The spirit of permanent renewal and rapid adaptation to the situation on the part of the International Olympic Committee added a new demonstration. Just as, in a world with the concept of equality in vogue, he decided that the same number of women and men should compete in Paris 2024, or, in view of exponential growth, he announced the creation of the Olympic Electronic Sports Games, on April 19, he took a breakthrough step in the field of technology after the launch of the Olympic Agenda for Artificial Intelligence.
Focused on implementing AI resources that improve everything from athletes’ performance to the fan experience, the program has already been fact-checked in several spheres, with the Games on the horizon. Leandro Larrosa, Director of Marketing and Digital Engagement at the IOC, described those that occur in his area of influence, exemplifying that “when it comes to creating content, the production of highlights is done with artificial intelligence, which allows them to be put a few seconds before the end of the competition”. In Paris 2024, the automation of highlights through AI can be generated according to the choice of each broadcaster following different parameters such as the sport, the country, the day or the instance of the competition.
Another specific event took place at the beginning of the year at the IV Winter Youth Games, an event that functions as a platform for innovation and evaluation in many ways. Larrosa addressed her: “We have already tested robotic cameras operated with Artificial Intelligence in Gangwon.”
The official Paris 2024 application, now available for any mobile device, is also an area prone to the incorporation of the latest technologies. According to Larrosa, “it will have an augmented reality camera where people will be able to see what the place they are traveling in 1924 was like”. In addition, it will have a “Google Maps-style” map that will provide information not only about sports results within the venues but also about cultural events outside the venues.
The optimization of the spectators’ experience (on the audiovisual level, it will be innovated with 360-degree repetitions and more detailed analysis of the performance of athletes) stands out as one of the five axes of the incipient transformative Agenda, focused on the premise of not supplanting the human but supporting him. The remaining four aim to improve talent identification (through the expansion and perfection of metrics, for example), to evolve performance and training (more personalized and adapted), to provide greater tools for arbitration in order to increase justice, and to promote health, well-being and clean competition by promoting safe sports environments, and detecting and eradicating abuse in all its forms.
According to the projections contemplated by Larrosa, “three out of four people on the planet are going to look at Paris 2024 in some way”. Convinced, the communication and marketing specialist anticipated which medium would be the most chosen: “I’m sure the vast majority will do it on television,” he said.
Despite the current dominance of TV in terms of audience preference, Larrosa does not neglect the fact that “the International Olympic Committee has to update itself to new audiences”, a statement backed by statistics. The IOC’s Digital Engagement department employs 14 social media platforms, because “each country and each region has a specific way of communicating”.
When encompassing the activity of fourteen media outlets, the expected number of user interactions with a publication for Paris 2024 has an impact: 12 trillion engagements, according to Larrosa. In addition, he referred to “a content production that will reach nearly 50,000 posts” and that will have “11,000 live hours, which is equivalent to a year if we told it all together”.
Whoever was the executive director of the Buenos Aires 2018 Organizing Committee does not escape the fact that Paris 2024 will mark the return of the public to the Olympic stadiums for the elderly since Rio 2016, when TikTok, for instance, had not yet been launched. When asked about the freedom to upload material without being automatically blocked, he clarified: “We are very careful to protect the rights of rightholders; we want the vast majority of material to be in the hands of rights holders.”
Looking at the scope of the concept ‘protect’, he argued that the restrictive purpose involves taking care of rights holders in, for example, “those iconic images such as a record of 100 meters” and acknowledged, in relation to the materials captured at the open opening ceremony, that “it will be almost inevitable that it will appear on people’s social networks”. Finally, emphasizing the interactive connotation of technologies, he emphasized the ‘Social Media Wall’, “where we repost not only what athletes put on but also what people publish from Paris living their experience”.