If you were watching on TV, you couldn’t see Lindsey Vonn’s injury close up.
You could hear it, though.
As she spectacularly caught the first gate in her downhill run at the Olympics, she flew through the air and landed heavily on her left leg. The cameras maintained a wide angle, keeping a respectful distance before cutting to various shots of worried-looking spectators.
You couldn’t see any specifics. There were no close-ups of her or her injury. Nothing gruesome was shown to the live TV audience.
But the screams of pain were unmistakable, picked up a number of times by the microphones placed around the course, which usually deliver the evocative whooshing sounds of skiers hurtling down the slopes at speeds that feel inhuman.
The screams were even easier to hear as the crowd fell silent. It was pretty harrowing, and apart from anything else was an example of how difficult it is for broadcasters to cover incidents like this in a respectful, tasteful, and non-exploitative way.
Footage of Lindsey Vonn’s crash was broadcast on the big screen at the venue. (Tiziana Fabi / AFP via Getty Images)
Vonn ultimately ‘only’ suffered a fractured tibia, when at first viewing it could have been much worse. In any sport, the moment an athlete looks to have suffered a serious injury is one that those in charge of TV broadcasts have to take a deep breath and hope they get it right.
As a general rule, broadcasters in the UK adopt an approach that you might describe as proactive caution when it comes to showing potentially serious injuries. As an example, during Manchester City’s win at Liverpool last weekend, City defender Abdukodir Khusanov got an accidental boot to the head, and goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma immediately called for the physios to enter the pitch. However, Sky’s broadcast team instructed their camera operators to switch to a ‘wide’ shot and didn’t show any replays until it was clear that Khusanov wasn’t seriously hurt. Only the keenest viewer would have even spotted the incident had happened.
Sarah Cheadle has been a senior match director at Sky Sports for 20 years, and she has a mental checklist of things she looks for when she sees an incident that could be serious.
“What I do is look for a player’s reaction,” she says. “If a player can’t look at an injury or is rushing the physio on, you know it’s probably serious, even if it might look innocuous. I’ll ask my team what’s happened and how bad it is. You just have to take your time. People tune into football for entertainment and they’re not expecting to see a horrendous injury, but you can’t pretend it hasn’t happened.
Broadcasters need to make quick decisions when injuries happen. (Daniela Porcelli / Getty Images)
“You have to take some responsibility, because once the footage is out there, it’s out there. People will be watching it and rewinding it, and if it’s something horrific… you’ve got to think, ‘Would I really want to see this if I’m sat at home eating my dinner?’.”
“For example, Eduardo (the Arsenal player who suffered a broken leg after a heavy foul by Martin Taylor in 2008), it was horrible, so we showed the foul, but we froze it just before the impact — so you saw that Taylor’s boot was high up, but you didn’t show the actual break.”
A broken leg is one thing, but a potentially life-threatening situation is another entirely. Most people you speak to cite one broadcast as the gold standard in how to deal with this sort of situation: the occasion when Fabrice Muamba suffered a cardiac arrest during a televised FA Cup game between Tottenham Hotspur and Bolton in March 2012. Muamba collapsed on the pitch during the first half, and was treated by medical staff from both clubs, as well as a cardiologist who happened to be at the game as a fan, for around seven minutes before being taken to hospital.
Fabrice Muamba suffered a cardiac arrest during a televised game between Bolton and Tottenham in 2012. (Olly Greenwood / AFP via Getty Images)
Aside from roughly the first 10 seconds after Muamba collapsed, when it became clear that this was not a run-of-the-mill injury, the TV coverage on ESPN didn’t focus on the player at all. The seven minutes were instead filled with wide shots of White Hart Lane (in which the group of people surrounding Muamba were visible from a distance, but nothing more), footage of spectators in the stands, close-ups of the concerned expressions on the faces of the other players, and the officials as they decided what to do next.
This was coupled with commentary from Jon Champion, who could clearly see what was happening but instead delivered sparse updates and descriptions, keeping the viewer as informed as they needed to be, without speculating on Muamba’s condition.
“It was something you’d never hope you had to deal with,” says Grant Philips, the director who helmed the coverage for ESPN that day.
“It’s fairly straightforward for me: these players have families, mums and dads, brothers and sisters, kids, and that’s the first priority, to make sure they don’t see things they don’t need to see.
“With Muamba, we didn’t know, but it was clearly serious. He was down for a long time. I just took a beat, you saw people’s reactions and faces — I’ve got all the close-up angles, so I just need to choose what goes to air. Sometimes you just get a sense of what’s happening. You have a bigger responsibility at that point than you probably realise. Those images will be forever in history if you try to be salacious or make a name for yourself.”
There had been very little precedent for something like this on British TV. Players had collapsed in similar circumstances on the pitch before, but not in a high-profile domestic game. Unfortunately, Champion did have some prior experience, having been present in 1990 when a York City striker called David Longhurst collapsed and died on the pitch. Champion, ostensibly there as a fan, filed a report to BBC radio, and later learned that was how Longhurst’s parents heard the news of their son’s death.
“That’s something that’s always stayed with me,” says Champion, “and I suppose that provided a little bit of precedent for me in terms of the sensitivity of the situation, realizing that the relatives and the friends and the loved ones of the guy that was stricken on the pitch, many of them would have been watching the TV broadcast.”
Champion received widespread praise for how he handled the Muamba broadcast, but he has never watched it back. “That’s a decision made on purpose on my part. I don’t really want to watch it back, because it was for everyone concerned a fairly traumatic day.”
He pauses when he’s asked if he can look back and be pleased with how he dealt with it. “I’m certainly not pleased, because I don’t think you can be pleased in these circumstances. Relieved is probably the word that I hopefully didn’t put too many words out of place.
“I think the biggest relief was that Owen Coyle, who was the Bolton manager at the time, sought me out and said, ‘Thank you for the sensitivity with which you handled the situation’, which came after having spoken to Muamba’s family. That was the biggest sign that I hadn’t stepped over any lines or trodden into territory that I shouldn’t have got into.”
Some incidents, such as Muamba, initially look innocuous, and it’s unclear whether they’re serious. With others, it’s more obvious.
In 2017, a British Formula 4 racing driver called Billy Monger suffered a horrific-looking accident when, during a race at Donington Park, his car crashed into the back of one driven by Patrik Pasma, of Finland, travelling at around 120mph. At first glance, having seen the crash and its immediate aftermath, it would be difficult not to assume the worst.
Lewis Hurt was directing the broadcast that day for ITV. “We were broadcasting his on-board camera live,” Hurt says. “Your first instinct is what the commentators say — they’re the experts, so when they said ‘that’s horrendous, that’s awful, that’s an awful accident’, you know it’s not just your typical accident. You know it’s something serious.”
The coverage cut to an advertising break while the production team regrouped and figured out how to handle it. One thing was decided pretty quickly: no replays, at all. “We didn’t replay the crash for the rest of the show and we were on air for six hours,” says Hurt. “It was another two hours until racing started again, which we filled with old races, interviews and updates from the track. He was inside the car, on track for two hours.
“We’ve never shown the incident on ITV ever again. There’s an unwritten rule that if you feel like the incident could be very, very serious, you should not replay it. We’ve shown so many bad crashes over the years, but only after the driver has walked away. That’s part and parcel of what people enjoy about motorsport.”
One thing that is crucial in these sorts of scenarios is to avoid spreading misinformation. It’s a tightrope to walk: you have to fill the silence with something, but you can’t speculate on anything. “In journalism, your instinct is to be first,” said Hurt. “But when it’s a life-threatening injury, it’s about being right.
“At one point (the presenter) Steve Ryder said to us he’d heard from someone in the pit lane who said Monger was out of the car and been air ambulanced to hospital. We had our cameras on that side of the track, so we could say ‘that’s not true’.”
Billy Monger had both legs amputated as a result of his crash, but returned to racing the following year. (Bryn Lennon / Getty Images)
Monger was eventually extracted from the car alive, but with severe injuries that ultimately led to him having sections of both legs amputated. Remarkably, he was back racing the following year and went on to compete in the Ironman World Championships. He now works in TV.
Not all of these situations are covered with the same level of tact.
When Christian Eriksen collapsed during Denmark’s Euro 2020 game against Finland, the BBC received 6,417 complaints about how that incident was covered. Rather than immediately cutting away to more generic footage, as Philips did in the Muamba incident, there was a fairly clear — if not close-up — shot of Eriksen’s face as he was on the floor, which was after a number of other players and the referee had frantically started waving towards medical staff to get them onto the pitch, clearly signalling that something very serious was wrong. There was then aerial footage of the medics treating Eriksen, followed by a series of other medium-range shots showing what was happening.
On that occasion, as is the case with most international tournaments, the coverage wasn’t directed by the BBC, but by the central host broadcaster. The BBC could have cut away to a holding shot or gone back to the studio (which they eventually did), but in terms of the choice of shots in the standard broadcast, they were in the hands of someone else.
That someone was a French director called Jean-Jacques Amsellem, who defended his handling of the incident in an interview with L’Equipe shortly afterwards.
“As you can imagine, there is no handbook for these sorts of things,” Amsellem said. “There was a slow-motion of the scene where we can see him fall really clearly, but I immediately forced my teams not to focus on him, not to film him anymore. With more than 30 cameras in the stadium, we could have continued to do so, but at no point did we go and do close shots on him.
“Our producer was in conversations with UEFA. The instructions were clear: we were told not to do close-ups, not to film the cardiac massage, but that there was no problem with filming the surrounding emotion.”
The BBC did eventually cut back to their studio, where Gary Lineker and a panel that included a visibly upset Alex Scott continued their coverage until — and this still seems remarkable, five years on — the game resumed a couple of hours later. Lineker later apologised, but pointed out that the BBC wasn’t actually in control of what footage was broadcast.
This highlighted a cultural divide in the protocol of covering such incidents. “In some countries, they would want to see exactly what is happening on the pitch,” says Cheadle. “I absolutely wouldn’t want to see it, but there are other countries where the expectations are different. It was a strange feeling: some people were like ‘that’s horrendous’, others were ‘no, it’s fine, we want to see what’s happening on the pitch’.”
There was another example of this during the 2011 Giro d’Italia, when Belgian cyclist Wouter Weylandt crashed and suffered a serious head injury, from which he later passed away. Rather than adopting the cautious approach, Italian broadcaster RAI showed some pretty graphic shots of blood pouring from Weylandt’s head on the roadside.
There is an argument to say that the viewer shouldn’t be protected, that they should be shown everything and then left to decide for themselves what is palatable and what isn’t. But things aren’t as simple as that.
As Philips, Hurt, Cheadle and Champion have outlined, a broadcaster has to think of the loved ones of those involved: do you want to be responsible for causing them needless distress, in the name of open broadcasting?
“Once it’s out there, it’s out there,” says Cheadle. “You don’t know who’s watching: it could be kids, it could be anyone. Nowadays, it will probably come out, whether it’s on social media or whatever, but it’s whether you want to be the person who puts out a super slo-mo angle of it.”
It’s difficult to see what else the broadcasters for Vonn’s incident could have done differently. But it’s also difficult to criticise anyone who maybe doesn’t get everything quite right. It’s a live broadcast, things are happening very quickly, and ultimately the judgement comes down to a combination of instinct, common sense and compassion.
“It is a bit of a test of you as a broadcaster,” says Champion, “but I think it’s also a test of you almost as a human being, and your empathy for a fellow human in distress, and also for those who know that person who are going to be watching.”
“There are loads of protocols now,” adds Philips, “but the thing is, if you’ve got a 500-page document… it’s a live broadcast, so you don’t have time to go to page 320 to check. You just try to do the right thing.”