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Suspended over the ice by four retractable wires, the mobile camera is giving fans a new vantage of the fastest game on Earth. Owen Hammond / Olympic Broadcasting Services
MILAN — It didn’t take a hockey genius to realize that Juraj Slafkovský had just uncorked one heck of a shot. On the usual broadcast, from the usual angle, Slafkovský received a pass on a third-period power play just inside the blue line, took a few strides in, then snapped off a wrist shot through defenseman Esa Lindell that beat Finnish goaltender Juuse Saros. Good shot, good goal. Ho-hum.
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But about 10 seconds later, fans back home saw something they’ve seen thousands of times — a hockey player scoring a goal — in a way they had never seen it before. The camera zeroed in on Slafkovský, seeming to hover just over his left shoulder. Viewers saw Slafkovský’s body torque and uncoil, they saw the whites of Lindell’s eyes and the way his face braced for impact, and they saw the sheer speed with which the puck came off Slafkovský’s stick — the back of the net rippling nearly the instant the puck was released.
Meet the Spidercam. Slafkovský and Connor McDavid might be the two most dominant players in the Olympic men’s hockey tournament so far, but the Spidercam has been the real star of the show. Suspended over the ice by four retractable wires, the mobile camera is always looming — crossing, dipping, diving, twisting above the players’ heads. And it’s giving fans a new vantage of the fastest game on Earth.
“You’re talking about being in one of those IMAX theaters,” NBC analyst Eddie Olczyk said. “Some of the looks really, really take people inside and really give them a true appreciation of what is going on.”
Sports fans have seen cameras like this before. The National Football League has used “Skycam” for years, bringing memorable angles of kick-return touchdowns that make the viewer feel like they’re running just behind the ball-carrier. But the technology is new to hockey, bringing some innovation to broadcasts that haven’t changed much since the advent of high-definition television.
Spidercam even made a lengthy video review compelling on Saturday afternoon at Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena. As officials Kyle Rehman and Andris Ansons stared at a small screen between the penalty boxes to determine whether Swedish goaltender Jacob Markström had successfully swept a puck off the goal line before it had fully crossed, the Spidercam settled directly overhead and pointed straight down, slowly spiraling while zooming in over the officials’ heads.
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Meanwhile, a camera operator on skates stepped out of one of the penalty boxes and swooped around the two officials, providing another dramatic angle, before ducking back into the box, out of sight. It all made one of the most boring parts of any hockey game downright cinematic.
“It’s really about wanting to take audiences to a place you couldn’t otherwise be,” said Trevor Pilling, the Host Broadcast Senior Producer for Olympic Broadcast Services, who spent 25 years with CBC and was executive producer of “Hockey Night in Canada” for three years.
Spidercam — a two-person, on-site system requiring a “pilot” and a camera operator — is just one of the new toys the Olympic broadcast has to play with. There are also the on-ice camera people, who sneak on and off the ice after every whistle to bring fans into the celebratory group hug after a goal, onto the bench during a strategy session, into the penalty box as a player trudges off, and even into post-whistle skirmishes. Already a few times in these Olympics, one of the skating camera operators has come close to getting a face full of a sweaty glove for getting a little too close to the action. All seven of the camera operators working these Olympics used to play hockey, giving them an innate sense of where to go and how to stay out of the way. The Spidercam’s primary pilot, Rüdiger Kasig, also has a hockey background, which is why the camera always seems to be in the right place at the right time, anticipating the play.
There are more ankle-height cameras along the boards than NHL arenas have, as well as more robotic cameras at the top of the glass and the back of the house.
Then there’s “The Matrix” arrays. Behind each goal at both Milano Santagiulia and Milano Rho are 25 carefully calibrated cameras, just above the top of the boards. When the images are stitched together, they allow NBC and CBC and other outlets around the world to show a three-dimensional replay, freezing the action from one angle before wheeling around to the other side. These so-called “Matrix” replays, named after the visually groundbreaking 1999 film, allow broadcasters to show just how a shot or a goal or a save developed in extraordinary detail.
Also, they just look cool as heck.
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“Some of the looks, you sit there and go, jeez, man, it’s something,” Olczyk said. “It does enhance the broadcast, and I think people get a better appreciation for it.”
The funny thing is, Olczyk is just as surprised as the viewers by the replays. For the first time, NBC is leaning on the so-called “world feed” from these games, meaning they have virtually no control over what images are on the screen. In a typical broadcast, Olczyk would be in constant communication with a producer or director and have the exact replay he wants to break down, cut and cued for the moment the whistle blows. With the world feed, it’s just luck of the draw, decided by some other director in some other production truck. Olczyk has even had to acknowledge the difficulty to viewers when a replay that’s simply not relevant to what he wants to talk about appears.
It’s a fine line for the production crews to walk. Naturally, you want to use all your new gadgets and gizmos, but within reason. Olczyk is a fan of the new camera angles, but is glad they’re being limited to replays and breaks in the action. In recent years, it’s become more common for local broadcasts to use a robotic camera above the glass behind the goal to show live action, particularly during power plays. Olczyk isn’t a fan — when the game’s on, he wants the traditional camera angle and wants to see as much of the ice as he can.
Pilling agrees.
“We want to make sure the audience sees the important, key moments in the game the way they’re used to seeing it,” Pilling said. “We don’t want to disorient the audience at a key moment. But where we can add more dynamic connection to the field of play is between the whistles. That’s where we’re emphasizing it a lot, to give (broadcasters) that dramatic reset coming back to the field of play.”
It was no small feat to get Spider-Cam and the Matrix cameras up and running in time for the Olympics. At Rho, the ceiling is very low, not leaving much room for the suspended camera. But much of the women’s tournament has been held at Rho, and Pilling said it was important to OBS that the women’s games have all the same bells and whistles as the men’s games.
Santagiulia, meanwhile, was still under construction all winter — almost right up to the opening ceremonies. Even when the arena held some test games in mid-January, Spider-Cam wasn’t yet set up. But using 3D modeling and a small army of technicians and engineers, they were able to work out most of the specifics virtually. The Matrix cameras, meanwhile, were a two-year project, with engineers trying to perfect the size of the cameras and their angles while ensuring minimal obstruction of the live fans’ view of the action.
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Olczyk said it’s impossible for fans to truly grasp how fast the game is on the ice, to feel just what McDavid feels as he flies down the ice, dancing his way through traffic. But this is as close as television has gotten.
“It’s just another thing to bring us closer to understanding the game,” Pilling said. “There’s a lot of innovation that’s whiz-bang but doesn’t tell you much. We’re trying to do it with intention.”
The question, of course, is whether such innovations make their way across the Atlantic Ocean and become a part of NHL broadcasts. Last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off, a fully NHL production, used on-ice camera operators; ABC/ESPN broadcasts of NHL games use them too. But the sheer size of the scoreboards in the NHL — think of the blue-line-to-blue-line behemoths in Denver and Tampa, for example — could complicate the engineering for Spidercam. The league is skeptical that all 32 arenas can accommodate the technology, and doesn’t want some arenas and broadcasts to have advantages and abilities that others don’t. So it might take some time.
But Pilling noted that OBS had a similar four-point camera for its basketball coverage at the 2024 Games in Paris. Between that and the engineering feat of making it work at Rho, he thinks it can be done just about anywhere.
And the way he sees it, anything that brings fans closer to the action — over a player’s shoulder as he shoots, into a player’s eyes as he reads the play, into a shoving match along the boards — is well worth the trouble.
“You’re always dreaming (of new ideas),” Pilling said. “You always have to be. It’s interesting to think about drones and tracking players. But how do you do that and have it help explain the game better, (rather than) doing things for the sake of doing it? We’re really on that edge. The challenge now is to bring value with the innovation, and to explain the game better and get people more engaged with what’s happening.”
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Mark Lazerus is a senior NHL writer for The Athletic based out of Chicago. He has covered the Blackhawks and the league at large for 13 seasons for The Athletic and the Chicago Sun-Times. He has been named one of the top three columnists in the country twice in the past three years by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkLazerus
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