In just a few days, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will take place, which will host more than 15,000 athletes, 80,000 employees, 3 billion spectators and will have an impact on the city of between 6.7 billion and 11 billion euros. It is a very important event in terms of sports and values, as well as in terms of technology.

Just because Olympic Games evolve with technology Over its 29th edition, we have witnessed all sorts of technological leaps forward. These were some of the most significant moments in recent history.

Berlin 1936: Television is coming

Entrance to the Berlin Olympic Stadium, 1936 | Image: Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5

The first “modern” Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece, in 1896. But the originals date back to Ancient Greece. They took place in Olympia and ran from 776 BC to 393 AD. The IOC was founded in 1894 with the aim of reviving a similar competition, and the rest is history. Since then, The Olympic Games are held every four years, with four exceptions.: 1916, 1940, 1944 and 2020. The first three of the First and Second World Wars; the fourth due to the pandemic.

These are events full of history and if we talk about technology, we must undoubtedly go back to 1936. The competitions were held in Berlin and they were important because first televised Olympic Games: 72 hours of uninterrupted live sports coverage isn’t bad at all, especially when you consider that the first television broadcast in Germany was on March 22, 1935. In its early stages, Germany was only broadcasting for 90 minutes three times a week.

These were propaganda Olympics because Adolf Hitler was already in power and if there was one thing the Nazi government knew, it was propaganda. The government entrusted the management of the television broadcast to filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, with whom it had previously worked on the film Triumph of the Will, one of the best propaganda films ever made. The broadcast of the Olympic Games managed to reach 150,000 people, a small number that may seem like a small number, but we cannot forget that television was an object that was beyond the reach of most people.

Germany won 89 medalsThe country with the largest medal table. They were followed by the USA (56 medals) and Hungary (16 medals). Spain, meanwhile, did not participate. The Second Republic tried to organize its own Olympic Games to boycott the Germans and protest against fascism, but they were never held since the coup that would start the Civil Revolution was to begin on July 18, 1936. War ensued.

Even so, the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany were the first Olympic Games to be televised but at a local level. The first international broadcast was in 1956, on the occasion of the Winter Olympic Games in Cortina D’Ampezzo. From that moment on, the Olympic Games began to have broadcasting rights. The European Broadcasting Union paid $660,000 for the 1960 Winter Olympic Games, and RTVE paid 55.5 million euros to broadcast the Paris Olympics on our borders.

National invention “Photo Coating”

One of the first “photo overlays” taken with the Omega system in 1948 | Image: IOC

The invention of “photocoating” is attributed to a Spaniard. Juan de la CiervaA telecommunications engineer, he managed to put an end to the controversy in horse racing and athletics championships by inventing the “photo finish” at the age of 20. The operation was very primitive: when the horse crossed the finish line, it broke a rope on the track that operated the camera with its legs.

That’s when Omega bought the patent and installed the system we know today as “photocoating” at the 1948 London Olympic Games, although “photocoating” had been around since the Olympic Games in 1912.

In 1948 Omega was appointed official timekeeper and used the Magic Eye system to do so. This combined chronometry and photography and was vital in breaking the tie between Americans Albert Kiviat and Norman Taber for second and third place in the 1,500 metres, for example.

The problem is that there was still a human role, as the referees were the ones who pressed the stopwatch button. The method used today is much more complex: there is a camera at the finish line that captures 10,000 frames per second. This allows millimeter breakdown of arrival at target and see who comes first with incredible accuracy. Progress over the years has been significant: 1,000 frames were taken in 1996 and increased to 3,000 frames in 2008.

Barcelona 1992: Montjuic becomes a giant LAN network

Barcelona opening ceremony, 1992 | Image: IOC

At the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games The last Olympic Games without internetIn 1992 we had our first commercial Internet distributor, Eunet Goya, which began to be tested on our borders in the mid-1990s. In any case, the reality of Barcelona 1992 was that a complete network infrastructure had to be developed to provide information to the media and teams without using the Internet. In a few words, an Internet without the Internet.

Rafael Macau was responsible for developing this infrastructure, which connected 5,000 computers with three to four megabytes of internal memory for the staff, with two large central computers of 140 GB each. “We dared to make a huge LAN covering all the areas of Montjuic Mountain,” Macau explained to ComputerWorld. They used relational databases to organize the information, which is an odd thing to do, considering the volume of information that moves at the Olympic Games. According to Macau:

“We said we were using it on a network of about 5,000 terminals that relied on hierarchical LAN rings to access the database, and there was one Englishman who said he didn’t believe it, that we were lying. ‘The guy was from IBM and he couldn’t believe it, he’d never seen it before.’

Interestingly, to accomplish this task, they had to fence the mountain. Since the mountain was an open area, repeaters could not be installed, so they decided to fence it and converting into a closed area for legal purposes. Basically Montjuic dude party on a massive scale. But television was the protagonist, with 3.5 billion viewers worldwide.

Cover image | Xataka

On Xataka | Paris 2024 Olympic Games: when, competition schedule and how to watch on TV and online