Any exposure to the Olympics in my life has always filled me with dread, disappointment and enervation. I like sports! Why is everything that follows the Olympic NBC logo so stupefying? I spent some time trying to figure out why the Olympics makes me so sad.
Problem 1: the content
By their association with the ancient games the Olympics imply that they are older and more established than other major athletic events. This is false. The 1896 Olympic were a ret-con, a resurrectionist cold start with no existing real precedent. At that time, the actual complex organized professional and semi-pro “major sports” of association football (soccer), gridiron football and baseball had been well established for at least 50 years with their organic antecedents having started centuries before that.
Baseball, soccer and football are much “older” than the Olympic sports, much more advanced and much more “market tested” in that they’ve appealed to people day in day out for centuries.
What of the Olympic sports? Many of them aren’t sports and many of them aren’t that fun. Here’s the central problem with the actual sports: Most of them are either immature or false.
False sports
As we discussed in the sports essay, sports are ritualized contests distilling hunting and combat. The more your “sport” looks like a performance that is subject to the judges’ whim, the less “true” a sport is. In other words, the more you need refs to actually make the sport proceed, the less real it is.
The truest sport in the world is the dead sprint race. Two contestants line up, someone wins. Of course every sport can require neutral arbiter to agree on the facts of the matter, but the outcome of a race is not subjectively judged. Similarly with soccer or basketball: the game “judges” itself. Kids can pick up and play basketball. Kids can’t pick up and “play” figure skating to some score because the scoring only exists in the mind of the judges. I mark baseball slightly less “true” than soccer and football because of the umpire’s central role in calling strikes. (Reasonable people can disagree.)
At the end of the spectrum is something like figure skating or gymnastics floor exercise where the entire competition is a solo exhibition that can only exist as a competition by being judged and scored. Obviously gymnasts are incredibly talented athletes doing incredibly hard things and I have no doubt audience members find it compelling but it’s much closer to performance than sport.
Immature sports
The more “mature” a sport is the more evolved and weird it is. That is to say there are more expressions of teamwork, complicated interactions, charming rules, and different ways of involving projectiles. The 100 yard dash is a very true sport. But it is also extremely immature. The fastest runner wins. The end. The more involved and elaborate a sport is the more entertaining it is. Soccer, basketball, football and baseball are the world’s most popular sports because they are so mature and offer so many ways for teammates to interact, create plays and plans and move the ball between them and their opponents to the end of scoring. (That’s why they’ve supported professional infrastructures worldwide for almost two centuries now.)
There’s a reason relays is the most interesting track and field event to watch: it has an element of teamwork that elevates its maturity and thus its intrigue.
Throw the discus the farthest. Swim the fastest. These are plainly sports, but they suffer in comparison to the more mature varieties. And that’s what so much of Olympic coverage has to offer.
Rule of thumb
If you find yourself shouting “go faster!” (running, swimming) or “throw farther” (javelin, discus, shotput) at the TV it’s an immature sport. If you find yourself shouting “do something!” (skating, skateboarding, gymnastics, break dancing [!] etc) it’s a false one.
“Go faster!” = Immature.
“Do something!” = False.
This graph attempts to give a visual representation. The top right is where the angels sing. These are the sports which unsurprisingly earn and occupy our actual attention year round. The Olympic sports are mostly drawn from the remaining crescent. At the bottom right: Highly mature complex performance sports that are barely sports at all. At the top left: the dead-simple “original” sports that are just too uncomplicated to really inspire much fan interest. Can you sit through a swim meet?
What’s the worst event using this model? I’ll leave that as an exercise for now. I’m sure you can plot x and y for the usual suspects.
Problem 2: the TV coverage
The classic NBC Olympic coverage model has been to pad sports with maddening amounts of non-sports and cover it like performance instead of sports. I didn’t really fully comprehend the Olympic TV model until I went through the details of TV’s baroque performance trap and the realities of peak network TV audiences.
The Olympics treats sports as perhaps too dangerous to show on television, which makes sense when you consider the Olympics coverage model came of age in the era I described when live sports was too niche to be eligible for primetime in-season network television. The endless talking heads, the soapy “meet the family” specials, the on-location absurdities, the godawful ceremonies, Bob Costas somehow still floating above it all: all these are a pastiche of other television modalities of coverage from a time when it was inconceivable to just show sports. They needed to create a performance-based show combined with a celeb-driven network news hour because that was what was proven to carry prime time.
What kind of show did they create? As we discuss in the TV essay they created a “fireside” performance-based narrative for a wide American audience that possibly didn’t want a true sports coverage. The grandparent narrative cycle of bright young people performing for us around the fire is an ungainly weld to the sports narrative.
I found on youtube a truly cursed and amazing document: three hours of NBC’s primetime coverage from Summer 1992:
The first thing I want to draw your attention to is the moment at 32:00 where Bob Costas throws it to Dream Team highlights intercut with a “world premier” song and video from Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff.
Note 1: The idea of a staid white network host cutting to a hip-hop performance is one of those things that lazy intellects will assume to be “new” but in reality it’s been going on forever. 1992 was 32 years ago.
Note 2: This illustrates the Olympics’ primary purpose to be a performance based show, not a sports one. Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff fit the mold of young charismatic beautiful musicians. The cuts to the Dream Team are mostly happy smiling athletes. I barely see any actual plays. The vibe is “campfire talent show with the best of our youth,” not competition.
The sticky problem of nationalism and competition.
If you can stand it watch this feature at the 11 minute mark:
An endless turgid behind-the-scenes featurette about an American swimmer who lost unexpectedly in 1988 and his rival slash friend Spanish swimmer. They, uh, train together. It’s almost six minutes of screen time solely devoted to the human interest intertwined stories of very boring super-focused athletes. (Actual footage: black and white pan of his diary with voiceover: “Today, I must win.”) Out of context it seems ludicrous that something as boring as this would take up so much time in the middle of a sports jamboree full to bursting with exciting athletic contests to show the viewer. But of course for NBC wall-to-wall athletic contests is a bug, not a feature.
Later at the 37 minute mark they show the leadup to the actual race, the race, the aftermath and medal ceremony. Literally one swimming race is the only sporting event shown. It ends up taking an additional ten minutes of screen time. NBC is trying to make a performance narrative out of this, highlighting the cooperation and practice of charismatic young people leading up to their performance. The problem is that Olympic athletes don’t really have time to do or think anything interesting. The main interesting thing about them is that these two super-athletes have to get in the pool and race under the banner of their nations and only one can win. But the “rules” NBC has set for itself to keep the structure of a variety show preclude dealing with that in any kind of direct way.
I can’t put my finger on the problems of nationalism and Olympic coverage: is it that the different events with different competitors and different rivals don’t lend themselves to actual “banner vs banner” frameworks? Is NBC too skittish of overt jingoism and wary of appearing as lowbrow as to suggest any taste of us-vs-them? The Soviet Union was recently gone in 1992, so did they want to leave all that gauche cold war chauvinism behind them?
There is a soft jingoism of low excitations in this featurette anyway: we are only forced to watch this boring story because the subject is American. If we have to watch life stories surely there are some more interesting ones in the whole Olympic village.
What explains the fact that international soccer (football) is so fantastic on television and exploits nationalist banner-versus-banner conflict effortlessly? The Jerry Seinfeld routine has made “rooting for clothing” a dismissive synecdoche for modern alienated fanship in the landscape of unfettered player movements but the truth is the opposite: in the richest most mature sports contexts, people actually love rooting for clothing and always have. College football is the ultimate laundry sport. The identity of the fans is 100% tied to the college name on the uniform and they don’t care really who is down there on the field playing, as long as they win. (Reminder: 8 of the 10 biggest stadiums in the world are College Football stadiums.)
The recent Euro cup coverage didn’t spend time on endless sappy player bios, they showed video of flag-waving fans doing chants in the street hours before gametime. There’s 90 minutes of actual sports to get to so the nationalism is just a little sauce to give the actual match some flavor.
Complex (mature) sports that mirror conflict pair well with tribal, nationalistic banners and imagery. You wear your colors, you sing your songs. Sometimes it gets ugly but for the most part the fans who participate in the spectacle are having a really good time. It’s great fun. That’s what comes across to me when I see Euro football fans singing and parading through the streets. Same thing when I see any giant crowd at a college football game or the tailgating masses before it. What a blast! The dreary 1992 Olympic broadcast is so devoid of fun.
You can’t force an event to be something it isn’t. You can’t make sports a performance. Sports and performance are two different things that trigger different areas of our primitive mind. You can’t make a track meet into a variety show. You can’t promise sprinting and basketball and then show…
… A five minute tribute to the architect Gaudi that would have been a snooze on PBS: A joyless wasted segment of half baked personality-driven “culture” “journalism” centered on someone who isn’t even nominally involved in sports. This is a particularly extreme example of what happens when producers can’t commit to either performance, variety show, network news or sports.
If you watch the upcoming Olympics keep an eye out for this internal tension. It might be over. NBC has apparently promised 12 hours of network coverage and more focus on actual events. The Olympic machine doesn’t attract viewers like it used to: The last Olympics got the lowest ratings of any Olympics ever. That’s not entirely fair, of course, everything is getting lower ratings than ever. There was only one scripted show that registered above 10 million viewers in the last TV season. The top three “shows” are regular weekly football broadcasts. The College Football Championship had 25mm viewers. Nobody watches TV any more except for sports, so might NBC actually break down and treat the Olympics like sports?
So what Olympic sport is the worst?
It’s diving, of course: a purely judged event with almost no entertaining eccentricities or filigrees. Long delays of talking between bodies plunging into the water with little discernible difference over and over as numbers appear on screen.