Olympic Inanity
NBC deserves an anti-medal.

By James A. Swan, “Media Watch” columnist for North American Hunter magazine.
February 13, 2002 11:10 a.m.

n Friday evening, more people than ever before watched the opening ceremony of an Olympic Games. They were treated to spectacle, heart-warming moments, a well-choreographed cast of thousands — and some of the most insipid, no-brainer commentary in television history.

The Olympics mark a special time in our culture, when emotions run high and both the heights and the depths of the human spirit are evident. Jim McKay can be forgiven for getting choked up on opening night. Katie Couric had the same problem; her silence said far more than the inane babble she produced the rest of the evening. In fact, through most of the opening ceremonies the networks did nothing but deluge us with vacuous observations when they could have been, say, giving unique facts about the events or human insights into the competitors. NBC had clearly spent little or no time on background research to prime their commentators, so the presiding voice-overs merely stated the obvious, hour after hour, as though addressing an audience of two-year-olds. Whoopi Goldberg or Dennis Miller could have done better; at least they know how to ad lib.

A case in point: As the national delegations entered, several flag-bearers were identified as contestants in "the skeleton." The commentators repeated what was spelled out on the screen, as if we were reading impaired, but never bothered to explain what "the skeleton" is. It turns out the skeleton is like a luge, but headfirst. It has not been part of the Olympics for 50 years. That could have been a great factoid to share on opening night, but…

Sports reporting — especially live interviews with athletes in the heat of competition — is often at the bottom of the journalistic craft. Athletes have trained for years for this shot: Their concentration is focused on performance; their emotions are peaked. If they weren't pumped they wouldn't have bothered coming. Presumably none of this had occurred to the interviewer Friday who asked an athlete if his problems with performance were due to a "jinx."

As the events have moved on, in general the live interviews have gotten no better. Imagine you're an athlete who has trained, for years, for this one moment. What would you say to questions such as (these are actual questions from the first three days):

"How do you feel?"

"Are you nervous?"

"What's going to happen today?"

"Was the pressure too much?"

"Were you pumped coming into it?"

"What were you hoping to accomplish?"

"What did your coach tell you to do?" (Besides being a distraction, this is between the coach and the athlete and is nobody else's business.)

(To the mother of an athlete:) "Mom, are you excited?"

So far, the gold medal for sports interviewing must go to Kristin Cooper, who asked U.S. downhill racer Daaron Rahlves after his event: "What happened?" After every performance, an Olympic athlete meticulously reviews and analyzes his performance in order to improve. Rahlves gave Cooper a detailed accounting that gave insight into the course, the race, and his approach to skiing. If he's free after his events, hire him.

Sports performance isn't all physical. One commentator reported that Polish ski jumper Adam Malysz was "using a sports psychologist" to help him jump better — as if this was special. It might have been newsworthy 30 or 40 years ago, but today every serious Olympic team has several team psychologists, and most athletes have their own counselors as well. Sports psychology is not just about listening to people with a problem; it teaches a whole host of skills: visualization, relaxation, concentration, mental attitude, and so on. Every athlete has a psychological strategy for competing, yet little or nothing is said about them. If the idea is to help kids who are watching, let's start asking the athletes how they prepare, and get the shrink on camera to explain the mental game — because at this stage, it's at least 80 percent mental who wins and loses.

Three days had passed before someone started using instant replay and a light pen onscreen to shed some light on the nuances of performance. This was done for ski jumping; why can't it be done for every event, to help us better understand what makes an athlete successful?

Further, most audiences know almost nothing about how judges judge. The media's experts could break out their light pens and instant replay and tell us how they would judge a performance — and why — so that we'd know better whether to boo or cheer when the numbers come up.

Maybe I'm extra-sensitive to this because I used to teach mass communications, and I practiced as a sports psychologist for a decade and worked with a number of Olympic and professional athletes. I can tell you that in general, right before or during competition athletes hate being interviewed. The interviews are distracting, and the people who get the mikes usually ask ridiculous questions. The reason athletes do agree to be interviewed, incidentally, is that they're auditioning for commercials and endorsements for after the games. Or, they want to say "hello" to someone who isn't there.

If you want live coverage of winners, why not let them give acceptance speeches, like actors at the Oscars? Approach them later, after things have cooled down, and ask them to reflect on their performance. Ask for training tips to pass along to kids, and maybe inspirational thoughts. Our local NBC affiliate, NBC3 in San Francisco, did a great piece on Saturday (before the national coverage began) with California Olympic competitors. Gold-medalist Johnny Mosely, for example, trains for moguls by hopping down the side of a steep California hill without snow, and jumping on a trampoline with his skis on. Can you see the kids out there today imitating this?

This is not a nickel-and-dime show. NBC has the time and money to interview coaches, athletes, trainers, and psychologists ahead of time. They could have trained commentators in the use of light pens. They could have asked the commentators to prepare understandable interpretive comments to help the audience know what was happening during the performance and judging. And, they could have a primed those who are conducting live interviews to ask questions that will elicit useful answers and make the athletes look good — and not interfere with their performance: "What goals did you have today?" "How does the course run?" "What about the conditions on the course?" "What should we be looking for?" and one question that interviewer Kristin Cooper asked to Daron Rahlves: "Is your life going to change as a result of this competition?"

There's enormous excitement to watching a world-class sporting event. There is also an opportunity to learn, to better understand the sports and the events. Champions may be able to not just inspire us, but pass along useful tips that can help future competitors watching — and anyone else who likes to ski or skate. If they would simply ask the athletes some intelligent questions, and treat the audience as if it has a brain, we might all gain insight and knowledge, as well as a few emotional highs, from the Games.

Right after Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann won the gold, an interviewer asked, "How did you do it?" Ammann responded with a stream of barely intelligible words — then finally just screamed for joy at the top of his lungs. That was, by far, the best answer of all.