EDITORIAL: NBC's Winter Olympics (03/03/02)

EDITORIAL

NBC's Winter Olympics

With the passing of February came the closing of the 19th Winter Olympiad in Salt Lake City, where the world was given the chance to witness yet another international celebration of the Olympic culture embodied by athletes from around the globe.

The Ukrainian Weekly was there, eyewitness to the Olympic spirit and the spirit of its athletes and competitors - and indeed the experience was a celebration of nations and cultures from around the planet. Approximately 3,500 athletes from over 80 countries took part in 78 medal events. For two and a half weeks representatives from various national delegations, spectators and media representatives from around the globe made Utah one of the most diverse and culturally interesting geographic regions of the world.

With literally a world stage assembled, one could assume that NBC, the official rights-holding broadcaster for the United States during the 19th Winter Games, could rather easily relay stories more in tune with the Olympic spirit of international competition.

And yet, the viewers gathering Olympic information via NBC could hardly hear about the upstart Belarusian men's ice hockey team that not only upended the qualifying-round favorite in its pool, Switzerland, to move on to the quarterfinal round, but later, in a dramatic upset, beat powerhouse Sweden to move on to the semifinal round before finally losing to Canada. The story seems more than worthy of analysis on how the Belarusian team got as far as it did, and yet NBC hardly felt the need to cover the story.

Then there was the unreported story of a luger from a county where luge and luge courses are almost non-existent, which makes training for international competition understandably difficult. Ukrainian Lilia Ludan, competing in women's luge, was not even mentioned though her fifth place in the event was the highest any Ukrainian had ever finished in international competition.

The greatest shame is that those relegated to watching NBC's Olympic coverage could not watch the unlimited world TV feed provided to foreign networks owning their respective countries' Olympic TV rights.

While NBC presented tightly edited packages filled with numerous ads and slanted American stories, foreign networks such as Britain's ad-free, government-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) largely transmitted the live world feed, giving its viewers the ability to see first-hand the events as they took place.

"I laugh and say 'thank God' the rest of the world doesn't get NBC," said Martin Hopkins, who has directed BBC's Olympic TV coverage since 1988, according to a February 20 article in USA Today. "It's very sad. U.S. viewers don't know what they're missing," said Mr. Hopkins.

Indeed, much of the international broadcast community agrees with this sentiment. "It's scary how much the American broadcast media focus on their athletes alone," Yukhym Sherpanskyi, a commentator for the national television station of Ukraine, UT-1, told The Weekly.

USA Today quoted Mark Parkman, vice-president for International Sports Broadcasting, which produces the host feed, as explaining: "A country can show up with a technician and a commentator - and provide as many hours as he can talk." According to Mr. Sherpanskyi (who worked with a staff of 14), international broadcasters with minimal budgets and limited manpower do just that while providing their viewers with a much more "international" viewpoint of the Olympic Games.

What a shame that NBC, reportedly spending about $545 million, employing 3,240 workers and providing on-site anchors fronting a video-projected fireplace, couldn't do the same thing.

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