Yiannis Exarchos, the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), recently discussed a range of topics surrounding how increasing Olympic gender parity on the field of play is reflected in the coverage of the Games.
Exarchos, speaking in advance of Saturday’s International Women’s Day, also delved into the state of women in sports broadcasting and the efforts OBS is making to create a more inclusive environment in the industry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
NBCSports.com: Can you give an overview of what OBS does?
Exarchos: OBS is the host broadcaster of the Olympic Games. What this means is that we have the responsibility to provide very high quality coverage of every single competition of the Olympic Games and the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. In addition to that, as a host broadcaster, we have another very important function, which is to assist all the media rights holding broadcasters from around the world to tailor this coverage because obviously in different parts of the world — more than 240 territories around the world — the interest is not for the same athletes or for the same sports in every country.
NBCSports.com: How is gender parity on the field of play reflected in that coverage?
Exarchos: It’s worthwhile reminding ourselves that Paris were the very first Olympic Games where you had the same number of women and men athletes participating (in number of designated quota spots). This is an achievement that took many, many decades, but it’s also quite a rare achievement for a major international sports event.
Milano Cortina will be the Winter Olympics with the highest participation of women ever. It’s going to be 47% (women’s athlete quota spots), so we are very, very close to gender parity in terms of participation there.
Beyond that, there are several other things that we are doing that really help showcase women’s sports. First of all, in the way we work with the scheduling that we manage and we look into providing opportunities that women’s sports are presented exactly with the same opportunities as men’s sports. Traditionally, in the past, for example, big team sports, the finals of men were always the last event, somehow signifying that it is the climax. That’s not the case. Now we distribute them 50/50. In Milano Cortina, on the last Sunday, you will have the men’s hockey final, but you will also have the women’s curling final.
It’s exactly the same production standards, the same number of cameras, the same number of special equipment and so on (for women’s and men’s events). It’s very important that, subconsciously, everybody has in their mind that women’s sports events are equally elevated as men’s sports events.
Exarchos: Another important area that we have seen as a challenge historically is commentary. OBS is offering a commentary for most events in English. This is where we’re making a very sustained effort to increase the number of women commentators because we believe that it’s super important for the audience to feel that it’s equally natural to have a woman commentating a sporting event as a man, which is the traditional stereotype.
The problem that we have faced is that actually there were very few women with which had been trained or which were professionally commentating in many of the Olympic sports. So what we have started doing is we have created special programs, and we’re currently running one of them, in order to train women primarily and a priority of ex-Olympic athletes in order to start a career as commentators.
This has contributed to a very significant increase in the percentage of women that do commentary for us. Ultimately we want for every single sport to have a man and a woman commentating.
We have developed a very, very detailed guide for portrayal of athletes, and those are quite detailed guidelines to our operators, to our directors, to our producers, to our camera operators, to our commentators, about how to handle both genders in absolutely equal terms for their sporting prowess rather than emphasizing their gender.
We have distributed them to broadcasters, and we invite them. We do not force them, but we invite them also to follow them. I think many of them have found them very, very useful. We integrate ideas from them, and we keep on updating, because for us, it’s very, very important that the whole narrative, the way we shoot, the way we produce, the way we tell stories, is really gender balanced.
Exarchos: Now, specifically about the work that we do behind the cameras, there are two areas where we continue having challenges.
We cannot find sufficient numbers of women as camera operators. The other area that suffers a lot is the area of engineering and technical services. This is the very well known phenomenon of STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. Even in the most progressed and sophisticated societies, you continue having this discrepancy. You don’t have an equal number of women graduating from the universities, from the schools, and you don’t have them in the industry.
So what we have been trying to do — we initiated in Paris for the first case — a program which is called Framing the Future. We trained 70 young women camera operators, and we used 40% of them in the Games of Paris. Some of them we will also use in Milano Cortina.
We’ll continue this program also for Milano Cortina in the area of engineering. We created a new program, which is called Engineering the Future, which is designed for young women engineers who have just graduated from universities or are still very, very young in the industry. We have them to work with us at least six months as interns within OBS, work with us in the Games in order to kick start their careers.
Within six, seven months, they would have worked with an organization that does the largest production in the world. They’re working in areas like AI, cloud architecture, virtualization, broadcasting, software-based broadcasting, I mean, the very cutting edge of broadcasting today.
It’s interesting to note also that in other areas, actually, the gender balance has gone the other way around. We have in every venue broadcast training managers. They are the bosses of the venue. In Paris, two-thirds of them were women in the broadcast operation center in the International Broadcast Center where we run the operation out of for 24 hours a day. More than 50% of the managers operating there are women. You have all the departments of ops represented by experienced people who give solutions immediately to any problem. More than half of them are women. Our head of planning and operations of the Games was just appointed (Lavinia Marafante).
It is true that our industry is, unfortunately, one of the ones which is less balanced. So we feel that, together with everything else we do for the Games and the opportunity that the Games represent in promoting values, it’s really worthwhile the effort leading the way into a more gender-balanced sports broadcasting, sports media industry.
NBCSports.com: If you are talking to rights holding broadcasters, a group from around the world about Milan Cortina, and you want to emphasize one or two things about continuing to build on the visibility of women’s sport, what advice would you give after seeing how far things have come in recent Games to move forward?
Exarchos: One year ago, we did our first big broadcaster meeting in Cortina with all the broadcasters. We presented our plans for the Games, and we listened to them — what they would need, what ideas they would have.
In last year’s meeting, we devoted a significant amount of time, and we had as a specific subject in the agenda, to present what we are doing in terms of gender equality and promotion of that in the work that we do. We share that with them. Also, we explain the updated guidelines. We do not force them to do anything. We just give them ideas about how we go about doing that. And also, we encourage them to come back to us with ideas that they may have, because among them are some of the most responsible and sophisticated media entities in the world. They face the problem. They face it responsibly.
We are not a regulatory body. We’re a production company. Our job is not to force anyone to do anything, but it is our job to share with them what we do in the context of the special occasion that is the Olympics. You don’t have another sporting event where half of athletes are women. And you don’t have another media event — I wouldn’t just say sport event — where 52% of the audience is women. In the Olympics, the majority of the audience is women.
NBCSports.com: You mentioned that those rights holding broadcasters and team leaders have opportunities to submit their ideas or thoughts to you. Is there any particularly interesting ones that you are able to share, or maybe a similar thought or idea that you’re getting from multiple groups that seems to be a common thread?
Exarchos: I think that the common thread is the effort that the most responsible organizations are doing to embed more women in high-end operations. You can start having a young woman edit for a news story and so on. It’s OK, but how do we get from that into having a woman directing the final of a major sporting event? This is what you want to achieve, and therefore you need to start introducing and giving them the opportunity to be side by side in such a production with a director, and at some point giving them the opportunity to actually do it.
Then these women become accelerators, because they become icons and symbols for everybody else. It becomes normal. By normalizing that and making it more acceptable, I think, helps a lot.
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