Olympic fever has broken; Games are more than watchable but have lost some luster

Like most viewers, I've had a few beefs with NBC's coverage of the 2002 Winter Games from Salt Lake. After all, complaining about the Olympics on TV is a tradition older than women's biathlon. Overall, however, I thought NBC did a bang-up job on these Games. Which, by the way, I'm no longer watching. For nine days I did full-immersion Olympics - watching not just NBC but CNBC and even MSNBC. And then ... I just stopped. I kicked the Winter Games late Saturday afternoon. At first I wasn't sure why. Maybe I'd just had enough icy thrills and spills for one winter. As Canadian figure skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier might say, I was ready to move on. And it appears I wasn't the only one. Although NBC's ratings are much better than those logged by CBS during the Nagano Games in 1998, and the opening ceremony from Salt Lake was the most-watched ever, viewership among 18- to 34-year-olds - an age group NBC was especially keen on reaching - is lagging well behind the most comparable benchmark, set by the Albertville Games in 1992. NBC's Olympics czar is producer Dick Ebersol. Before the Salt Lake Games he promised there would be fewer of those squishy up-close-and-personal athlete profiles - not because they drive the predominantly male collective of TV critics up the wall, but because network research found they were a turn-off to young male viewers. Thus, fewer profiles and more "X Games"-inspired events that guys supposedly love, like snowboarding on the halfpipe or the short-track races aptly described by NBC's Bob Costas as "Roller Derby on ice." Led by U.S. skater Apolo Anton Ohno, short-track skating has been one of the unexpected highlights of the Salt Lake Games. Speaking of Costas, his presence as the wry and not-easily-impressed Olympics anchor was just the tonic for all the rah-rah going on around him. Watching 20-year-old Swiss ski-jumping sensation Simon Ammann on the medals stand, Costas observed, "Simon Ammann, doing a little Harry Potter there." Sure enough, next time Ammann competed, NBC flashed a picture of Harry so viewers could compare mugs. NBC had promised there would be more live coverage of the Salt Lake Games than there had been of the Sydney Games. And yet, as critics have pointed out often, most of NBC's prime-time coverage still seems to be on tape delay. On the other hand, since most viewers work during the day, is anyone really cheated by not seeing the women's downhill in real time? NBC's critics complained about the constant interruptions, which were undeniable. Some accounts have calculated the "clutter" levels (commercials plus promos) approaching 19 minutes an hour. I'm not fazed by clutter, but then, I've already seen that new Julia-Louis Dreyfus comedy and all the promos in the world aren't going to make it one iota funnier. Clutter considered, you have to hand it to the NBC production team for making these Olympics so addictively watchable. At one point on Saturday, I sat through four commercial breaks just to find out if Sweden's skiing-and-shooting sensation, Magdalena Forsberg, would finally win the gold. (She didn't.) Not long after NBC signed off that afternoon, however, I read something that broke the spell the Salt Lake Games had over me. It was a column by Phil Mushnick, the no-nonsense sportswriter for the New York Post. This was just after the International Olympic Committee announced that the Canadians, Sale and Pelletier, would be awarded gold medals in pairs figure skating. The announcement brought to a swift end the judging scandal that NBC had been covering breathlessly all week. Mushnick wrote: "In the pairs skating controversy, NBC got the kind of Olympic scandal it could sink its teeth into. ... This scandal could allow NBC some sustained Olympic outrage while still ignoring the greatest fix of all - the bribing of IOC officials that brought the Games to Salt Lake, not to mention the sites of at least the last five Olympics." He was right. Indeed, as Helen Jefferson Lenskyj draws out in rather sickening detail in her book, Inside the Olympic Industry, when the scandal involving the Salt Lake Olympic Bid Committee erupted in 1998, it led to investigations of earlier Olympic host-city bids. Later reports detailed how, for more than a decade, key IOC members had been lavished with "entertainment, gifts and services scholarships for athletes from developing countries and financial assistance, higher education and/or employment in the bid city or region for relatives of IOC members." Reforms were proposed that would end these shenanigans once and for all. They have yet to be passed. They also have yet to be mentioned, even in passing, by an NBC announcer or NBC News anchor. Does NBC really think talking about the 1998 scandal would do the Games a disservice? If anything, it would put pressure on the IOC to pass reforms and restore some of its lost luster. NBC might even win back a few viewers like me who - for whatever reason - have lost interest in the world's greatest athletic get-together. To reach Aaron Barnhart, phone (816) 234-4790 or visit the TV Barn Web site at www.tvbarn.com. @ART CAPTION:U.S. speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno won a silver in the 1,000-meter short track. @ART CREDIT:The Associated Press @ART CAPTION:Bob Costas @ART:Photos (2, color)