Winter sports are wildly popular in Norway, with cross-country skiing and biathlon being of particular importance. As such, at the Winter Olympics 2026, Norwegian free-to-air broadcaster NRK is bringing those two sports to viewers at home with no expense spared.

NRK is basing its presentation operations firmly in Oslo with a huge studio that will bring in reports from its teams in Italy. Its key operations in Italy, however, are going large on the two most popular winter sports in Norway.

NRK is doing a full OB at Antholz-Anterselva for the biathlon, and a fly pack and crew at in Val di Fiemme for the cross-country. These teams will be accompanied by ENG reporter crews from other key sporting sites on the ground, which will utilise the mixed zones and other positions.

The productions for the biathlon and cross-country will be done onsite in Italy, then a single feed of each sent back to Norway. All other feeds will be sent back to Oslo.

Øyvind Nyborg will be onsite in Italy directing NRK’s own feed from the biathlon. He notes: “For biathlon and the same for cross-country, we will be onsite with the production units. We’ll use the OBS feed and then we will add on our own cameras, and we’ll put on the graphics and will have a small studio position with commentators and experts and reporters and everything onsite for those [two sports]. We will use a crew of 23 at each location.”

Andreas Sommerseth is the head director for the Winter Olympics. He will be producing the final cut for broadcast, and coordinating what comes in from Italy. Sommerseth comments on the popularity of biathlon and cross-country in Norway: “These are our two main sports. We have divided the sports into different segments, based on how important [they are here], but also if you have Norwegian chances for medals. So biathlon and cross-country are the two main ones, and then we have the rest, which will be mostly controlled from Oslo, where we are building the main studio.”

Challenging logistics

Norwegian free-to-air broadcaster NRK is bringing cross-country skiing and biathlon to viewers of Milano Cortina with no expense spared

These Winter Games require a lot of resources – and are therefore cost-heavy compared to previous Games, notes Nyborg:

“Logistics is a challenge. It’s a lot more expensive to have this event around northern Italy, rather than in one city. As an example, in Vancouver in 2010, one OB van did biathlon, cross-country, ski jumping, and Nordic combined; four different sports. So that was one crew doing all that. Now that will be three crews doing that.”

Jostein Jære Fjeldskår, NRK sports department’s technical and production coordinator, is overseeing the entire production for the Winter Olympics. He says: “This is quite expensive, quite challenging. There are separate crews for everything, just because of the distance between the locations and the logistics [of moving people around]. Alpine skiing for women and for men are located so far apart that it’s impossible to use the same experts, the same pundits, the same talent, so we have to have two teams. Paris was a compact games where everything was in the same range, whereas for [Milano Cortina] it’s five or six hour drive over a couple of mountain passes to get to the other location. So that’s difficult.”

Adds Sommerseth: “It’s impossible – even though things are happening on different days and so on – [for crew to travel from location to location as the] distances are so far. So it’s going to be good for everyone; everyone is going to get some days off, so it’s lucky for them!”

On the ENG teams, Jære Fjeldskår notes: “There’s different sizes of crews, but we have I think approximately 10 other teams. And when I say team, we have everything from a single video jockey – VJ – doing curling alone, to ski jumping where we have maybe four people. And alpine skiing – of course, we have to separate the men’s and the women’s because they are located way off [from each other] in Italy – so the men’s have a team, the women’s have a team. We have a speed skating team. So we have a lot of different teams.”

Connectivity control

NRK is going to be using bonded technology for all its transmissions from Italy for Milano Cortina, except for biathlon and cross-country where it using a full OB and a flypack, respectively. Pictured here, NRK’s Oslo-based MCR

Meanwhile connectivity on the ground between sites in Italy proved to be too expensive for NRK’s budget given the scale of what it is intending to achieve at the Games, so it is relying on bonded technology to get its content home.

Says Jære Fjeldskår: “The dedicated fibre connections just within the Games from one point to the IBC is too expensive for us, so we are relying heavily on bonded technology and we’re buying the SRT feeds through the OBS sky routing package, so we get everything sent here to us from OBS, basically except for cross-country and biathlon. That means we’re doing everything here [in Oslo], but we have to rely on the public internet connection than we would like.”

The roving teams on the ground will be using LiveU technology to transmit. On connectivity, Jære Fjeldskår comments: “We are using bonded technology basically everywhere except for biathlon and cross-country. They will connect to here in Oslo where we have three control rooms in addition to the one Andreas is controlling, which are from a medium size one to a small one, where we will do athlete reactions. The priority for NRK now is we’re showing the events and then we have all the athlete reactions afterwards; that’s our main priority, so we have teams covering that.”

Nyborg says that athlete accessibility is an area that the teams on the ground in Italy are going to have to get used to. He explains: “We’re used to be able to meet athletes on the day to be able to interview them, but there are very strict rules for the Olympics. The Olympics is a different ballgame than what we are used to. This is known from before, but they have strict regulations on where and when we can meet athletes.”

However, this volume of content coming into NRK’s headquarters has been a challenge which is being overcome with technology. Nyborg says it is an area that requires more work going forwards: “Technology wise, it’s fairly doable to do everything remotely in theory, but NRK, our building, our technology is just not built for the sheer amount of content [generated by an event such as the Olympics]. It’s just too much going on. So that’s a challenge for the future.”