Athletics has always been one of sport's most international products. A meeting in Oslo can attract viewers in Tokyo. Fans in London can follow athletes competing in Shanghai. A performance in Brussels can be clipped up and shared around the world within minutes.
Making that happen goes beyond staging the competition.
It also comes at an interesting time for the sport. Athletics has seen a number of new events, formats and series emerge in recent years, with varying degrees of success. They have raised useful questions about how the sport is packaged, how new audiences are reached and what works.
Infront has a close view of that evolution, with our work in athletics now stretching across the Wanda Diamond League, World Athletics Continental Tour Gold, World Athletics Indoor Tour and the new World Athletics Ultimate Championship.
The work is different across each property, but the common thread is finding ways to get athletics in front of more people, in more markets and in the formats that actually work.
Media rights remain a major part of that.
Infront has worked with athletics for since 2020, building broadcaster relationships and finding new markets for properties including the Wanda Diamond League from 2025.
Recent seasons have brought new agreements across Europe, Americas and Asia, adding to a distribution network that includes free-to-air television, pay TV and streaming.
There is a balance to strike here. Rights naturally need to generate commercial value, but reach matters too. Putting athletics behind the wrong platform or limiting distribution to a handful of markets might maximise one metric while making it harder for the sport to find new fans.
The World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest is a good example of the work involved. It is a completely new event. There is no established audience or decades of broadcast history to fall back on and stakeholders have been imagining this as a concept. As the exclusive international media rights agency, Infront has had to establish the international footprint, partnering with over 35 broadcasters ahead of the first edition and creating a strong platform for distribution. This has also meant explaining the new format, helping everyone understand how it will work and why it should matter to their audiences
That gives the event a platform, but what appears there is just as important as ever.
The way people follow athletics has changed considerably.
A fan might watch an entire Wanda Diamond League meeting live. Another might only see the decisive Pole Vault Jump or the final 100 metres of a race on social media. Someone else might follow a particular athlete and consume their performances without watching the rest of the meeting at all. All three matter and offer an access point to a new fan for athletics, which is why working on reach goes well beyond selling the live rights.
Through Infront Productions, we support content workflows across the Wanda Diamond League season covering signal ingestion and distribution, near-live highlights, athlete-specific clips, broadcaster content and digital assets.
It means a single meeting can produce content for a number of different audiences and platforms, rather than relying on the live broadcast to do all the work.
Athletics has an advantage here because its stories work at different levels. Global stars can draw attention across markets, while local athletes give broadcasters and fans a reason to care about an event closer to home. A race or field event can therefore carry a global storyline and several national ones at the same time.
Athletics has great personalities, rivalries and stories, but the calendar naturally revolves around relatively short windows of competition. Archive footage, athlete content and other formats can help keep those stories going when nobody is standing on a start line.
That matters if the ambition is to build an audience that follows the sport rather than simply turning up for its biggest events.
The first World Athletics Ultimate Championship will also provide a chance to try some different ideas around the broadcast itself.
The competition has been developed with television and digital audiences in mind from the outset. Plans by HBS – the wholly-owned subsidiary of Infront and production partner of host broadcasters Tata Communications – include a new graphics package, more performance data, augmented reality and other tools intended to make what is happening on the track and field easier to understand and more engaging to follow.
Some of that is about presentation. Some is about recognising that a mobile viewer and somebody watching several hours of athletics on television do not necessarily want the same thing.
Sports organisations used to be able to treat media rights, production, digital content and audience development as relatively separate jobs. They are now much more closely connected.
A broadcaster agreement determines where an event can be watched. Production determines what that viewer sees. Digital content can introduce the event to somebody who would never have searched for the broadcast in the first place.
Our role across athletics increasingly touches all three.
That is probably the biggest change in Infront's relationship with the sport. Media rights remain an important part of the work, but getting an event onto a broadcaster is no longer the end point.
The job is making sure people can find it, watch it and have a reason to come back.
Find out where you can watch the World Athletics Ultimate Championship