household, in the English language at least.

Paris-Roubaix, Harmon explained the previous day, is a highlight for him, but it is perhaps the coldest he gets all season. The commentary position in the finishing velodrome in Roubaix is outside and icy north winds chill the bones. The sun shines on the velodrome, but not on its creaking tribune.

The race finishes, Cancellara taking the victory, but not in the manner that many had expected. He circles the velodrome before collapsing, exhausted and exalting, on the field it encircles.

Bernabino is already there, Vincent by his side and Eurosport-branded microphone hanging casually from his pocket.

Stefano Bernabino (right), Eurosport’s head of cycling, sits with Karsten Migels in the press tribune before heading down to interview winner Cancellara

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At home on the road