54 XTREME Ineos
pacemakers to run in formation. I wanted to put cameras on the pace cars, but was told that wouldn’t be possible. So I asked, what about if we put one very small camera, the size of a 50 pence piece, on to the cars? We ended up collaborating and testing the cameras in their wind tunnel. They did all sorts of computational fluid dynamic tests to see the effect the cameras would have on the pacemakers’ running pattern. Somehow, we got to test a big stabilised camera arm – the Shotover G1 – which we mounted to the back of the pace car, and it didn’t interfere with the runners. So we got the best pictures we could have hoped for.” The Shotover G1 camera was also placed on to the reserve car, in the unlikely event that anything would happen to the first pace car, and both cars were controlled from another car that rode in between them. As well as having continuous footage from the cars, there was a 200 metre-high wire cam at the finish, cranes dotted across the course and a motorbike with a camera operator on the back to keep it looking varied. Preece says: “The original thought that Ineos and its team had was that there
would be cameras positioned every 200 metres, that would go from right to left, left to right as Eliud and his pacemakers ran past. While we felt that this would give full coverage, we weren’t sure it was the most dynamic way to show the race.” Rigging comms between the cameras and the OB van was more complex than it would have been if Sunset+Vine had stuck to Ineos’ camera plan: “We had to have RF towers along the course to send signals from the pace cars, motorbike and wire cam back to the OB compound, which was in the middle of the course.” Preece also had trouble finding a signal at the start of the race, which was on a bridge half a kilometre from the track Kipchoge bolted around four times: “We ended up using the city’s dark fibre. We managed to tap into one of its networks down by the bridge and send our signals back to the middle of the course and back to our OB compound. We also had LiveU help us out with the GoPros, which were attached to the pace cars for performance testing. LiveU brought those feeds back via our London HQ and then back out to Vienna, in order to get them into its network. So that was quite complicated,” he laughs. Sunset+Vine is no stranger to covering live sport, but compared to football, this was more demanding: “We do a lot of football with BT Sport and, while we want everything to be perfect on day one, we have several months of the Premier League to get it right. Here, we only had day one, but we were happy with how it went. We didn’t have any significant issues; all the graphics and camera communications worked, and our feed got out to the satellite and was encoded for YouTube the website.” considering Africa will be the first to get hit by climate change. No one can deny Kipchoge’s run is a historic leap forward – maybe it will inspire Ineos to make a leap forward, too. There’s irony in a petrochemical company sponsoring Kenya’s hero,
THE PACE CARS HAD A LASER SYSTEM FIXED ON TO THE TOPOF THEM WHICH ENABLED THE PACEMAKERS TO RUN IN FORMATION
A GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND Sunset+Vine wanted to position Kipchoge’s achievement alongside other events, like the moon landing
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