Eurosport to broadcast 120 hours of live action for first ever multi-screen coverage of a Summer Universiade

Fans can follow live action on TV, mobile, tablet and connected TV

PARIS/LAUSANNE – Eurosport has today marked the -100 day countdown to the start of the 2013 Summer Universiade in Kazan by announcing details of the first ever multi-screen coverage of a Universiade event.

Viewers can follow the competition from Kazan on the move via Eurosport’s online streaming service for mobile, tablet, and connected TV’s, the Eurosport Player – bringing a truly multi-screen experience to a Summer Universiade for the first time.

The leading Pan-European sports entrainment group  will broadcast over 120 hours of live TV coverage from the multi-sport event between 6-17 July 2013, as the first activation in the six-year agreement signed with FISU in September 2012 to cover all Summer and Winter Universiades until 2017.

Live coverage of the Summer Universiade in Kazan will be shared across Eurosport and Eurosport 2 with action from up to nine different sports being showcased across the 12 days of broadcast. Evening and afternoon highlights will also be shown from selected events.

Eurosport will also have reporters and film crew on-site in Kazan to report breaking news and record athlete interviews. Results and news reports will also be posted on Eurosoport’s dedicated University sports section on Eurosport.com.

The 2013 Summer Universiade in Kazan is expected to host over 10,500 athletes, aged 17-28, from 170 countries who will compete across the 10 compulsory disciplines each host city has to stage – athletics, basketball, fencing, football, gymnastics, judo, aquatics, table tennis and volleyball – alongside optional sports chosen by the local organisers.

Host city Kazan has also opted to include: badminton, beach volleyball, belt wrestling, boxing, chess, canoe sprint, field hockey, rugby 7’s, sambo, sport shooting, synchronised swimming, rowing, weightlifting and wrestling.

Many of the gold medal winning performances at the Summer Universiade events are close in timing/scores to the Olympic Gold medal winning standard and many Olympic Champions first achieved their taste for victory at the SU events.

At the London 2012 Olympic Games, no less than 154 former Universiade medallists – 75 men and 79 women – achieved 174 Olympic medals: 48 gold, 56 silver and 70 bronze, in 21 of the 26 sports.

Eurosport is currently broadcasting a monthly magazine show entitled CAMPUS which is counting down to the Kazan Summer Universiade and profiling five athletes who will be competing. The show also features the latest news from the world of University sports as students work towards qualifying for Kazan.

Eurosport Chairman & CEO Laurent-Eric Le Lay said: “Eurosport has considerable expertise of broadcasting large-scale, international events and the ability to unite million of fans around them. The 2013 Summer Universiade promises to be an inspiring, and highly competitive sporting event, and one that perfectly demonstrates Eurosport’s capacity to deliver an event to the fan, wherever they are on TV, mobile, tablet or PC. I look forward to watching the world-class performances from Kazan in July.”

FISU President Claude-Louis Gallien said: “With Eurosport as a partner FISU will be able to bring the Universiade to the homes of everybody who cannot be present in Kazan. Especially the parents, siblings and friends of our student-athletes will be thrilled. But also the FISU Family. Never in FISU history before will the Universiade be so extensively covered by broadcasting and available on multi-media platforms for everybody to witness. Our student-athletes will without doubt excel in front of the TV cameras and I’m pretty confident the crews from Eurosport will do the same behind those cameras sharing some exhilarating moments of international university sport with millions of viewers.”

Li Na, 2011 Roland Garros winner and 2013 Australian Open finalist told Eurosport about her experience at the 2001 Beijing Summer Universiade: “The Universiade gives university tennis players a chance to experience world level competition and meet different people. On my side I was pretty excited because I was playing in Beijing, in front of all these local fans and I said to myself ‘ok, that was pretty good tennis!’ I won singles, doubles and mixed doubles! Not bad?!”

(Source: Eurosport/FISU)