How drone cams ship high-pace visuals and add a brand new dynamic for TV viewers – One America Information Community

[ad_1] By ANDREW DAMPF and STEVE DOUGLASUpdated 6:26 AM PST, February 13, 2026

<img decoding="async" width="800" height="533" src="https://www.oann.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/dronecam.webp" alt="Drone pilot Martin Bochatay controls a drone, left, in front of the Olympia delle Tofane course, ahead of an alpine ski, women’s World Cup downhill race, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Friday, Jan. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Alessandro Trovati)" class="wp-image-761262" srcset="https://www.oann.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/dronecam.webp 800w, https://www.oann.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/dronecam-400x267.webp 400w, https://www.oann.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/dronecam-768x512.webp 768w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px"/> Drone pilot Martin Bochatay controls a drone, left, in entrance of the Olympia delle Tofane course, forward of an alpine ski, ladies’s World Cup downhill race, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Friday, Jan. 26, 2024. (AP Picture/Alessandro Trovati)

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Standing on a tower overlooking the cliffs of the Cortina downhill course, there may be somebody who's simply as concerned within the greatest snowboarding races of the Winter Olympics as Mikaela Shiffrin and Breezy Johnson.

Martin Bochatay is the drone cam pilot for the cash photographs inside the long-lasting Tofana schuss, the slim chute between two partitions of Dolomite rock.

He's a part of a group in charge of the buzzing machines which can be flying proper behind Olympians as they go for gold on the Milan Cortina Video games, providing beautiful and high-pace visuals to TV viewers again house.

“In my thoughts, I’m not flying a drone. I’m flying with the skiers,” Bochatay advised The Related Press earlier than the Olympics. “It’s an immersive factor. … The skiers don’t see us. However I’m proper there with them. You grow to be the drone.”

Drone cams have grow to be ubiquitous in showcasing the speeds and angles of skiers, lugers, snowboarders, ski jumpers and different Winter Olympians at these Video games.

“The ability of these drone pilots is simply phenomenal,” U.S. bobsledder and flag bearer Frank Del Duca mentioned. “It will get a extremely distinctive perspective.”

Viewers have famous the buzzing noise coming from the machines, sparking the query: Is it laying aside the Olympians within the greatest second of their lives? Norwegian downhiller Kajsa Vickhoff Lie says that’s not a problem.

“No, you simply possibly hear them on the beginning, however you don’t hear them whenever you ski,” she mentioned.

The drones are tiny and zoom past 100 mphDrone cams made in inauspicious influence on Alpine snowboarding 11 years in the past when a primitive, huge machine got here crashing down from the sky and almost smashed into Austrian nice Marcel Hirscher throughout a slalom race.

Today, the drones are agile, tiny — they weigh round half a pound (250 grams) — and might simply speed up to speeds past 100 mph (greater than 170 kph).

In all of the sports activities, there are guidelines stopping the drones from overtaking the athletes, and so they should hold a secure distance behind the opponents.

Pitch, roll and yaw: methods to fly a droneThe drones truly comprise two cameras. There’s a high-quality digital camera for broadcast functions that's truly managed by the TV manufacturing unit in a truck under the course.

“They will modify whether or not it’s too brilliant, the stability, with out us doing something,” Bochatay mentioned.

Then there’s a lower-quality digital camera that the pilots use to see the place they're going. These are the pictures that the pilots see within the goggles they put on to fly the drones.

The pilots have a distant management that requires two arms to carry, and incorporates two principal switches to enter the flying instructions of pitch (front-to-back), roll (side-to-side) and yaw (vertical axis); plus throttle (up/down or altitude management).

“There’s all the time these 4,” Bochatay mentioned. “It’s not such as you transfer one then the opposite. It’s all the things on the similar time.”

There’s additionally a low-tech problem: the batteries for the drones should be modified consistently — and saved in warming instances as a result of chilly temperatures — requiring a “pit cease crew” to rapidly sub in new batteries between runs.

Flying footage might be ‘nauseating’ however beautifulTwo issues had been essential to Olympic broadcasting officers: Displaying off each the great thing about the venues and the standpoint of the athlete.

And the Worldwide Olympic Committee is delighted with the outcomes as they give the impression of being to convey viewers nearer to the motion. Perhaps too shut.

“Trying on the display within the downhill, I nearly really feel movement illness,” mentioned Pierre Ducrey, the IOC’s sports activities director. “That’s how a lot we're in a position to mission ourselves because of this new manner of broadcasting the game.”

U.S. bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor agreed.

“I’m not involved in regards to the drone or something like that,” she mentioned, “however I'll say I used to be watching the luge footage the opposite day and I used to be like, ‘That is barely nauseating.’ I don’t know if I may watch this all the best way down the run.”

Lie, the Norwegian skier, likes how the drones showcase a key facet of snowboarding: It’s cool to see the pace somewhat bit extra for the spectators.”

AP Sports activities Author Tim Reynolds contributed to this report.

ANDREW DAMPFDampf has been a Rome-based sports activities author at The AP for over 20 years, overlaying soccer, tennis, Alpine snowboarding and plenty of different occasions in Italy and past, together with 5 soccer World Cups. The Milan-Cortina Video games will mark the tenth Olympics that he has reported from.

STEVE DOUGLASDouglas is a Europe-based sports activities author who has lined a few of the world’s greatest occasions for The AP over the past 15 years, notably the lads’s soccer World Cup remaining in 2022. In addition to soccer, he handles a variety of different sports activities together with golf, cricket and rugby.