POP CULTURE: Olympics make us yearn for the days of less marketing, more drama

11:49 AM CST on Tuesday, February 21, 2006

By TOM MAURSTAD / The Dallas Morning News

One name sums up the 2006 Winter Olympics as a television event: Bode Miller.

LUCA BRUNO/AP

Bode Miller has come up empty in the medals count.

In the weeks before the Turin games, in a barrage of magazine covers and interviews, the downhill skier was transformed from a guy most people had never heard of into the next gold-medal superstar.

But halfway through the competition, Mr. Miller has failed to medal, never mind win, in every race he's entered. Change the details a little and the same can be said of other athletes – Apolo Anton Ohno, Michelle Kwan – ordained by the media and marketers as the breakout stars of the Olympics show.

Some prepackaging is necessary. The network has a lot of airtime to fill and viewers don't connect with athletics, they connect with athletes. In its television history, the Olympics have created a heroic mythology, full of ordinary characters who have achieved extraordinary things.

In the past, however, those heroes emerged during the games, not before – think of Nadia Comaneci's perfect performance at the 1976 Summer Olympics or Dorothy Hamill and her soon-to-be-a-national-craze haircut from the 1976 Winter Olympics. Mark Spitz had to win seven gold medals before he appeared on the cover of Time. But Bode Miller was on the cover of Newsweek weeks before he came in fifth in the men's downhill.

In today's media marketplace, viewers are force-fed prefabricated heroes. Profiles and highlights of sports stars synergize into commercials starring those same sports stars.

"The strategy of NBC and the major sponsors like Visa and Coca-Cola and Nike has been to anoint certain athletes as the stars and then to pitch the Olympics as a chance to see these really cool athletes succeed," says Rick Gentile, sports management professor at Seton Hall University. A former CBS Sports executive, Mr. Gentile oversaw the network's coverage of Winter Olympics in Nagano, Lillehammer and Albertville.

"But that isn't what's happened and they've given viewers no other reason to tune in."

This prepackaging of athlete-stars is just one of the ways that NBC's broadcast reflects how our celebrity-centered culture has skewed the public's Olympic experience. In water-cooler conversations, you can't miss the pang of nostalgia for the good old thrill-of-victory/agony-of-defeat days.

"I think this glitzy, glamorized treatment has kind of devalued the experience for viewers," says Robin Koval, president of the Kaplan Thaler Group, the ad agency behind the AFLAC duck. "Instead of celebrating the amateur spirit and letting performances and personalities tell the story, it's like the winners have already been decided and we get to watch them stroll down the red carpet."

This sentiment is backed by sagging ratings that belie the Olympics' reputation as "special-event television." Night after night, viewers, especially younger viewers, are turning from NBC to shows on other networks. Most telling of the trend: American Idol beat the Olympics every night the two broadcasts went up against each other.

The outcome is at first surprising. Intuition says in this age of reality TV that the Olympics should be hotter than ever. It's the ultimate reality show: Global Idol –a gathering of inspired amateurs who dream of making it big, pitted against one another. When you get down to some of the marquee events such as figure skating or ice dancing, the differences are almost nonexistent – amateur contestants performing before a panel of judges. It's Dancing With the Stars on ice.

Except that more people watched Dancing With the Stars. You could draw the same kind of parallels with Survivor with the same outcome – more people watched Survivor.

The failure of the promised few to perform up to their pre-Olympic hype is only compounded by our instant-news age when, through cable TV and the Internet, you know who won (or lost) hours before NBC's prime-time broadcast of the day's big events. Maybe with a little less celebritized brand building and a little more reality-based programming, things could be different. For instance, this could be "the Underdog Olympics," in which people who didn't have Nike-sponsored Web sites or credit-card commercials based on them – such as speed skater Joey Cheek or skier Ted Ligety – came out of nowhere to win.

But instead it's been an endless procession of Bode Miller profiles intercut with commercials urging viewers to visit www.joinbode .com. Or last week's prime-time broadcast of women's ice skating that featured Visa commercials starring Michelle Kwan, two days after she had dropped out of competition.

Marketing in this age of media saturation makes this kind of front-loading, with its potential for comic backfiring, necessary.

"Sponsors need to develop platforms that make their investments worthwhile; they can't wait to see who wins," says Steve Lauletta, president of Radiant Sports Group, an agency that coordinates sports promotions for major brands such as Pepsi and Visa. "You can never bank on a performance and if the company has done its work right, performance doesn't matter.

"But, yeah, it amounts to taking a leap of faith."

As this year's Olympics remind us, sometimes those leaps end up flops of faith. What's more, they reveal the button-pushing, knob-twirling wizard behind the curtain. American Idol may be a showbiz imitation of the Olympics' amateur talent show, but at least viewers get to choose the winners and don't know who wins until they tune in to watch. Not so with the Olympics.

The down-is-up, postmodern result is that the fake reality show seems more authentic than the real reality show.

"With that kind of disconnect at work is it any wonder that American Idol has been trouncing the Olympics in the ratings?" asks Mr. Gentile.

E-mail tmaurstad@dallasnews.com