The Olympic Games, weighed down and distorted by corporate sponsorships and television rights fees, offer a cautionary tale for other sports. Yes, commercialism and professionalism have opened up the Olympics to athletes who never would have been able to compete back when Avery Brundage was using amateurism to exclude all but the elite from the Games. But what a cost. Nowadays skiers at the bottom of whatever hill they’ve just raced down can’t get their skis off quick enough to hold them up alongside their faces so their sponsor’s logo can be seen. It’s almost enough to make one pine for the days of ascots, emblazoned blazers, and noblesse oblige.
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In the current dog-eat-dog media environment the competition doesn’t feel obliged to let NBC keep the results secret until it decides to air the events, though admittedly NBC is offering real-time results on its Web page. I first heard that Lindsey Jacobellis had hotdogged her way from gold to silver in the women’s snowboard cross at 8:30 AM on the local CBS Radio station. You would have thought NBC would at least lead with it when the main coverage started that night. But host Bob Costas and the rest of the NBC reporters pretended the race hadn’t happened until it finally aired around 10 PM. No wonder the Olympics got trounced in the Nielsen ratings by Fox’s even more contrived and reprehensible American Idol.
When NBC wasn’t working overtime to create media heroes out of snowboarders like Shaun White, the redheaded half-pipe gold medalist known as the “Flying Tomato,” it was hyping U.S. athletes who turned out to be busts, like skier Bode Miller and the guys on the men’s hockey team. (NBC recently signed a deal with the National Hockey League and turned Olympic hockey into a cross-promotional device.) It was trying to create stars to draw in viewers instead of allowing the Games to produce them.
