US swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, will feature prominently in a forthcoming campaign by Globo Group, the leading media group in Latin America and one of the largest in the world, to showcase its television coverage of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.

Phelps will star in an advertisement to be carried by the press in several countries around the world, highlighting record audience numbers and other triumphs won by Globo TV, which outperformed all other free-to-air channels while broadcasting the Games and related content, and SporTV, a pay TV brand owned by the Globo Group. SporTV’s channels earned the largest prime-time audience of all Brazilian pay TV channels during Rio 2016.

Closing a cycle that began by Globo TV and SporTV in 2009, when the world was told Rio de Janeiro would host the 2016 Summer Olympics, the campaign launches on September 19th with publication of a full-page ad in The New York Times headed “The Olympics are all about inspiration. You need to prepare, do your best and surpass your limits” next to Phelps’s smiling face. The ad goes on to describe how, just as the athletes trained hard in preparation for the event and surpassed themselves while competing, the channels prepared to produce the best and biggest coverage ever, surpassed all limits, and won the audience race while the Games were on air.

For Carlos Henrique Schroder, CEO of Globo TV, the coverage was successful because its team was driven by the same dedication and determination to overcome obstacles as Olympians like Phelps. “The success of the Games on Globo TV was due to the hard work done by thousands of professionals who prepared for years and gave their very best to produce this coverage, the biggest in Globo’s history,” he said. “Our daily audience rose more than 19% to 173 million, showing that Brazilians cheered, applauded and followed the event in every detail with us on all our platforms. This is an appropriate time to recall the message with which we began the whole process: ‘We’re All Olympians’. That’s not just a slogan – in real life our daily challenges prepare us to keep going, to achieve more and more, and to be increasingly relevant.”

For Alberto Pecegueiro, CEO of Globosat, a leading multichannel cable and satellite TV programmer in Brazil and responsible for the SporTV channels, “Rio 2016 was unquestionably a milestone in the history of our coverage of the Olympics, a victory won by everyone who works at Globosat. The entire team did an outstanding job. What’s more, simultaneous transmission of 16 TV channels plus 56 online channels delivering live streams over the web represented an unprecedented technological and engineering challenge, which we surmounted thanks to sound planning and several partnerships. In particular, I’d like to acknowledge the support we received from pay TV operators and sponsors.”

Phelps will donate part of his fee for starring in the international campaign to a Brazilian NGO, which is currently being selected.

In Brazil, the ad to be carried by a swathe of print and digital publications will feature pole vault gold medalist and record breaker Thiago Braz.

The ad describes the work done by Globo TV and SporTV in three distinct stages: planning, execution, and results.

Preparations lasted seven years

The first section, “We prepared”, says Globo Group, the leading media group in Latin America and one of the largest in the world, spent seven years preparing for the event and mobilized over 2,000 professionals, as well as a select “Golden Team” of athletes who took part in the coverage as commentators.

The second section, “We did our best”, highlights the importance of the facility shared by Globo TV and SporTV in the Olympic Park, with a 5,380 sq. ft. studio and an 8,600 sq. ft. newsroom producing the most comprehensive coverage of a sporting event in the history of Brazilian television.

The last section, “We exceeded our limits”, says free-to-air Globo TV was watched by 173 million people and was the audience leader throughout the coverage, while SporTV’s pay channels transmitted 100% of the Games. To achieve this feat, SporTV was split into 16 simultaneous channels distributed via high-definition pay-TV operators, in addition to offering 56 online channels.

The ad also trumpets “É Campeão” (“The Champ”), one of SporTV’s flagship programs, which during Rio 2016 featured live interviews with such heroes of past Olympics as US runner Carl Lewis (winner of ten medals, nine of them gold), Romanian-born gymnast Nadia Comaneci (nine medals, five of them gold), Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor (gold medalist at Barcelona ’92) and US swimmer Mark Spitz (holder of the record for the most gold medals at a single Olympics before Phelps, and winner of 11 medals, nine of them gold).

Furthermore, according to the ad, SporTV and SporTV 2 were the most watched channels at prime time during Rio 2016, and the audience for live transmissions was 137% larger than for the previous Olympics (London 2012).

45.6 million page views in a single day

To enable more Brazilians to share the excitement of the Rio 2016 Olympics, Globo TV launched an exclusive complementary online channel that attracted more than 6.5 million viewers. Called ‘Play nos Jogos’ (‘Play the Games’), it was available throughout the event on GloboPlay, Globo’s video-on-demand (VOD) platform, as well as its sports portal GloboEsporte.com. GloboPlay’s registered user base reached 9 million and the number of sports video views soared 460% to 28.2 million. GloboEsporte.com scored a record 45.6 million page views in a single day.

SporTV’s specially created app (SporTV Rio 2016) was downloaded over a million times during the Games.

The ad’s closing message is that everyone involved, from channels to athletes and viewers, made history during Rio 2016, but the world moves on and there is still much to achieve. All this success is more than enough motivation to face the many challenges to come. What athletes teach us, the ad concludes, is that to give our best every four years we must do our very best every day.

The ad is signed by Globo TV, Latin America’s largest content provider and Brazil’s leading free-to-air TV network, winner of 14 International Emmy awards, and SporTV, the largest network of pay-TV sports channels in Brazil.