Sports marketing agency Infront Sports & Media responded to a DPA report from Tuesday regarding German public broadcaster ZDF's coverage of this weekend's FIS Nordic skiing event in Kuusamo, Finland. The statement said, "Infront Sports & Media has been in negotiations with SportA, which is the sports rights agency of ARD and ZDF, about extensive and long-term media rights to FIS events for several months. As a partner of all national ski federations that host FIS World Cup events, the only exception is the Austrian Ski Federation (ÖSV), Infront is collectively marketing the media rights for all FIS World Cup events in the disciplines of Alpine skiing, ski jumping, cross-country skiing, Nordic combined, snowboard and freestlye. The rights for the Finnish competitions have been completing Infront's portfolio since this year. The partnership between SportA and Infront has been a successful one in terms of utilizing media rights for a number of sporting events for many years. It became clear several weeks ago during the talks that the current contract negotiations won't be completed in time for the Finnish Nordic skiing events. As a result, we offered the media rights for the FIS events in Kuusamo to SportA -- as we usually do in such cases -- without red tape and ahead of time. Therefore, broadcast coverage of the races on ZDF this weekend would have been possible and obviously in our interest. This offer was not used" (Infront).
