Hakone Ekiden produces mind boggling TV ratings yet again. 56.2 million people watched and the race averaged 17.3 million!!

Not a surprise, culture and elite level athletes on show.

NY is a huge family holiday in Japan, like Thanksgiving or Christmas here. With family gathered, it makes sense that a lot of people would put on a sporting event, rather than soap opera or game show. And it's the only domestic sporting event happening at that time of the year.

we need an event like this in the west. maybe the different shoe companies can be the teams

First off, it's during a national holiday so it's more likely to get viewers at that time and people watch it, but they don't really watch it - it's 5+ hours long for two days, the likely hood someone watches it for 30 mins is high, but very few people are watching the 10 hours non stop over two days.

If you ask people in Japan if they watch baseball or ekiden, 9 out of 10 people say baseball, there is no comparison. I wish this was not the case but it's the reality. People watch the ekiden like they watch the ball drop for new years, it's on in the background but most people aren't really watching the whole thing or paying much attention to it.

Our closest analogue is the club xc championships. A club ekiden nationals would be awesome but probably super hard to organize.

How about a team relay at a major marathon?

It might be like football on thanksgiving. It just happens to be on the family tv so everyone is “watching.” However, that’s still tons of exposure to the sport.

USATF actually had a marathon relay champs back in the Aughts. It drew for a couple of years and then fell off a cliff. One of the issues is they held it in conjunction with the Colfax Marathon in Denver, and few clubs wanted to travel from sea level for it. Hansons was a notable exception.

Also there was this in the '80s

en.wikipedia.org

America%27s_Ekiden

Open link

And, more recently, this which did not survive beyond COVID:

tracksmith.com

The Michigan Pro Ekiden | Tracksmith

Tracksmith is an independent running brand. We honor the Amateur Spirit upon which the sport was founded and champion the Running Class ??? the non-professional yet competitive runners dedicated to the pursuit of personal exc...

Open link

(Forgot this latter one had even happened until Googling just now)

Likely 99.9% of those viewers were not in the U.S.A.

sounds cool. Right now US major marathon coverage consists mostly of wheelchairs. A good start might be replacing the wheelchair coverage with coverage of the marathon running.

Agreed. With so many large companies here in the US, one would think a corporate sponsored Ekiden would work. It was tried in the 80s, didn't catch on.

The cost wouldn't even be that exorbitant, the runners can work flexible hours to allow them to train.

We do. Its called the super bowl

I got shouted down for this before, but the fact is that an ekiden is much more audience friendly than a cross country race. A cross country race is over in half and hour, and all you can follow is the individual win. Everyone else finishes in a huge mass and you have to look at spreadsheets afterwards to tell what happened. An ekiden lasts hours, like all our major sporting events. You have time to have some beers, socialize a bit. No one is going to get together to watch something that's over in half an hour. And you can actually follow what happens in each individual leg and see the drama build toward the finish. Good TV!

We have an event like this in the US. Many people watch football when their extended families get together on holidays. Well, maybe many of them are not actually watching. But they are in the room with football games on TV.

Watch a Japanese marathon broadcast sometime. Even for a lesser event like Beppu-Oita. The production value they put in these broadcasts is leaps and bounds ahead of anything you'll see for Boston, NYC, or Chicago in terms of audience engagement. This is a big reason Ekiden would fail today in the USA, we would manage to mess up the broadcast.

Just wish there was a way to watch it over in the USA, either live or on replay.

I mean sure, there's lots of ways we could mess it up. But trying an entertaining format is a step in the right direction. Right now we're applying those bad production values to a pack of guys running through the woods early on a Friday or Saturday morning.

Would never happen in a million years, but here's my idea. Everyone is already gathered around the TV to watch college sports on New Years Day. Instead of hours of bowl game pregame show, give them an option of watching some of those same schools they're already there to root for run a NCAA championship ekiden!

My daughter lives in Japan (and speaks Japanese), so our New Year's tradition is live streaming the Hakone Ekiden together, with her explaining to me what the Japanese commentators are saying.

The production effort that NHK TV puts into the race is FAR better than anything that we see in the US or the UK. The impressive tracking (sensors, many camera bikes, etc.) and knowledgeable commentators make it so much more interesting than we normally get from US commentators.

It helps a lot that the two days are book-ended by the dramatic climb/descent to Hakone, with 3000' of elevation allowing for additional drama.

There seems to be some additional staging effort that makes the race more dramatic for casual viewers, e.g., theatrical collapsing into the arms of teammates at the end of each leg, coaches yelling through speakers from following vans, choreographed water bottle drops by teammates. I don't know if the TV people instruct the teams to do all of these set pieces.