Organizers Hail Success of Inaugural European Championships

(ATR) The first European Championships clocked up some impressive statistics, as organizers look for the 2022 hosts.

The 11-day event in Glasgow and Berlin – bringing together the existing European Championships for athletics, aquatics, cycling, gymnastics, rowing and triathlon and including a new golf team championships – drew to a close on Sunday night. Russia topped the overall medal table, followed by Great Britain and Italy.

Around 4,500 athletes from 52 nations took part in the multisports event, with new European Champions crowned in 187 medal events representing 33 countries.

The UK’s biggest multisports event since the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games was broadcast across the continent, with more than 3,500 hours of free-to-air programming across 43 territories in Europe, reaching an estimated 1.03 billion viewers.

European Athletics president Svein Arne Hansen said it was the "best ever" European Championships for his sport. The Berlin Olympic Stadium was a full house for Saturday evening’s athletics finals.

"Thank you, Berlin. You have delivered the best European Championships ever, that is for sure," Hansen told a closing press conference at the Olympic Stadium, flagging up the venue’s "unbelievable atmosphere".

Aleksander Dzembritski, Berlin State Secretary for Sport, expressed his satisfaction with the European Championships.

"We started in Glasgow, and they delivered, and I am very, very sure that Berlin delivered," he said. "This was a great event, it worked very well."

Huge Crowds for Athletics

Berlin 2018 organizers said the city had delivered on its promises for an exciting athletics event.

Frank Kowalski, CEO Berlin 2018 European Championships, said crowds of more than 500,000 people had watched the athletics: "This was beyond our expectations. But this is not an accident. There was a really strong concept behind it when we went into the bidding in 2013."

Kowalski said Saturday evening’s athletics, watched by a crowd of 60,500 – the biggest ever for the sport’s continental championships – represented a significant step forward in the presentation of track and field.

"That was a big change. A session of only two hours of athletics, only finals. And in my opinion, we do not need any change of athletics. We need to have professional presentation, very compacttime schedules and the emotions of the athletes, and then we have perfect moment of athletics during the evening," he said.

Raising the Profile

Social media stats also told a story of success.

"We have reached 750 million impressions on social media by the end of the final day across social for any content including the official hashtags, whether produced by the federations, host cities, media, broadcasters, fans or athletes," said James Mulligan, head of communications for the European Championships.

"The stakeholders have worked together on different innovations, such as pushing various types of content directly to athletes’ social feeds across all the sports, and the athletes have really engaged with us on this to boost numbers.

Stefan Kuerten, executive director of EBU Sport, said the Europe-wide broadcasting of the event had exceeded expectations.

"We brought in the best media we had, the best host broadcasters and services. On top of that we brought 40 EBU member organizations with us who cleared their schedules and went for between 8-12 hours live coverage for a new event," he said.

"As you would say in poker, we went 'all in'. When we see what Berlin did, what European Athletics did, what Glasgow did, it was beyond expectations.

"The viewing figures have been incredible in Germany, and in Norway, where the reach was 80 percent. We have had a 50 percent reach in the Czech Republic, and between 30-40 percent in Switzerland. The whole concept flies. It shows how free-to-air public service broadcasting is an incredible partner for multi-sport events."

The EBU and European Athletics on Saturday extended their worldwide media rights contract through 2027. The deal covers the worldwide television and radio rights for European Athletics’ major events from 2020 to 2023 and from 2024 to 2027. This includes the 2022 and 2026 European Athletics Championships, which will be part of a multi-sport event.

There is already plenty of interest in staging the 2022 European Championship, with organizers, including Hansen, again looking to raise the profile of the individual sports and the event itself in the year of the Beijing Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. The bidding process started in 2016, with hosts or co-hosts expected to be announced later this year or early 2019 at the latest.

"We want the same system in four years," Hansen said of athletics elevated global exposure. "We have an eight-year deal with the EBU and we want to have the best conditions for European athletics. If it is one city, or one region – we don’t know yet."

Commenting on the search for 2022 hosts, European Championships communications chief Mulligan told Around the Rings that allthe stakeholders, including sports federations and broadcast partners, "will be looking at what happened in Glasgow and Berlin to evaluate the best way forward, to take lessons from the first one to make the second edition even stronger.

"The stakeholders are already in discussions with potential host cities for 2022 and will negotiate on a bilateral basis until a suitable candidate or candidates are found," he said. "There is genuine interest from cities and countries in the opportunity of hosting the 2022 and 2026 editions, and even the 2030 version. With the momentum and success of 2018, the stakeholders will wish to accelerate the existing discussions and we think the 2022 hosts will selected in the first part of 2019."

Reported by Mark Bisson

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