The new Olympics website
By Claire Stocks, Assistant Editor, BBC Sport Online
With the Beijing Olympics less than seven months away, we've recently launched a new Olympics section on the BBC website.
In the past we might have waited until a month before the Games before launching a dedicated section. But this time we wanted to get in as early as possible.
Over the coming months, bbc.co.uk/olympics will be the home for the BBC's coverage of the build-up to the Beijing Games, while we will also be charting the countdown to the Paralympics on our award-winning Disability Sport site. They will both receive an overhaul when demands radically change as we're suddenly thrust into our busiest sporting event.
Football World Cups may inspire more passion, but in terms of workload there is nothing to compare with the Olympics, with non-stop action for about 15 hours and up to 35 finals a day across the 28 different sports for more than a fortnight.
The website will look very different when it switches into 'live' mode, with up to six streams of live video and a constant flow of stories, statistics and photos that will require us to bring in many new staff.
But that still, thankfully, seems a long way off and for now the site will allow us to create a more coherent journey to the Games themselves.
Olympic qualification (a complex process, with each of the 28 sports and the disciplines within them having their own set of events, criteria and timetable) is underway, but the real scramble for places will begin in earnest in early spring.
We will be following a series of candidates, at least one or two from pretty much every sport, on the site, and we've set up a specific Team GB section where you can read their latest diaries or scan the photos we hope they'll be taking for us.
Some of them – such as 21-year-old heptathlete Jessica Ennis, 19-year-old cyclist Shanaze Reade and 13-year-old diver Tom Daley (voted the 2007 Young Sports Personality of the Year) – are featured in a new TV series, Olympic Dreams. The first run went out at the end of last year, and we're working with the show so that chunks of the footage they film ahead of the next run, to be broadcast post-Beijing, will appear on the site.
Research by the International Olympic Committee shows that young people in particular are less interested in the Games, seeing it as a distant, confusing event that only happens once every four years. And young people have been telling us that they would like to see more about the competitors – usually also young like them – and more about how to get into the sports themselves, from our coverage, so we're looking at building more of that into what we do on the web.
We want to take up the 'legacy' challenge so firmly issued by Seb Coe during the bid, and do our bit to help increase participation in sport and improve the health of the nation.
The government target is to increase the number of people playing sport by 2 million by 2012. There are rumbles from a few people in sports administration that the country is already some way behind in delivering this, but in BBC Sport we think one way to do it is to create content that can inspire young people to actually take up sport and to weave that content not only into our event coverage but into other areas of the BBC, such as BBC Switch, the new teen-focused strand, and indeed the wider web, partnering with sites such as Flickr and YouTube.
It is the kind of content BBC Sport has been creating on its Sport Academy website since 2002 – tips and tricks from stars and coaches designed to help young people learn more about sport and be inspired.
So, on the new site, all 28 Olympic sports are firmly brought under the Olympic banner – making more of their Olympic status and the fact that the BBC is the Olympics broadcaster in the UK.
One small consequence of this is that we have moved some sports – such as badminton – from the Other Sport section into the Olympics section. We hope this doesn't cause too much confusion for too long and more links will be added around the site to direct people to the new location.
This article first appeared on the BBC Sport Editors' blog – if you have any feedback, please leave a comment there.
Related links
- BBC Sport Editor's blog (December 2007)
- BBC Olympics website
- BBC Disability Sport
- Team GB pages
- Olympic Dreams
- BBC Sport Academy
- BBC Outreach
- London 2012 website
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
