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SoundOFF: NBC, Track & Beijing

Posted August 7th, 2008 at 9:00 AM by Jesse Squire

Section: News & Results, Track & Field, SoundOFF, Columns, Olympics, Drugs In Sports

The Associated Press published an article a few weeks ago headlined No longer exalted, track slouches toward Beijing:

Track and field is slouching toward Beijing. To climb back on its pedestal, the sport needs the world to pay attention to the compelling story lines at these Summer Games, highlighted by what could be the greatest men’s 100-meter race in history and a Chinese megastar named Liu Xiang.

The story touches on a number of issues that have been discussed recently. Most telling is NBC’s treatment of track compared to other sports.

With the recent U.S. track trials and the swimming trials running concurrently, NBC chose to place Bob Costas, the face of its Olympics coverage, by the pool in Omaha, Neb., rather than trackside in Eugene, Ore.

That pecking order will be evident in China, too. During the Aug. 8-24 Olympics, swimming and gymnastics will be broadcast as they happen in prime time in the United States, even though that meant switching the start times to morning in Beijing. Track and field will be shown in the evening, but on tape — the suspense of the results gone in this wired world.

The trials in those three sports were illustrative. The overnight ratings on NBC averaged 3.9 for swimming, 3.3 for gymnastics and 3.2 for track and field.

It is a major reworking of priorities on US television that swimming and gymnastics are being made the top draw over track & field. NBC is of course tight-lipped about their reasons, leaving the rest of us to speculate, and inevitably the reason most often cited is the abundance of doping scandals in track. I’m not sure I buy it.

First of all, track’s biggest problem in America is USATF, which is woefully inept in terms of promoting track as a spectator sport. The recent USOC ultimatum to USATF is probably mostly about USATF’s rank amateurism on this front and its effect on the USOC’s bottom line. Swimming and gymnastics are smaller and tighter operations more interested in getting a bigger pie than how to slice it up.

Secondly, doping is a problem but even casual sports fans now recognize we’re no different than any other endeavor based on raw athleticism. Comedians now take potshots at baseball instead of us. The IAAF tried to get away with a clean image (rather than actually being clean) for decades and when the truth came out it hurt. Now that doping control is in the hands of others (WADA and, increasingly, law enforcement), the dirty laundry is aired in public. Cycling and now baseball are getting the same amount of pain in a much more compressed time frame, and football’s moment of truth will someday come in an even more shocking fashion. No, we must look elsewhere and from different perspectives.

Swimming has two advantages on track, one momentary and one more long-lasting. New suit technology means world records are falling with regularity in the pool, while records fall on the track with great rarity (especially at the Olympic Games). This will not last forever, but the other issue might. The globalization of track & field has resulted in a sea change in the level of US dominance which has not happened in swimming and likely never will. NBC’s jingoism is not only shrill, it is calculated.

Which brings us to another perspective, which is the non-American one. NBC was once the major TV money source for the IOC, spending more on rights than the rest of the world combined. But as with other areas of economics, Europe and Asia are becoming bigger and bigger players. Track will be on off-hours in the USA, but will be in the afternoon during the traditional European vacation period, and in prime time in Asia. In those areas, swimming and gymnastics will play second fiddle. The majority of the world’s TV money wants track over anything else, and that cannot be a bad thing anywhere but here.

I have said time and time again that track in the USA is not dead or dying, but more like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It doesn’t even know how badly it’s been wounded but cannot be killed. Times are tough, and “leadership” barely exists, but we do have one important thing: the greatest sport on the face of the earth.