‘Wildly challenging’: How UFC plans to pull off White House event

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Even for background-checked and approved visitors on foot, accessing the White House is an extensive process. Multiple layers of ID checks, facial recognition, metal detectors, pat-downs, canine inspections. It isn’t quick.

Now, imagine trying to get hundreds of trucks — packed with crates, steel structures and electronic equipment — onto the grounds while satisfying all security protocols. Each trailer can take six-to-eight hours to simply proceed through screening. Never mind unloading everything and getting it where it needs to go once you’re through.

It was only one of countless logistical challenges the UFC faced while attempting to pull off one of its most ambitious efforts ever — staging an event on the White House’s south lawn this Sunday night. And some of the most stressful dilemmas — inclement weather, accommodating close to 5,000 spectators, equipment malfunctions — are likely still to come.

“It’s been wildly challenging,” said Craig Borsari, UFC’s chief content officer and executive producer who’s in charge of overseeing and directing the entire operation. “We’re pushing to the limits on this one, that’s for sure.”

Planning for the event began conceptually over a year ago and picked up pace last summer, when Borsari and his team made a series of four visits to the White House to measure and assess the area they had to work with. Each time, Borsari came away thinking the landscape was too small and unusual for what the UFC wanted to build.

The biggest problem? The south lawn is not a level surface. It slopes down from north to south by 22 feet. Using ultra-precise laser measurements, a team of engineers devised a fix that includes an intricate web of galvanized steel scaffolding behind a 30-foot wall on the southern-most edge of the lawn to level out the footprint on which everything else would be built.

The White House has its own robust teams of engineers and groundskeepers who spent several months reviewing the UFC’s plans and providing feedback until the final designs were settled. The approval and permit process then ran through a dozen different government agencies and departments from the National Parks Service, which assessed the impact on existing landscaping and trees, to the Secret Service, which needed to ensure the entire area could be secured.

The final footprint for the octagon and surrounding seating runs 222 by 278 feet — as big as possible without bumping into surrounding infrastructure. And that’s before the various support and staging areas tucked away all over, plus an entire operation at the Ellipse, a 52-acre park across the street hosting a fan festival area capable of accommodating upwards of 85,000 attendees.

“It has literally been a year of daily, if not multiple times a day, meetings, conference calls, logistics with the White House,” Borsari said. “It’s been a heavy, heavy lift.”

A central focus of the design phase was how the UFC could support all the overhead production elements typically attached to arena roofs and rafters while preserving the largest-possible window for cameras to see past the octagon and capture the White House unobstructed in the background. Lights, speakers, cables, video screens, etc. None of it can be in the shot distracting home viewers.

After an extensive search, a solution was discovered on the other side of the Atlantic. They call it “the claw,” a four-pronged, steel superstructure with long, bowing legs that extend to touch down as four corners of a 120-by-120-foot square. It was built by Stageco, a Belgian events services company, and shipped to the United States via air and sea.

According to the UFC, the claw weighs 380,000 tonnes in total — 182,000 of that being the structure itself, plus 80,000 of ballast to keep it upright. That helps support 115,000 tonnes of rigging and production elements — including over 1,000 lighting fixtures — within the 15,000-square-foot footprint. The UFC estimates the entire structure took around 1,000 hours to build.

And they built it twice. First, this April in Warwick Township, Penn., where the UFC ran a test build of the structure to confirm its dimensions, assess the timeframe required to assemble it at the White House, and configure the array of light fixtures required for the production. It was then disassembled, loaded on trucks and shipped to Washington to be built back up again.

“The structure fits perfectly,” Borsari said. “Within a quarter-inch of what we had planned. And it allows us to maximize capacity and do a lot of the production elements and enhancements that we’re looking for. It’s very, very close. We’re making some fine-tuning tweaks as we speak just to optimize some of the camera views. But it’s very close to our renderings and schematics.”

That’s what the UFC can control. What it can’t control is weather. The last time the promotion held an outdoor event was in Abu Dhabi 16 years ago when the UFC and its regional partners worked to erect a temporary arena on Yas Island. That was a much less stressful endeavour because United Arab Emirates weather is relatively predictable, even if incredibly hot.

June in D.C. is another story. Historically, average highs have ranged from 29 to 30 degrees C — an average humidity level around 70 per cent intensifies that heat — with around 12-13 centimetres of rain scattered across nine to 14 days. To keep on top of the various possibilities, the UFC has had multiple weather services and an on-site meteorologist providing daily weather pattern updates for weeks. And in recent days, they shifted to hourly reports.

There are three major atmospheric concerns: rain, high winds and lightning. Borsari’s team has undergone extensive contingency planning for each plus any combination of the three, devising processes for how information would flow to department heads with athlete relations, media partners and production operations should the UFC need to respond and react in real time to weather that develops during the event.

That contingency planning addresses how the area would be evacuated in the event of lightning, alternative broadcast positions the production crew could take up should working in the original areas prove untenable, and backup options for transmitting the live event feed to millions of homes around the world. But it’s impossible to plan for everything.

“What’s tricky is when you get into these scenarios where you’ve got rain, wind, lightning.” Borsari said. “You don’t know how long it’s going to last.”

The only thing anyone knows for certain is it’s going to be hot. An unfortunately timed heat wave engulfed Washington this week, pushing temperatures as high as 36 degrees C with extreme humidity that made it feel north of 40. Sunday isn’t projected to be quite as hot, but forecasts are calling for temperatures in the low-to-mid 30s with 70-80 per cent humidity. 

Many fighters have been training outdoors in hot climates for weeks, efforting to acclimate to the conditions. Some have been jumping in a sauna for 10 minutes amid indoor sessions to elevate their body temperature before resuming. Steve Garcia, who will experience the worst of the heat in the first fight on the card, once fought outdoors in Albuquerque and remembers the canvas getting so hot from the sun that fighters were burning the soles of their feet standing on it.

The UFC is utilizing a custom canvas cover to protect their fight surface from sun and heat damage throughout the week and has a pair of replacement canvases on hand should they be required during the event. And Sunday’s 8 p.m. ET start time was chosen to limit the amount of direct sun hitting the canvas, which is dotted all over with dark sponsorship elements that attract light.

The promotion’s biggest weather-mitigating effort sits atop the claw itself, which reaches nearly 90 feet at its apex: a 100-foot custom canopy fitted to the structure and designed to be watertight. That ought to have a cooling effect while protecting the octagon and its surrounding area from direct rain. However, considering the claw is wide open on every side, any breeze mixed with precipitation is likely to result in rain blowing under the canopy and impacting spectators in the outer bleachers.

According to Borsari, the current plan is to push forward with the show in the event of light-to-moderate rain. Anything heavier and a call will need to be made about potentially entering a delay, forcing the broadcast to potentially fill hours of airtime while a weather system passes. There’s no contingency plan in place to shift to an indoor venue, per Borsari.

The UFC also has flexibility on Sunday to move the show forward or back if it has advance knowledge of a likely weather event within the current block of time. But the nature of a weight-class sport, which provokes often dramatic dehydration practices among competitors, means there is a relatively defined window in which the event can be held while maintaining athlete safety. If timing was going to be impacted in a significant way, it likely would have needed to happen by Friday at the latest.

Borsari said the only thing on the UFC’s wish list for the event that proved infeasible was flying drones around the area to capture footage for the production. Understandably, the airspace above the White House is some of the most tightly controlled in the country, and the Secret Service is extremely sensitive to any uncrewed aircraft entering an area where scores of high-ranking American officials will be seated in open air. So, the only drones permitted anywhere near the White House will be government agency operated.

As soon as the event ends, the UFC’s team transitions into what it calls “load-out mode,” deconstructing all of its equipment and structures at both the White House and the Ellipse. That work will run around the clock for as long as a week, followed by extensive repairs to the grass surfaces beneath the venues that have been damaged by the production.

The hundreds of trucks will be packed back up. The claw will come down and be shipped back to Belgium. And Borsari and his team will breathe a sigh of relief for the first time in months. Until next time.

“Listen, I can tell you there’s no doubt (UFC president) Dana (White) will come up with an idea that will challenge us to the limits again,” Borsari said. “We enjoy it. Whether we’re on the moon or Mars, we’ll give our full effort to try to figure it out and do it to the best of our ability.”