And the final Gold medal goes to…The BBC Olympic Coverage

For me, the biggest success of the 2012 Olympics has been the BBC’s unfaltering coverage of the games. More people than ever before turned to the web to consume Olympic content over the past two weeks and from start to finish the BBC iPlayer took the record viewing traffic in its stride.

One of my biggest concerns before the games began was how to follow 24 dedicated live channels and keep up to date with information on the athletes themselves. I have to admit I was skeptical as to whether the BBC could handle all the coverage without making a few mistakes – something that a Twitter wielding global audience wouldn’t take kindly to – but they managed to pull it off with style.

The BBC 2012 website was, and still is, a technological masterpiece. The Interactive schedules, detailed athlete bios, real-time updates and live video feeds gave us all the information we could possibly need during the Olympics, without overwhelming our senses. All within a mouse click or two. By combining the 24 dedicated TV channels, the BBC web site and the official London 2012 mobile apps, it was possible to stay up to date with the games in virtually any situation imaginable. Provided you had access to an internet connection of course.

Thanks to such an effortless viewing experience, combined with the ability to add events to my phone’s calendar from within the BBC web site, I found myself tuning in to far more coverage than I had originally planned to. This included sports that I had never intended to watch, such as Basketball, rowing and Taekwondo.

Thanks to some ingenious camerawork, mind bending bullet-time action and gratuitous slow motion footage, even the less exciting sports were a pleasure to watch. A testament to the level of detail and thought that must have gone into the recording process before, during and after each event. Exactly how they managed to pull off the clip below during a live event still baffles me.

The level of coverage, detail and interactivity has been nothing short of world class, arguably solidifying the BBC as the greatest media broadcast network in the world. The bar has been set so high that it is difficult to imagine any other country or broadcaster doing a better job. The 2016 Olympics in Rio has a lot to live up to and we haven’t even seen the paralympics yet.

After two Olympic ceremonies dedicated to showcasing the best of British, it’s the team that filmed the games themselves, alongside the incredible work of the 70,000 volunteers, that deserve the biggest applause. For me, the BBC is the unsung hero of the Olympic Games, now bring on the Paralympic Games coverage!

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• rawhead_wrecker

  I watched the Double Trap finals with keen interested as shooting is my sport, and the coverage was entirely inept. Whilst the slow motion replays of clays exploding was technically very well done, to be showing those while our man was taking his shots and winning the competition was utterly ridiculous.

• Mark Duncan

  I agree – that clip was magnificent, but perhaps the Headline should read “…To the BBC cameramen and technicians” instead. I am not sure that the commentaries and all that nauseating brown-nosing by the ‘personalities’ should be regarded in the same light.

• http://twitter.com/brentmeister27 Enoch

  On principle I don’t pay the TV license fee, however I did enjoy the olympic coverage & especially the 21 live channels on freesat. My only complaint was Gary Lineker presenting and that other northern tw@t. Other than that one can’t complain.

• Rinc3wind

  Totally disagree with this article. The bbc was nothing but bias, patronising and drawn out drivel. A race that lasted 2minutes would take the bbc 20mins of inane commentary. It was awful. It relied on so called celebrities to push it through and I was quite frankly sick and tired of all the over analystic rubbish they seemed to come up with.
  The coverage on Sky’s Euro Sport 2 was however, a breath of fresh air. Concise reporting and to the point and in no way bias. Good coverage on a huge range of the games.
  Well done Euro Sport.

• nonsheep

  I thought the red button coverage was good, much better than the studio coverage that was concentrating on their in house celebrity, they were so far up their own ar$e, they missed what was going on at the event.

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=618720439 James ‘Jamo’ Moulding

  Apart from the Men’s Olympic Road Race BBC Coverage which was a bloody debacle.

• nick.brett

  It was a fine technical job but many presenters came out of it well. Balding and Logan especially – be great to see Gabby Logan fronting Match of the day in my view…

• Alex_Cheshire

  A gold medal? They did their job, which is what they get paid very well for.

• http://www.facebook.com/jon.akerman Jon Akerman

  The actual footage is not the BBC’s. It’s the feeds they are given from the Olympics broadcast team and so is out of their control. The need to present inclusive pictures even when it meant ignoring the focus point of an event clearly frustrated some of the presenters on occasion too.

• http://www.facebook.com/jon.akerman Jon Akerman

  It was pretty horrible to watch but I do have some sympathy with poor Hugh Porter and Chris Boardman – both of whom are usually good value – as they were left squinting at their monitor in the mall whilst trying to commentate and compensate for the lack information the Olympic broadcast team were able to provide. It also seemed like the fact that everyone decided to switch team colours didn’t help. None of which excused Jill “You’re not Cav so I don’t care” Douglas and her treatment of the winner (ex doping offender or not).