“Perfect storm” leads to broadcast headaches as Ironman fans lash out over Mont-Tremblant coverage

While athletes, spectators, officials and the race crew were dealing with the torrential rain that slammed the region for Sunday’s Ironman 70.3 Mont-Tremblant race, the conditions were setting up the “perfect storm” for a series of mishaps that led to a disastrous day on the coverage side. As you can see in the comments from the Instagram post below, triathlon fans have been scathing in their complaints about the coverage of the race on Sunday.

Did anyone see the ark? Photos from a rainy Ironman Pro Series race in Mont-Tremblant

The weather conditions wreaked havoc on cameras and the transmitters to get the video to the feed, not to mention the almost constant issue of cameramen having to wipe the lens off because of all the water. Adding to the frustration, though, was an abundance of commercials, including during the Lionel Sanders’ winning finish.

“You guys seriously need to get it figured out with Outside,” one fan commented on Ironman’s Instagram post. “The commercial breaks are horrendous. They cut to commercial at the worst possible time, half the time the moto’s cameras arent even working. And then to be on commercial while Lionel is going across the line? You guys need to do something about this. I’d rather watch only T100 events.”

 

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Outside TV

Ironman has a five year deal with Outside TV that runs through 2026. That means that Outside TV has the exclusive rights to broadcast the Ironman Pro Series events in North America. Other regions can watch the coverage through YouTube, DAZN, L’Equipe Live and through the proseries.ironman.com website. Those other feeds wouldn’t have had the same issues that plagued the North American coverage on the weekend.

Live feed challenges

We caught up with Ironman officials today to get some insight on what happened on Sunday and what the company is looking to do to avoid such issues in the future.

“It was the perfect storm of events,” said Julia Polloreno, vice president, content, at Ironman. “Losing camera feeds, the condensation and humidity … we were challenged just keeping the live feed going.”

Adding to the issues caused by the weather, some manual errors at Outside compounded the issues. When the feed dropped at one point, operators scrambled to get content back out on the feed, and inadvertently deployed a protocol that added more commercials and other content that wasn’t supposed to be part of the show.

The end result was there were more commercials than there were supposed to be, and some of those popped up when they absolutely shouldn’t have – like when Sanders was taking his second Ironman Pro Series title of 2024 and during the close battles for second place in both the men’s and women’s races.

Next steps

According to Outside’s Scott Burgess, safeguards and solutions have been put in place to ensure that the right protocol is put in place in situations like this. (Here’s hoping we don’t have another race with that much rain!)

Ironman fans will also be directed to a different feed, too. The Outside platform offers two different feeds of the coverage – one appears on the 24/7 streaming channel, which features 10 minutes of ads every hour. The other “standalone” feed includes six minutes of ads every hour. While both feeds had issues on Sunday, the “standalone” feed didn’t have as many problems, and the feed that went to other broadcasters in Europe also didn’t have as many issues. Ironman will be pushing fans to that feed through its various channels for upcoming events.

For those who missed any of the action on Sunday, Outside has made the replay of Sunday’s race available on its channel for free.