World Athletics in new 'conversations' with Netflix as rugby suffers doc blow
Sebastian Coe has revealed World Athletics is in talks with Netflix about a second season of its Drive to Survive-style track and field documentary before the first even airs.
The news comes as Premiership Rugby learns Amazon Prime has turned down a follow-up to its Mud, Sweat and Tears docuseries as the pilot failed to attract a big enough audience.
Netflix tracked the world’s top sprint stars at and around this summer's World Athletics Championships in Budapest for a six-part series, featuring Noah Lyles and Dina Asher-Smith, to be screened ahead of the Paris Olympics.
While cash-strapped UK Athletics struggles to get a proposed project of its own off the ground, Lord Coe says appetite for the sport globally is on the rise.
“The feedback we’ve had from Netflix is interesting,” said the World Athletics’ president. “And the important thing is Netflix themselves said they were surprised.
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“Given the nature of the sports they follow - and any number of those documentaries have been really good – they were genuinely shocked by the universality, the global nature of our sport.
Drive to Survive has brought F1 legions of new fans (Netflix)“That they were sending film crews into all four corners of the globe as those 100m runners are not from half a dozen countries.
“For them, it was a really interesting process to go through and I know we are in conversation with them about an extension to that series at some stage.”
The holy grail for athletics, as with all sports, is reducing the age of its fanbase; to engage more young people.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe hopes track and field's Netflix show "will help us raise the profile of the athletes in an Olympic year" (Getty Images for World Athletics)Perhaps the most eye-catching attempt at this came in September from the NFL, who teamed up with Disney-owned Pixar to broadcast live a game between the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars in animated form.
Calling it the Toy Story Funday Football alt-cast, the match was set in Andy’s bedroom, with Woody, Buzz and other characters involved around the edges of the playing field.
Prior to that a 2022 game between San Francisco and Dallas on CBS and Nickelodeon, complete with animated elements, was the most-watched NFL Wild Card game on any network in seven years.
Britain's 2019 world 200m champion Dina Asher-Smith (PA)The Gold Standard for recent sports docs is Drive to Survive, which has brought a massive new audience to Formula One.
“I’ve got friends in the US that wouldn’t even have known what Formula One was,” said Coe. “They’re now building often the early hours of their day around watching it because of Drive to Survive.
“For us the whole drive from this point on is really focusing on what we can do to reduce the age of our fans, to get more young people involved and to make sure we understand a great deal more about the sport.
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Lyles en route to one of his three gold medals in Budapest (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)“Interestingly, this year in Budapest we did reduce the average age of people watching, certainly UK/US TV. That was back down into the 40s which was good. We’d been up around the 50s for a time.”
Rugby’s desperate need to tap into the TV doc market has taken a big hit domestically, but it has another chance with its Six Nations series, Full Contact, out next month.
The Netflix series is made by Box to Box Films, the production company responsible for Drive to Survive as well as Break Point (tennis), Full Swing (golf) and TDF: Unchained (cycling).
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