Olympics: A Made-for-TV Extravaganza

At a circus-like gathering of world journalists, ABC is the focus

Television news does not often compete with print in digging up investigative stories or in the subtler craft of discerning political and economic trends. But when it comes to covering visual events of known proportions (preferably grand), staged at announced times and places, TV can be informative, intimate and stirring. At its best, live TV enables millions, even billions of people to share an emotional experience. ABC has faced in the Summer Olympics the most complex task ever undertaken by an American network: it has committed technical bobbles, interpretive inanities and excessive cheerleading for the home team. Yet on the whole it has provided TV at its best, for an audience bigger than almost anyone had hoped.

Some 10,000 journalists from 140 governmental entities are in Los Angeles, among the biggest assemblages for the longest time (there were 14,000 at the four-day Democratic Convention last month) in the history of reporting. By far the most influential are the 3,500 members of ABC’s army, who produce two separate reports: the broadcast seen by Americans and tailored to them, and a neutral pictorial record of every event, about 1,300 hours in all, to be excerpted for broadcasts in the rest of the world.

The network, like many of the individuals covering or watching the Games, has at times been carried away by tides of patriotism and even chauvinism. ABC reporters have unabashedly rooted for U.S. competitors and given short shrift to the athletes of other nations. The expert commentators, almost all of them former U.S. Olympians, have been particularly prone to this. Gymnast Cathy Rigby McCoy, for example, repeatedly implied that the U.S. women gymnasts had been cheated of the team gold medal by judges who favored Rumania or China.

The pro-U.S. tilt of ABC’s coverage irritated athletes and coaches from other countries, many of whom did not realize that their fans at home were seeing a different report. On their behalf, International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch formally protested to Chief Organizer Peter Ueberroth, but later retracted after closed-door bargaining. In a statement, the I.O.C. expressed “its satisfaction with ABC . . . and felt that international broadcasters had received appropriate coverage.” In the sports that ABC has not highlighted in prime time, when attracting an audience is most urgent, coverage has tended to be a little more balanced. Boxing Reporter Howard Cosell spoke enthusiastically about athletes from a variety of nations and led the way in pointing up U.S. Welterweight Mark Breland’s first-bout unsteadiness. Equestrian Commentator Tad Coffin, a former U.S. gold medalist, described the multinational contenders in his sport with impressive authority and fairness. (Soviet coverage has been more one-sided than ABC’s: its state-run TV has carried no footage at all of the Games.)

While the choice of shots for the U.S. audience has occasionally seemed calculated to make viewers cry every few minutes, ABC has offered much more than pathos. It has persuasively conveyed the uncelebrated thrills of volleyball, the perils of equestrian cross-country, the arcane strategy of cycling, along with the explosive power of swimming and track. By recording the comic pratfalls of riders and weight lifters, the poignant stumbles of pentathlon runners in the home stretch, it has shown that sports are not as easy as the best athletes make them look. With the utter clarity of its new technique, super-slow-motion, it may revolutionize coverage of some swift-paced sports.

Electronic wizardry is, of course, no better than the people who control it, and ABC’s reportage, although wide, has been less than deep. Gymnastics Commentators Rigby McCoy and Kurt Thomas repeatedly tossed off the names of movements (Tsukahara, Strelli and Hecht) without using pretaped footage to define them. Swimming Commentator Mark Spitz was only occasionally instructive; although shorter races are often won in the turns, neither he nor ABC’s cameras demonstrated what makes a turn effective. Track Commentator O.J. Simpson added little to what viewers saw, although onetime Olympian Marty Liquori aptly explained pacing.

For these former athletes, the Olympics afford a return to public attention. For ABC reporters, the spotlight can make or break careers. Anchor Jim McKay, 62, who became the voice of the Olympics at Munich in 1972, still appears earnest and unflappable, but as at Sarajevo last winter, he seems a bit weary. A typical snatch of McKay’s sometimes repetitive prose: “This could be a historic night in the history of men’s gymnastics.” Among his potential successors, Jim Lampley comes across as better informed and shrewder than he was at Sarajevo, but the most natural and adroit performer is Kathleen Sullivan, who appears headed for a major news anchor slot. ABC’s worst efforts include Ray Gandolf’s report on buying breakfast at a trendy Los Angeles beanery (he had three frankfurters) and former U.S. Olympic Hockey Captain Mike Eruzione’s burbling about how much fruit there is for sale at Farmers Market. During the day the network seems determined to pander to the presumed interests of housewives. Thus contests were bypassed for irrelevant visits to a celebrity workout center and the Golden Door spa. The nadir may have been a demonstration by Vidal Sassoon of his hair styles for athletes; on the other hand, the coifs were a smash hit with the Olympians.

For print journalists, covering the Olympics has at times been frustrating. Although reporters were well positioned for the opening ceremonies, the action soon scattered to the 23 venues, spread over five Southern California counties. Moreover, although ABC has been able to reach nearly every winner moments after the event, other interviews have generally had to be conducted in fenced-in pens outside the dormitories, in earshot of rival journalists. Said William Gilligan of the Australian Associated Press: “Access to the athletes was better in Moscow.” Nonetheless, USA Today has put together crisp, complete coverage that includes its usual late-night results, and Syndicated Columnist Jerry Izenberg unearthed a memorably moving story about an impromptu reunion between U.S. Breaststroker Steve Lundquist and the handicapped former college roommate who taught him to value his physical gifts.

A couple of months ago, the conventional wisdom in the TV industry was that ABC had blundered in paying $225 million for rights to the Los Angeles Games and committing an additional $100 million to produce the coverage. Ratings for the Sarajevo Games had lagged well behind expectations, forcing the network to provide costly givebacks to advertisers. Moreover, daytime coverage of the Games would cut into ABC’s profitable schedule of soap operas, posing a competitive risk (see VIDEO). Although the network expected to profit both directly and by having a splendid showcase to promote fall series (as it did in 1976, when it jumped from third to first in prime-time ratings), those plans were threatened by the Soviet-led boycott, and ABC demanded a reduction in fees.

Last week, as the ratings came in, it was plain that a predominantly American Olympics was suiting American viewers just fine: ABC met its pledge to deliver about 25% of all U.S. households during prime time, and the network quietly went ahead with a scheduled $30 million payment to the organizing committee. Said an exuberant ABC Sports President Roone Arledge: “I never doubted for a moment that the Olympics would do well. This is what we have been waiting for. It is an experience trying to decide what to put on and what to leave out.” Some of those decisions may have been debatable. But ABC, and the spectacle it covers, has indeed made it seem that the Olympics are just what the audience has been waiting for. —By William A. Henry III