As the Paris 2024 Olympics kick off on Friday (July 26), Sport 24 is preparing to broadcast live coverage of the event to passengers inflight.
The iconic global sporting event will run from July 26 until Sunday, August 11. There will be 329 medal events in 32 sports.
Owned by the global sports and culture company IMG, Sport 24 launched in 2012. It broadcasts on the Sport 24 and Sport 24 Extra channels. The channels are available aboard ships and aircraft.
The opening ceremony in Paris will be the first of a summer Olympic Games to take place outside of a stadium. The parade of athletes will be held aboard boats on the River Seine, passing Parisian landmarks along the way.
Highlights of the games include the football, rugby sevens and basketball tournaments. France’s men’s basketball team were silver medallists at the Tokyo Olympics, losing to the USA in the final. The 2024 gold medal game will be contested on Saturday, August 10.
Swimming will be broadcast from the Olympic Aquatics Centre, the only sports facility purpose-built building for the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad other than Le Bourget Climbing Wall, which will host sport climbing events.
The much-anticipated races for the athletics’ 100-metre golds will take place on Saturday, August 3, for women, and a day later for the men.
The surfing will be held off Teahupo’o in Tahiti, French Polynesia, almost 10,000 miles from Paris. With one-stop, flights have a duration of more than 20 hours, offering passengers plenty of time to view sporting events while underway.
Beyond the 2024 Summer Olympics, Sport 24 also broadcasts sports including Formula 1, whose season concludes in Abu Dhabi on December 8, tennis and football of both round and prolate spheroid varieties. The NFL preseason gets underway in August, a week before the 2024-25 Premier League season kicks off on 16 August. The group-stage games of the UEFA Champions League begin in September.
There will be much to captivate sports fans on inflight entertainment systems via Sports 24’s channels over the weeks and months ahead.
Increasingly, airlines are finding that the availability of live sports is proving a factor in passengers’ booking choices.
