By Nick Butler

Over 1000 hours of television coverage is expected at the Zurich 2014 European Athletics Championships ©Zurich 2014More than 1,000 hours of live television coverage is expected from next week's 22nd European Athletics Championships in Zurich, with 35 international broadcasters across Europe expressing intentions to televise the biennial event.


It is expected that the Championships, due to begin on Tuesday (August 12) and continue for six days until the following Sunday (August 17), will feature at least 1,180 hours of coverage, of which over 1,113 will be live.

Pan-European channel Eurosport will show the majority of the action live across its 59 territories, while outside the continent, the event will be broadcast by Eurosport Asia.

This compares with a total of 1,400 hours of coverage from the 2012 European Championships in Helsinki, of which 1,115 were live.

But the total number of hours of intended coverage this time around will increase once the broadcast intentions of the remaining rights-holders are received..

Produced in partnership with European Athletics International Partner, SPAR and EBU-Eurovision, the entire event will also be streamed live with English-language commentary on the European Athletics website here.
 
Nine additional feeds will also be available here.

France's pole vault indoor world record holder and Olympic gold medallist Renaud Lavillenie will be among the biggest names competing at the European Championships in Zurich ©Getty ImagesFrance's pole vault indoor world record holder and Olympic gold medallist Renaud Lavillenie will be among the biggest names competing at the European Championships in Zurich
©Getty Images



The Championships is the biggest event in the European Athletics' calendar, with a total of 1,439 athletes from 50 National Federations entered for this year's event.

In the absence of a global outdoor championships in 2014, it is being billed as the biggest athletics event of the year.

Among the main names expected to take part are Great Britain's reigning world and Olympic 5,000 and 10,000 metre champion Mo Farah, France's Olympic pole vault gold medallist and world indoor record holder Renaud Lavillenie and the respective world and Olympic high jump winners, Bohdan Bondarenko of Ukraine and Ivan Ukhov of Russia.

The women's events will be headlined by the likes of Sweden's Ethiopian-born world 1500m champion Abeba Aregawi and Croatia's two-time world high jump champion Blanka Vlašić.

"To have more than 1,000 hours of intended live coverage of the Zurich 2014 European Athletics Championships shows that the sport of athletics remains an attractive product for television audiences in Europe," said European Athletics President Hansjörg Wirz.

"We are very pleased that in cooperation with the European Broadcasting Union, we are able to showcase the best of European Athletics with them providing the biggest platform to promote our sport on public free-to-air television channels throughout the continent."

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