This weekend was all hands on-deck for our event team. We were at IRONMAN Texas, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nashville, and produced the IRONMAN Texas Broadcast! All were amazing events all around!
2023 Memorial Hermann IRONMAN Texas
IRONMAN Texas is the first full distance IRONMAN of the year for us. It is always a great time with some awesome people! As always, we set up the power for the IRONMAN Expo, Medical, finish line and start line, as well as running sound throughout the venue and a livestream at the finish. We also took care of scripting and running the athlete welcome and awards ceremonies as well as creating all the videos for those events.
What made this event special?
This year, we wanted to try something a little bit different than in the past, so we reached out to the unofficial IRONMAN Texas Facebook page (where athletes doing the race gather to discuss training and encourage each other ahead of race day). We posted a video asking for athletes to send in short clips of themselves explaining why they chose to do IRONMAN Texas. We had dozens of submissions and put together a video to kick off our welcome ceremony that was a huge hit! Additionally, we sent out the link to spectators and family, both on Facebook and with IRONMAN’s assistance through the IRONMAN Tracker app and had hundreds of photos and videos uploaded throughout race day. We were able to integrate these videos into our race day recap video that we showed the next morning at the awards ceremony. It was a great way to involve all the spectators in making the video and give even more athletes the opportunity to see themselves in the video.
Operations
On the operations side, the majority of our day ran smoothly. In the late afternoon, we had an error occur on our finish line generator that caused all the power at the finish line to go out. It was down for around 30 seconds, but we were able to successfully fire the generator back up and get everything back online. We did not want to risk the generator going out again while finishers were coming in the chute, so we took a generator from the expo and hauled it up to the finish line as a replacement while the race was going on. This is hard to accomplish during an event, but with the help of IRONMAN staff and many volunteers, we cleared a path to drop the new generator. We then waited until the end of a song and swapped out the new generator in a matter of seconds. While we hate to see this kind of issue happen at our events, we are proud to have a team that can work on their toes and make fixes quickly and under pressure as unforeseen issues arise.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Nashville
Event after Event – 7 Total
In the heart of Music City, Rock ‘n’ Roll hosted multiple races including a marathon, half marathon, 10k, 5k, 1-mile, Doggy Dash and a kids race! The weekend was packed with athletes old and young toeing the line waiting to embark on an incredible journey through the heart of Nashville. Before they got to their start line, everyone had to check in at the Musicians Hall of Fame where the Expo was held this year, adding a little extra Rock ‘n’ Roll to the entire event. There were three floors in the Expo ending in the Musicians Hall of Fame where athletes could peruse vendors’ goods while seeing the historical musicians that made the industry what it is today.
There was live music throughout the whole Expo which brought the Music City feeling inside. On course participants were welcomed with local musicians positioned at various mile markers around the course. Some athletes ran the entire marathon in costumes just to add a little more Rock ‘n’ Roll to their race.
The Doggy Dash was held Sunday after the marathon, half marathon, 10k and 5k, and brought out pet owners and their four-legged friends. One of the best parts of the weekend was being surrounded by dogs—all of which were ecstatic to be receiving unconditional love from the spectators! The Nashville Humane Association was at the Doggy Dash showcasing some local animals in need of adoption, ending the weekend on a lovely note.
IRONMAN Texas Broadcast
What we’re perhaps best-known for is our on-site event production—building strings of speakers, running power, sourcing and installing Internet, shooting video. But when you turn on your TV or open up your favorite streaming site to watch an IRONMAN event, have you ever wondered where that show comes from? Well, that’s us too! Our studio here in Boulder processes the camera feeds from an event, combines it with stellar commentary from our hosts, and sends it out everywhere it’s needed. That’s a heck of a job for our team! Ever wondered what it takes to put on a TV show? Well, let’s run through what we did for the IRONMAN Texas broadcast so you can see!
Early Bird Gets the Worm
Our day began bright and early—or, rather, dark and early. The broadcast team was in the office at 3:45 AM to make everything ready! While this sounds very early indeed, that’s only about an hour before we started sending out the show. Every broadcast comes with days of careful preparation and planning: designing and setting up graphics specific to the event, reviewing and refining the script, arranging the studio for showtime, and checking every component in our studio hardware to make sure nothing goes wrong. That way, even though we have to wake up early to come into the office, we have as much time as possible to get a good night’s sleep beforehand! Then once we show up, there’s just a laundry list of equipment to turn on, like…
How did the event technically go down?
Dedicated network switches to ensure an uninterrupted stream, batteries to back up our power, stage lights, two cameras, an audio mixer, four stream encoders, a NewTek 3Play for instant replays and recaps, two NewTek TalkShows to bring in remote guests, two TriCaster video switchers, individual computers for stream monitoring and intercoms and controlling teleprompters and supporting additional control surfaces, stream recorders, a clock… there are a lot of moving parts! Especially now, as we’ve recently added a French-language broadcast with remote hosts. As you can imagine, that’s nearly doubled the workload! However, one of the things we do best is refining our processes so we can put on great shows with small teams. For IRONMAN Texas, we had four team members in the studio: one to switch the main video feeds for the show and work with the hosts, one to control the onscreen graphics, one to run the French-language systems, and one to call in remote guests and prepare clips for recaps. Everyone is always on the move and handling multiple jobs in a BCC Live production!
Closing out an amazing weekend!
Fortunately, since we’ve done this many times before and spend significant effort in planning and prep, we all know exactly what to do. It’s a delicate juggling act, but what we end up with is a show on par with the programming on any major sports network. And this weekend was no exception: despite this being our first show with the French-language broadcast, our team rolled with the punches and executed a killer show. One of the biggest highlights was the neck-and-neck finish of the top three male athletes: it’s rare to get such a close finish, so the energy was way up! Our whole team worked at double-pace to keep up with our energetic announcers and high-speed athletes. It made for a great show, and a fun experience!
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