With ‘Sprint’ and 'Simone Biles: Rising', Netflix fills Olympic content gap

Eaubonne: The four-person crew from Box to Box Films, the production company responsible for the hit Netflix motorsports docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive, has often shot in lavish settings like Monaco and Miami.

But one recent morning, it congregated in a far less glamorous spot: a set of flimsy bleachers next to a running track in the Paris suburb of Eaubonne, where it waited about an hour for a practice session to begin.

“This is our life,” Warren Smith, a top executive at Box to Box, said of the waiting. It could have been worse: Across town, a second crew was filming a runner having a haircut.

The footage from France will eventually be part of the second season of Sprint, a Netflix documentary following the American 100-meter stars Sha’Carri Richardson and Noah Lyles and a dozen or so other track athletes.

The series is one of three projects being filmed during these Summer Games as part of a partnership between Netflix and the International Olympic Committee, a latecomer to the sports-documentary genre that is now an eager participant.

Just as Drive to Survive forged a deeper connection between fans and Formula 1 auto racing, the IOC hopes these projects will pique awareness and interest among a new (read: younger) generation of Olympic fans. They include the track series, a gymnastics one called Simone Biles: Rising and one about the US Olympic men’s basketball team.

So far, the effort has worked: Both Sprint and Simone Biles: Rising have spent at least two weeks on Netflix’s top-10 most-watched list.

“You cannot be telling these stories only every four years and expect to remain relevant,” said Yiannis Exarchos, the chief executive of Olympic Broadcasting Services, the IOC media arm. “You need to be telling them 24/7 and do it in a compelling way.”

Through gold medal performances or memorable moments, Olympians become national celebrities overnight during this quadrennial three-week stretch. But after brief morning and late-night victory laps on television back in the United States, the athletes, in sports beyond soccer and basketball, are often forgotten for three years as they compete in far less publicized international events. Americans, at least, shift their focus to the major sports, which have round-the-clock coverage even in the offseasons, with free agency and manufactured prime-time spectacles.

The IOC’s union with Netflix and its coveted base of 278 million subscribers is its attempt to mimic other sports organizations’ frenetic pace of documentary filmmaking, and a partnership it hopes to replicate with other streaming services. It’s also an exercise for Netflix and production companies to explore unfamiliar sports and their characters.

Exarchos, who has worked at Olympic Broadcasting Services for nearly two decades, said this strategy represented a cultural shift. Previously, he said, the industry viewed the four-year gap as an advantage: a period in which to build anticipation for the next Olympic cycle. But engagement on the Olympic social channels and website had noticeably dropped by 2016, he said, and international federations could not compete in promoting their sports against mainstream leagues with billions of dollars.

There was also confusion over what was even possible. Brandon Riegg, the vice president for unscripted and documentary series at Netflix, said the platform was weary of NBCUniversal’s exclusive domestic broadcast agreement in the United States with the IOC.

“We totally respected that, and it never crossed our mind to engage with them,” he said.

Netflix and the IOC joined the NBA’s entertainment arm and a slew of other entities in 2022 to create The Redeem Team, a 97-minute documentary about the 2008 US men’s basketball team, which won a gold medal after the country placed third at the 2004 Athens Games. The film won a Sports Emmy, which started conversations about making a plan for Paris.

Filmmakers have explored the athletic and geopolitical themes of the Olympics for over a century, but the on-demand presence of many of its sports has lagged. More popular sports have pursued streaming dominance amid the decline of linear television. The NFL, for example, announced a joint venture with the Hollywood studio Skydance Media in 2022, resulting in projects on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Roku. The league was partly inspired by the cultural impact of the 2020 documentary series The Last Dance, which gave an all-access look at Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

Fans now crave that format elsewhere. Data from the research division of United Talent Agency, which represents athletes and entertainers, found that 72 per cent of potential Olympics consumers aged 15 to 45 said in a survey that they were more interested in behind-the-scenes content from the Paris Games than they were during the Tokyo Games in 2021.

“It’s ripe ground for them to use formats that have worked in the past but for a different event,” Danny Barton, the vice president of sports content at UTA, said of streaming platforms and the Olympics.

Of the more than 30 sports in Paris, Riegg and Exarchos said, they chose ones that they felt offered compelling narratives and recognizable names.

Sprint, of which Netflix released six episodes in July, followed runners in the marquee 100-meter and 200-meter races at tournaments before Paris. Executives from Box to Box Films said the sport’s simplicity challenged them to focus on story arcs, such as that of Lyles, a brash showman who runs in two events, and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, a Jamaican who would compete in her last Olympics at 37 years old. But Sprint also included interviews from Allyson Felix, Usain Bolt and other retired Olympic stars to explain the sport’s intricacies, such as the context of the United States-Jamaica rivalry.

Simone Biles: Rising, which also had episodes released in July, profiled Biles, the most decorated gymnast ever, as she returned from a disorienting mental block that led her to withdraw from most events in Tokyo. The Religion of Sports production company, which has documented Tom Brady (one of the studio’s founders) and Serena Williams, created the project as an expansion of a shorter series on Facebook in 2021.

Similar to Sprint, the Biles documentary used interviews from current and former gymnasts to decipher the sport’s history and jargon.

To help the audience’s understanding, Giselle Parets, an executive producer, said the creators slowed down video of Biles’ dizzying aerobatic movements to show errors.

“Unless she doesn’t land on her feet, you wouldn’t know that she did something wrong in the air,” Parets said. “We leaned a lot on different creative devices for that when something wasn’t right.”

The second seasons for the track and gymnastics documentaries are expected to come out later this year and will show the athletes’ journeys and results from Paris. There was triumph and drama: Biles and Lyles won gold medals; Fraser-Pryce withdrew from her semifinal heat in the 100 with an injury. Riegg, the Netflix executive, said he would be interested in a future swimming documentary, potentially involving Katie Ledecky. Exarchos said the IOC was in advanced discussions with sports federations for potential projects on figure skating and skiing for the 2026 Winter Games in Italy.

Exarchos said that while the IOC wanted to diversify the sports it highlighted, it would evaluate future series judiciously.

“Our vision is to keep expanding, not by checking boxes but finding the right story, the right athletes, the right sports at the right time,” he said.

He said the IOC was in conversations with all of Netflix’s major competitors and would release a behind-the-scenes look at the opening ceremony along the Seine, to appear in the United States on NBCUniversal’s streaming platform, Peacock.

“We don’t want to be exclusive,” he said. “We want to get everybody in to the fold.”