Video: ABC Leaps for Gold Ratings

The coverage in Los Angeles sets a TV record

For four years ABC has been preparing for the XXIII Olympiad, practicing its skills, flexing its electronic muscles and pouring more than $325 million TV rights and enough new gadgets and gizmos to set up a whole new network. This week, as the Los Angeles Games begin, an expected audience of —is it possible? — 2 billion plus, over half the people on earth, will be able to judge what ABC has achieved with all that money and exertion. Never in TV history have so many events been covered over so vast an area. Says Julius Barnathan, head of ABC’s broadcast operations and engineering:

“I’ve worked at eleven political conventions and seven Olympics, and this is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Until Aug. 13, when the athletes go home, the network will have little else on its schedule but the Games: 180 hours in all, nearly 2½ times the 76½ hours it devoted to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, the last Summer Games covered by an American network. This year everything is bigger, including the problems.

Most of the major events at Montreal were concentrated within a 25-to 30-sq.-mi. area, but Los Angeles has 221 events spread over 4,500 sq. mi., from the northernmost (canoeing and rowing) near Santa Barbara to the southernmost (the endurance test of the three-day equestrian event) at San Diego, 190 miles away. Says Barnathan: “If the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City was a 1 in order of difficulty and Montreal in 1976 was an 8, then this one is about a 25.”

Making its task harder still is ABC’s obligation, under the terms of its contract with the International Olympic Committee, to supply coverage to foreign networks around the world of all the events, not just those, such as swimming and track and field, that are of particular interest to Americans. In all, 140 countries, territories and protectorates will be rooting for their favorite athletes, and ABC cameras must record every sweaty moment: a total of 1,300 hours. For the events being broadcast to Americans, the network must have parallel coverage, one neutral view for the world feed and one with red-white-and-blue lenses that will concentrate on such home-grown stars as Carl Lewis, Mary Decker and Greg Louganis.

Such an immense undertaking requires unusual effort, and ABC executives have planned for their 18 days in Los Angeles the way a general staff plans for war, marshaling a regiment of 3,500 employees. Among them: more than 50 on-air reporters and commentators headed by genial Anchorman Jim McKay, 1,500 engineers, and 250 drivers to move 902 cars, trucks and buses. “There are now so many people that I have to park three blocks away from the studio,” complains a producer for Los Angeles’ KABC-TV, which shares a parking lot with ABC’s Olympians. “I’m not going to show up at 7:30 in the morning just to find a parking place.”

The $70 million, 60,000-sq.-ft. command center, which was built in California and shipped to Sarajevo for the Winter Olympics, has been brought back home and upgraded. Now even Kublai Khan, or George Lucas, would be overwhelmed by this pleasure dome of electronic wizardry: twelve editing rooms rather than the seven used in Sarajevo, 96 videotape recorders rather than 36, and a wall of 97 TV monitors that will carry simultaneous pictures from nearly every stadium, arena, swimming pool and open field in the area.

Whatever technology or ingenuity could provide, ABC bought. At a cost of more than $150,000, it built a sleek futuristic van, 22 ft. long and 7 ft. wide, packing it with cameras and monitors to record the 26 miles and 385 yds. of the marathon. The van’s shots of runners will be supplemented by hand-held cameras on two specially adapted motorcycles moving along the marathon route. All three vehicles will be powered by electricity, since exhaust fumes might bother the athletes. To follow the rowers and canoeists without swamping them in the wake of an ordinary boat, the network constructed two nearly wakeless craft: both consist of 10-ft.-high platforms mounted atop a pair of racing shells.

All the electronic marvels would mean nothing without the right people pushing the buttons and providing the commentary.

ABC has grabbed experienced hands wherever it could find them. Experts from the BBC will direct the soccer and equestrian events, a West German will coordinate coverage of team handball and a Dutchman will be in charge of cycling. Along with its own reporters, the network has also hired a score of expert analysts, including Olympian High Jumper Dwight Stones.

So far the network has sold all but 1% of the commercial time available during the Games, at rates ranging from $45,000 for a 30-sec. spot during a weekday to $260,000 for 30 sec. during prime time. The biggest advertiser is McDonald’s (almost $30 million), followed by Coca-Cola ($27 million), and Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Sears (about $20 million each). The munching and guzzling that viewers will see between events add up to $435 million. But such figures do not tell the whole story. ABC executives have in fact taken a gigantic gamble that the 1984 Olympics will give them ratings equal to or better than those they received for the 1976 Games in Montreal. If the Summer Games bomb with viewers, the network may give rebates of free air time to its advertisers as it did after Sarajevo, when ratings were a huge disappointment, 25% below expectations. Already ABC is hedging its bets, warning the Los Angeles organizers of the Games that it might ask for a partial rebate of the $225 million in TV rights because of the Soviet boycott, which it claims may have made the Games a less important and less valuable TV property. In any case, more than money is at stake. By scrapping its regular schedule, particularly two weeks’ worth of its already faltering daytime schedule, ABC risks losing regular viewers to the other networks and possibly jeopardizing its ratings this fall and for several years to come. A great deal depends on whether Americans will be as interested in this second Los Angeles Olympiad as ABC expects. “I hooked,” says think Roone people are Arledge, going to get president of ABC News and Sports. “There hasn’t really been a Summer Olympics in eight years for this country, and there will be an emotional involvement that I don’t think people will experience until the Games have begun.” But are the executives on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue at all worried?

Disheartened by the low Sarajevo ratings?

Not in public, anyway. The most any of them will say is that Los Angeles is “a risk-taking venture.” True enough. But then so was D-day.— By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Jeff Gottlieb/Los Angeles