It’s the nature of the sports director to use each game and show as a platform to better improve his or her craft. Yet we can only be as good as our own definition of success will allow. Sometimes that definition can become a limitation.
Welcome to the paradox of NBC’s Olympic coverage.
The achievements of NBC’s production of this year’s summer Olympics in Athens are worth lauding—the result of years of experience and a product of the network’s long-held vision for how to cover the Games. However, the limitations of this vision open the network and chairman of NBC Sports and Olympic coverage Dick Ebersol to criticism they can’t see coming, since it speaks to their blind spot.
Times have changed and so must NBC. Having watched hours of coverage and reviewed scores of articles on how NBC’s coverage fared, I’m convinced the network has both found its niche and in doing so lost some of its edge.
Winning Performance
On the plus side, NBC executed a relatively error-free series of productions of 28 different sports airing across seven networks—a grand total of 1,210 hours of television. When events dictated, they rearranged their plans, extended coverage of one event, and reduced another to make everything fit.
There were many positives. NBC did a good job of letting pictures tell the story during opening ceremonies, with less wordiness from hosts Bob Costas and Katie Couric.
The network’s use of graphics and new technology was superb. During opening ceremonies, they showed easy-to-follow factoids on each country with a listing of which ones were coming up next.
They also avoided the biggest gaffe usually made by producers and directors new to a technology: overuse. Their production teams were judicious in how they employed the new tools of their craft—using them when they had greatest impact in the storyline.
In sports like swimming, the network adeptly employed Sportsvision’s Stromotion, an effect that shows multiple snapshots of a dive on a single frame, and DiveMotion, a snapshot comparison of two dives superimposed alongside each other.
NBC used Orad technology to easily identify swimming and running lanes with countries’ flags and athletes’ graphics. They even overcame the unique challenge of outdoor lighting that constantly changed the keying of the graphics under the swimming pool.
NBC found its groove in how to cover the Games from a traditional perspective. But it’s that “traditional” part that is also the biggest disappointment: It’s what NBC didn’t do that brings them up short of the gold medal for Olympic coverage.
Why Not Gold?
Beyond solid game coverage and in spite of higher ratings, the network still takes home a silver medal for being behind the curve on coverage philosophy. Since most of NBC’s coverage can be lauded, where did they fall short?
The easiest way to answer is to consider this: What would the games have looked like if Fox Sports or ESPN had produced the broadcasts, or if executive producer Mark Burnett (Eco-Challenge and Survivor) were in the driver’s seat?
Think of what Fox has done for NFL coverage or ESPN for non-traditional sports like the X-Games events.
The late Roone Arledge from ABC strongly influenced the template for how networks cover sporting events. He was an innovator who looked at trends—not just techniques.
NBC seems stuck on a formula that was best summed up by syndicated sports columnist Norman Chad, who wrote the following in a post-Olympics wrap-up article in the Houston Chronicle:
“Ebersol uses a simple, cynical formula to broadcast the Olympics:
1 - It’s all about America.
2 - It’s all about overcoming adversity.
3 - It’s all about keeping us waiting to watch what we want to watch.
“When we cover war on TV, we’re the good guys, and the other folks are the bad guys. When we cover the Olympics, we’re the only guys; the rest of the world is cast as extras.”
What Chad is getting at is at the heart of where NBC’s coverage fell short. These games are about more than the competitors and who wins the medals.
NBC did well on showing the actual games, personal stories, and shots of Athens but there wasn’t anything “out of the box” to their coverage. Moreover, in a post-9/11 world, there wasn’t the international enlightenment we’re beginning to see in other networks’ coverage.
New Perspectives
What could NBC have done differently? Take a cue from television coverage of President Bush’s speech at the Republican National Convention.
During a moment in the President’s speech about international terrorism and the war in Iraq, one of the major networks cut to a double-box showing Bush talking live on Al Jazeera in Qatar and another Arabic network in Kuwait.
It was stunning. As Arabic characters crawled along the bottom of the screen, you suddenly heard the speech through the ears of a Middle-Eastern Muslim family who might be watching at that very moment.
They didn’t change Bush’s speech, they played to another side of the story—a perspective different from normal. This technique or something similar could easily have been employed by NBC, who in Athens had access to 17 commercial broadcasts headed to “home countries” around the globe.
In print, Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch wrote an article from the Main Press Center about the strange perspective of seeing so many different international broadcasts at the same time. Deitsch talked about simultaneously watching athletes from a dozen countries being televised to somewhere in the world.
He remarked, “Covering the Olympics from the press center is a viewing experience unlike anything you could imagine. It gives you a tutorial on sports and athletes you never see.”
In an article by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Bill Fleischman, NBC’s Ebersol rebutted critics of his coverage, saying that every medal ceremony was covered by at least one of NBC’s networks. He added, “In primetime, I can assure you that we showed a helluva lot more about foreign competitors than anybody else does.”
Ebersol mentioned that in certain contests like men’s basketball, NBC planned to show the game even if the U.S. didn’t make the gold-medal final. However, in all of this he misses the point.
Sports, Politics & Cultures
If Americans really only want to see Americans, witness how Eco-Challenge productions by Mark Burnett turns that idea upside down. Burnett took international contestants and turned up the human drama quotient by including and even playing off the politics and cultural background of the athletes.
After setting us up to know more about a culture of honor and non-emotional expression among Japanese athletes, Eco-Challenge: Morocco then showed a Japanese team carrying one of their members in an effort to finish the race. Few can forget when they fought back showing emotion in the final leg, finally to break down in tears of pain and shame when it was clear their efforts were hopeless.
Burnett showed differences in competitions have as much to do with our cultural differences as it does with our personality or life-story. Using that style, NBC might consider what it would be like to show Greek coverage of a hometown hero, along with a biography on the athlete, his culture, and reaction from a local pub. Or the network might consider cutting mid-game to live Arab television coverage of an Iraqi soccer game.
It’s fair to question if Americans are ready for this type of coverage, but when it comes to the Olympics the answer is easy. This is a sporting event with a history of transcending the usual up-close-and-personal and entering the cultural and political.
In Berlin (1936), the Olympic highlight was the success of Jesse Owens, a black man who won four gold medals in the face of Adolf Hitler’s attempt to prove Aryan racial superiority in the Games.
During the Cold War, Eastern European judges routinely scored tougher on foreigners than their own countrymen.
In Munich (1972), the games are known for the Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli athletes. In Moscow (1980) we had a U.S. Boycott due to the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan. Atlanta (1996) was plagued by the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. In Salt Lake (2000) there was a French judge figure skating scandal.
That’s not to say great athletic moments don’t come into play, they do...but on a platter that’s much more politically charged and culturally diverse than NBC’s producers are accustomed to showing us. Before 9/11 we were fine with telecasts that were highly American-centric; today things are different.
The Olympics are an amazing opportunity to see people through the eyes of a sports competition that tells much about how their cultures and politics differ from ours. The challenge may be to convince NBC brass and train frontline producers to shed the philosophy of covering the Games in standard fashion.
As NBC moves forward toward televising the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy, and the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, they’d be wise to take bigger risks and bring a more broad international perspective. Both sites are ready-made with intrigue and storylines that mix international views on religion, politics, and sports.
Hats off to you NBC for a silver medal in Athens and here’s hoping you can attain gold in the Games to come. Before you start planning, it might be wise to consider that the Olympics aren’t just a sporting event, they’re a world event.
