The only thing worse than the networks’ coverage of the Olympic Games is if the TV networks didn’t cover the Games. We could play a drinking game: name all the things you hate about NBC (or the BBC or ….)’s coverage of the Olympics. You’d be plastered before the athletes started marching into the stadium. The packaged, preselected narrative ruins the live experience as TV aims for the most photogenic, the most “American-looking,” the most-likely winners, and ignores most everyone else. The nightly entertainment package is full of insipid chatter by the hosts, incessant shots of family members, content-less interviews with athletes who aren’t competing, and not enough competition to show the competition. And don’t get me started on the idiotic obsession with the medal count. So much to dislike about the way the entertainment media “crafts” narratives about the sports, so much that interferes with the sports, themselves.
In fact, I was planning on a good ol’ fashioned rant about the lousy media as the Opening Ceremonies approached, but I started thinking about the history of the Games. The media changes the Games because the media curates the Games, with its intrusive format controlling the content as that guy McLuhan would say. But is it THAT different today than before?
As much as we prefer our athletes to be unsullied by the watchers, we might think about how their performance has always been about both the audience and purveyors. We want to watch; they want to compete. The media is in the middle. The media has changed the game, but it always has been doing that, from the time of the ancient Greeks to the 1896 reboot to the introduction of television to the drones and ubiquitous cameras. AI will introduce some other ruination and perversion, but…same as it ever was. There’s always been an unholy alliance between the athlete, the audience, and the curator.
Running for Zeus
The Olympics started with a footrace. The site at an Olympia site is a sacred grove, created as a place to worship Zeus and other gods. The Temple of Hera is still standing, one of the oldest Greek temples to do so, and thousands of animal figurines, charred animal bones, and bronze tripods have been found as proof that this was originally a religious site. It was created centuries before 776 B.C.E., making offerings, accepting pilgrimages, and thinking up ways to worship the Big Guy.
The classical Greek poet Pindar claimed that Hercules set up the Altis after cleaning out the Augean stables; he diverted the river, which cleared out the muck, and voila! lovely land in western Greece. Great place to put temples for Dad and Step-mom and plan some sporting contests, said Pindar. Another story says that the nearby Eleans (from Elis) created the contests, possibly because their king was told to do so by the Oracle at Delphi. Myths were the ancient media, weren’t they? Stories to curate what was happening. Homer noted that the Greeks loved ed games, and the philosopher Xenophanes said that “Victory by speed of foot is honored above all.” That might explain why the priests (and priestesses) thought it would be great to attach a footrace to the Temple of Zeus.
You might imagine the conversation: Guys, our offerings are down 20% this year because of that plague and Spartans trying to conquer their neighbors. We gotta find a way to get people back to their Zeus worship! What about a festival? People like those! Yeah, but it’s gotta honor the gods. We can’t just have a party. Hey, what about some sort of contest? The winner gets to sacrifice a goat! Brilliant! Honor to the athlete, lots of people come to watch and make offerings, we take our priestly cut, and Zeus showers blessings down. Win-win-win!
The priests marked out the first stadion, a 185m patch where a race was run (the 200m), and you can still see the track today. The first winner of the first race was Koroibos of Elis, and we know this because of the media, that is, the historian who wrote his name down on a scrap of parchment that survived to be found by archaeologists. They date it to 776 B.C.E. Within a few decades, the priests started adding contests–a 400, 2400, wrestling match, pentathlon, boxing, and chariot races–ah,well, that required some big money for an oval track. But it allowed those wealthy friends of Socrates and Pericles in the 450s to tromp out to the sacred grove, ready to fill out their betting cards. Chariot races surely meant a separate stadium, food stalls, stables, latrines for the audience (come back Hercules!), and bookies. Statues! Schmatues! You don’t have seven different lengths of chariot races just to honor Zeus or exalt the purity of athletic competition.
The Smoke-Filled Vision of 26.5 Miles
Two thousand years later, when classics-loving European aristocrats came together, they dreamed of rekindling the classical beauty and harmony of simple times. It was a lucky convergence of 19th century events. Greece had gained independence from the Ottomans in the 1820s and, therefore, allowed those brand new scientists–archaeologists–to start digging. As marble statues and painted amphyrae were pulled out by the bucketful, the sports-loving scholars dreamed of recreating those statues. Priests. Temple. Stadia. Chariot races, blah blah blah, all they could see were the poses on the chipped marble and painted Grecian urns.
The idea of rebooting the Olympics came out of a conference in 1892, ostensibly to deal with how to get of those pesky professionals in sport, but which turned on the crazy idea of Pierre de Coubertin. At the final dinner, as they sat around with brandy and cigars, French professor of ancient Greece, Michel Breal, proposed a race to match the old story of the runner who went from Marathon to Athens. Legend said the runner died (he didn’t), which raised the stakes. Breal suggested bestowing a silver cup on the winner.
No one had ever run that length before in a competition. It didn’t match any Greek contest that had ever occurred. It wasn’t for the gods. There was no “tradition” to follow. It was designed purely to entertain the audience, curious about whether anyone could run that far, and to challenge the athletes, willing and stupid enough to try. The marathon was a contest curated by a bunch of wealthy men at dinner. In later Games, those men as judges and assistants would even help Dorando Pietri across the finish line in London 1908, which prompted a written rule that no one should aid a future athlete during competition. The 1896 Olympics were crafted and curated to begin with.
“Eleven Wretched Women”: The Media Makes the Message
Just where did the actual media, as opposed to inter-mediaries, enter the picture? Fans in the stands watched the actual competition, but the vast majority of people in the world read about what happened in the news media. That handful of sports journalists at the most influential papers and magazines–the Times, the Tribune, Harper’s–told everyone what happened, which means what they wrote was what happened, whether that was what happened or not.
One great example of this is the Women’s 800m in 1928. It was the first Olympics where women were permitted to compete in Track (and only so because of they created their own separate games, see Chapter Two in my book). The longest race was the 800, two laps, and eight women ran the race. It was super hot, and at the end of the race, two lay on the ground panting. Also, runners four and five fell trying to beat each other at the finish lane.
However, the next day, multiple journalists wrote stories that most of the women had collapsed. Not everyone–the Times originally posted a bland note that said the race was held and Germany’s Lina Radke won. There is video that shows what observers would have witnesses, nothing unusual. Nevertheless, the sports writers told a different story. The resulting outcry by those who read the news, as opposed to those who saw what happened, caused the IOC and track federations to ban any race for women longer than one lap, a ban that lasted until the 1960s.
The Camera Transcends
Film entered the picture starting in the 1930s, and the earliest directors saw it as making art. Leni Riefenstahl filmed the 1936 Games, and her resulting Olympia was groundbreaking. She invented camera shots, camera positions and cameras moving with the athlete, innovative uses of slow motion. The Torch Relay was created as a marketing strategy by the Nazi Olympic Organizing Executive, Carl Diem, but Riefenstahl had the bright idea to film it from the back of a moving car, which is why we know what it looked like.
The film changed the way competitions were filmed. Documentary films were also made for Rome, Tokyo, and Munich, which played in theaters and enhanced the idea that the competitions were stories to be told artistically.
While a German audience was able to watch the 1936 Games on television (!yes!), the first widespread television entry was for the 1956 Cortina Winter and Melbourne Summer Games, the latter televised in Australia. They couldn’t manage international rights or feed yet, but negotiating with Australian television created the idea of doing so. But there weren’t a lot of TVs in Australia at the time, so a lot of the viewing was done in community halls. Rome was the first time an American network paid to televise–CBS. They didn’t have satellites, so competitions were taped in Rome, edited in Paris, thrown on a plane, and flown to the US.
The Whole World is Watching
The transition from Rome to Tokyo to Munich might be described as the change from treating sports films as documentary art to treating the televising of live sports as an art in and of itself. Wilma Rudolph was the perfect subject: an athlete challenged to compete, a story that the press loved to tell, and someone the audience wanted to see. Other later stories could be created, and producers would look for it. They found it in an unlikely place in 1972, in a Russian pixie. That is, Olga Korbut.
Korbut performed a couple of unusual moves, namely standing on the parallel bars, which got her noticed by the camera. She also cried after making a mistake and seemed younger and smaller than the other women on the team, who won most of the medals. No one knows their names now or remembers watching them compete. Roone Arledge and his ABC cameramen in 1972 decided to make her the focus, and she became The Story. The director chooses the frame, and, like the journalist who first decided that the women all collapsed at the 800, that becomes the story.
Did Arledge ruin the sport by focusing on a specific athlete? Did it ruin the competition? Were we, the audience, desperate to find something more interesting than watching women swing around on a beam? People were not really interested in gymnastics before that story. That story created an interest, which led to Nadia, which led to Bela coming to the US, which led to Mary Lou Retton and the US women winning gold, which led to… Simone Biles. The Media Created the Message, but the Message then Changed the Sport.
Additionally, the Camera changed the narrative, but there already was a narrative, just a different one. For US journalists and spin-masters, it was THE SOVIET UNION UNFAIRLY WINS TOO MANY GYMNASTICS MEDALS BECAUSE THEY PAY ATHLETES AND ARE SO GOOD AT BALLET, AND IT’S HURTING US IN THE COLD WAR OF SPORT.
Or maybe it was NO ONE CARES ABOUT GYMNASTICS, THE IMPORTANT SPORTS ARE THE CLASSIC ONES LIKE SWIMMING. All along, someone has been teeing up those narratives, like HONOR THE GODS WITH YOUR COMPETITION! If we’re going to complain about it, we should know what the alternatives are.
Everyone wants to control that message, not just the American networks. In searching for one of these photos, I read that the 2022 Beijing were the “least-watched ever” (Town and Country) and had the largest audience ever for the IOC, up 5% over Peyonchang viewers. As all these voices weigh in, it may be harder to have a single viewpoint. And, while the cameras do frame the events, and the networks pre-package them for the night time audience, you can watch all the feed, and that keeps the stories in check, somewhat.
So here we are, also blanketed in technology. You could hear the drones flying around the head of the skiers on their downhill training runs and see them zipping around the rails of short-track. The main websites that will carry information about the Games have “helpful” bots that jump in front of the data, Do you want to see the medal count? do you want to see the winner of the downhill? do you want to see what I have curated for you? The technology puts the Games closer to us than ever before, but it will still attempt to package and to mediate.
It took me 10 minutes to get a picture related to camera + 2026 Olympics. I was flooded by text about the technology–all cutting-edge, the press releases swear–and videos and “we can’t show you that, it’s copyright”–and Do you want to know how to watch the Opening Ceremonies…? They’re not controlling the narrative very well, if you ask me.
Same as it ever was.
