Atos supporting athletes and technological innovation on road to Paris 2024

Atos has been a key technology provider for the Olympic Movement since 1989 and, as the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s lead integrator, its role is to ensure the Olympic Games are fully connected, secure and digitally-enabled. For Paris 2024, Atos is once again providing core Olympic Games systems such as for the management of accreditations and the official results service, as well as applications that include athlete entries for events, the competition schedule, workforce management, and the voting for the IOC Athletes’ Commission election.

A team of more than 700 people, both on-site and working remotely, will deliver this complex, 24/7 operation during Games time, which serves all Olympic stakeholders, from athletes and fans to broadcasters, media, workforce and volunteers. One of the key figures supervising this herculean effort will be Nacho Moros, Chief Operations Officer of Atos’s Major Events division, who is already working closely with Paris 2024, the IOC, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and the International Federations (IFs) on a comprehensive programme to test more than 150 IT applications that will be used at the Olympic Games.

Inside the Integration Testing Lab

The hub for this testing programme is a 1,000sqm building in Madrid (Spain) known as the Integration Testing Lab, where around 60 Atos experts are spearheading the test campaigns from operational units dedicated to each sport and competition venue.

“We are focusing on the results and distribution systems, making sure that everything related to data is properly tested, and is ready for the Olympic Games,” explains Moros.

To achieve this, Atos tests a range of scenarios using real data from previous Olympics and the Paris 2024 test event programme to make sure the system can handle peak periods. By the time of the Opening Ceremony on 26 July 2024, Atos expects the Integration Testing Lab to have conducted over 250,000 hours of testing.

Atos powers record registrations on volunteer portal

Atos started work on Paris 2024 as far back as 2021 – a period when, along with Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022, it was servicing an unprecedented three Olympic Games simultaneously from the same location – and Moros points to the Paris 2024 volunteer portal as an early success story and example of how Atos has innovated to help the Organising Committee.

The portal launched this year, with 300,000 people registering, and a new Atos smart system is helping to match the volunteers to the most suitable role for them among the 45,000 available positions.

“In the past this assignment needed a lot of manual work and discussion, but now we calculate we have saved 40 per cent of the time by using this technology,” Moros says. “When we are talking about this number of people and the complexity of organising the Olympic and Paralympic Games, for the organisers this is helping a lot.”

Innovation on the road to Paris 2024

Moros spoke to IOC.org from the European Games in Krakow-Małopolska, Poland, held from 21 June to 2 July 2023, where Atos served as the official Digital Technology Partner. The event serves as a key opportunity for European athletes in a range of sports to qualify for Paris 2024 – for example in breaking, where B-boy Dany (France) and B-girl India (Netherlands) booked their tickets to Paris 2024 in the men’s and women’s competitions respectively, and where Atos had the opportunity to hone its systems and build working relationships with the sport’s technical officials ahead of its Olympic debut next year.

Working with the European Olympic Committees (EOC) – the governing body for Europe’s 50 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) – and the European Broadcasting Union, the European Games also gave Atos the opportunity to test some new innovations to support athletes and help them boost their personal brand.

These included a personalised video clipping service, where athletes received short videos of them in competition delivered via the European Games app, ready to share on their social media profiles. The service was also delivered to NOCs and Sports Federations, with around 850 clips per day edited and distributed by a team of 30 Atos staff at the event broadcast centre, with thousands of clips being posted and reaching millions of viewers, boosting engagement with the event.

Another Atos innovation at the European Games was to use Blockchain technology to deliver NFT medals to all medallists via the European Games app, with all 6,500 athletes who competed at the event also receiving a digital collectible in the form of an NFT participation diploma.

Athletes at the heart of Atos’s Olympic sponsorship

Atos views supporting athletes as a key responsibility of being a TOP Partner, and the technology company even counts an Olympic champion among its staff. French rower Matthieu Androdias joined Atos as an analyst developer in 2018 and was supported by Atos on his journey to winning gold in the men’s double skulls alongside Hugo Boucheron at Tokyo 2020.

Androdias regularly inspires his Atos colleagues by sharing his views on high performance and being the best version of yourself, and is now training towards Paris 2024 along with French boxing hopeful Fatia Benmessahel, who works as an industrial engineer for Atos and recently joined the IOC’s #LetsMove campaign for Olympic Day 2023.

Just like Androdias and Benmessahel, Atos is preparing for Paris 2024 in the manner of an elite athlete, running a comprehensive testing programme while focusing on innovation to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible during Games time. And Moros believes that, when it comes to technology, he has a dedicated  team for this purpose.

“We have, of course, IT engineers, but we also have people coming from the sports world, so it’s a great combination of different skills, and for Paris 2024 we have 17 nationalities in our team,” he says. “We have people who have been working on the Olympics since 1992, and the feeling I have is that our people are proud to deliver for the IOC.”

Find out more about The Olympic Partner Programme