Dr. José Luis Rojas Torrijos
Associate Professor, Department of Journalism II, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. His research focuses on sports journalism, ethics and stylebooks.
Email: jlrojas@us.es
Twitter: @rojastorrijos
The Paris 2024 Olympics turned out to be a new episode for sports media to cover a wider range of topics than usual, reporting not only about scores, medal tally updates, and athletes’ quotes, but also making the global mega-event much more understandable to audiences who are not so familiar with most sports on the Summer Olympic program. Among those topics of interest that facilitate public discussion around competitions, the intersection of sports practice with science stands out as a very valuable approach for sports journalism to better explain how Olympians perform under extreme pressure or in certain environmental and climate conditions.
Apart from opening ways to disseminate scientific knowledge through their coverage during the Olympics, media outlets seize the opportunity to cultivate sports culture among citizens by reporting about technique, terminology, rules, and competition formats of each discipline on the schedule. To reach this double goal, larger newsrooms make outstanding efforts to support the work of their sports desks and enhance the coverage by involving reporters from different areas and backgrounds, as well as professionals from photography, video, multimedia and graphics, and web design departments, moving again towards innovative storytelling formats.
As shown in previous Olympics, the science side of sports provides relevant insights into athletes’ performance with the help of experts from fields as diverse as biomechanics, physiology, cardiology, and psychology. During the 2014 Winter Games, BBC Sport produced the series of animated videos ‘Science of Sochi’to explain the physics of speed, the cardiovascular effects of altitude, or the production of artificial snow and the risks associated with sports practice. In the 2016 Rio Olympics, O Globo launched the interactive ‘Segredos Olímpicos’driven by video explainers from the lens of kinetics to offer lesser-known aspects of Olympic sports. Prior to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Reuters published a graphic with data about the combination of high heat and humidity levels that Olympians would have to endure in the city during the Games, drawing public attention to health issues around sport.
In Paris, the Seine water pollution levels at the triathlon and open-water swimming venues, the discussion about the shallow depth of the pool and the scarcity of swimming records, and the controversy around gender testing of two female boxers made the front page. These big issues led media to gather quick answers from science to meet the most urgent information needs. But going far beyond the news, sports media provided very insightful reads and illustrative pieces based on data gathered from scientific sources.
Despite closing down its sports desk in 2023 and in parallel to the daily live reporting from its online sports site The Athletic, The New York Times deployed a multidisciplinary team to offer broad coverage of the Paris mega-event and bring expertise in storytelling. As a result, NYTimes featured several interactive articles and visual stories focused on the detailed mechanics of athletic performance, like the one about why many of the world’s top swimmers scour data analytics and mathematics to gain even a fraction of a second in their pursuit of a gold medal, or the explanatory analysis on the most frequent injuries that occur in athletes competing in the Olympics.
In a similar approach, The Washington Post presented in-depth reporting pieces to address issues such as the human limits to reach peak performance and set unbreakable records and devoted some articles to explain advances in training, technology and technique in different disciplines like artistic swimming. Other media outlets chose this same science angle to help Olympic fans better understand some non-mainstream disciplines. Under the label of ‘Décryptage’ (Deciphering), L’Équipe delivered infographic analysis on technical elements of an athlete or sport, such as the muscle groups used in gymnastics rings and the power pedaling rate in BMX riders.
Toronto Star published a series about the science behind the high-level sport with special emphasis on Canadian athletes. The Guardian analysed the biomechanics of outstanding athletes in basketball, cycling, surfing, weightlifting, athletics and tennis in the series ‘Midas touch’. And the Australian The Age expanded the Olympics coverage into some science of sport articles on topics such as the physics behind Simone Biles’ perfect technique or the importance of staying underwater to move faster and beat the water resistance in the swimming pool.
In all these examples and many others, sports media outlets proved to add value to the Paris Olympic Games coverage by broadening the agenda from the science perspective.
