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Nine wins award for Olympics programme

Updated: Nine wins Bronze for Best Olympic programme at the IOC Golden Rings awards for Day 16 coverage.

Updated: The Nine Network has won Bronze for Best Olympic Programme at the International Olympic Golden Rings awards in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The award was for its Day 16 coverage by Shane Street, Alex Rolls / Steve Crawley, Lesley Tapsall, Tim Cleary, Matthew Callander, Brent Williams.

NBC won the Gold prize while the BBC took home Silver in the same category.

The win follows strong ratings by Nine’s broadcast but a significant backlash about its coverage in social media in Australia.

Nine Network Managing Director, Jeffrey Browne, said “Congratulations to Steve Crawley and the entire Nine Network team on achieving this outstanding recognition.

“This follows a similar award from our broadcast of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games and clearly places Nine’s Wide World of Sports in the top echelon of world sports broadcasters.”

Foxtel won Silver for  The Best On Air Promotion “Foxtel on Platform TVC” / Ash Bolland / Graham Burrells, Chantal Walker.

25 Responses

  1. No matter how you look at Nine’s coverage it was streets ahead of anything Channel Seven did over the previous two Games. The deal with Nine allowed continuous live coverage on Foxtel over eight channels. Seven refused point blank to deal with Foxtel and instead allowed SBS to show the dregs Seven had discarded.

    We urgently need the anti-siphoning laws to be changed to specify that any free-to-air network that wins the games must enable them to be shown on Foxtel as well.

  2. How soon before someone asks David Gyngell – in the style of all of Nine’s Olympic presenters – “Third place? You’ve got to be disappointed with that”

    However, to put it into perspective, Nine picked up third place for one specific day’s coverage, and they appear to be proud of that “achievement”. Surely a single 3rd placing in these awards should be an embarrassment to Nine.

  3. Insane. NBC were criticised by every true sports fan for playing out the bulk of event coverage via dreaded tape-delay. The BBC covered pretty much every second of every event live via 24+ dedicated streams / digital screens. So, who takes the gold award…
    So much politics (and rights fees) involved and sadly zero grasp on reality – let alone asking the viewing public what they thought…

  4. And if you think this award is a joke, Channel 7 apparently won the “golden rings” six years ago for their Torino 2006 “coverage” which they taped delayed almost everything and showed a 1-hour highlights package….

    1. Update: Closer inspection indicates it was an award for a single programme Day 16 of coverage, not the entire broadcast. Nine’s press release did not make this clear. Apologies for any confusion.

  5. As others have said..a meaningless joke. NBC viewers howled down their coverage across two Olympics and Nine’s was the worst we’ve seen in a long time. If they simply give awards to big clients then it’s a tokenistic pointless exercise. The IOC – including the AOC – didn’t even bother to respond to our letters or petitions even though what we asked for was to IOC’s relative advantage and would have cost them nothing per se. Seems the Olympics is now just one mega big buck business and that means the death knell is ringing. What a shame – both for the history of the Games, and the future of them.

  6. Is this April Fools or what?

    The Beeb should get the gold NBC and 9 for the Worst Olympic Coverage ever and Foxtel silver.

    How can Nine win bronze for a single channel and Foxtel nothing for eight dedicated channels and all medal events live.

  7. Wow, this industry really knows how to throw it back in the audiences faces.. The backlash and their coverage was unbelievable and yet they still come third!? Every other country in the world must have been really really bad…

  8. so the network that was widely criticised by the americans for not even showing the games live gets the best coverage award.
    the network that showed every moment live on multiple channels comes second and the less said about 9 the better

  9. I think it just proves how much Aussies love whinging – Nine did a reasonable job, better than I expected, and better than Seven did for the last one – yet people kept complaining on bloody Twitter because they weren’t showing the events that they wanted to watch right at that second.

  10. How can NBC win gold when they didn’t even show the opening ceremony live on broadcast tv?

    How can Nine win bronze with one channel, when Foxtel had a gazillion channels?

  11. What.

    And why on earth would anyone give them an award for their Vancouver coverage? It was even worse. I think the fact that NBC got gold says it all really.

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