Posted on 02/25/2002 2:56:58 PM PST by Utah Girl
The buildup to the 2002 Winter Olympics could be charitably described as bumpy. An embarrassing bidding scandal, sluggish ticket sales and the specter of terrorism fed a sense of foreboding about the Games. The anxiety seemed to mock a handmade sign hanging two weeks ago outside a house 40 miles from here in the tiny town of Mountain Green: "Welcome Olympics, Feel at Home."
By the end of the two weeks that followed, Americans were feeling more at home than ever at a Winter Olympics, relishing their mastery in new-age sports that spawned a record haul of 33 medals through the events of early tonight, broadened interest in the Winter Games and buoyed television ratings by nearly 15 percent. There was also a pervasive sense of satisfaction over a smooth logistical success amid unprecedented security.
But not everyone felt at home, or wanted, at the Salt Lake Games. What began in splendor and spiritual unity at the opening ceremony on Feb. 8 is ending with charges of a North American bias wrapped in a vehement anti-American fervor.
The breakdown of collegiality began three days into the Games, when the Canadian figure skating pair of David Pelletier and Jamie Salé were denied a gold medal that many people thought they had earned. On nearly every day since, the Olympics proceeded on dual tracks: one following the riveting, uplifting competition, the other pursuing a burgeoning backlash and undercurrent of finger-pointing.
These were the fun Olympics, the safe Olympics, the largely compact Olympics, the demographically blessed Olympics and the telegenic Olympics. In keeping with the rogue spirit of the newer sports of skeleton, snowboarding and short-track speedskating, there was a rakish appeal from the moment the Americans marched into the opening ceremony in berets and hip, baby-blue vests.
These were also the sour grapes Olympics. No result seemed official until the postevent hearing was completed. The Russian and South Korean teams protested the judging in several sports, threatening boycotts.
These were the Olympics that simultaneously managed to reverse time, reviving dormant cold war antagonisms, and to charge forward into cyberspace, as more than 16,000 angry e-mail messages from Korean fans protesting the controversial victory of the American speedskater Apolo Anton Ohno shut down the United States Olympic Committee's server.
The figure skating compromise that ultimately gave Pelletier and Salé duplicate gold medals may have been a heartwarming signature moment of the Games to many Canadians and Americans, but to other countries it was evidence of a North American news media confederation capable of strong-arming Olympic leaders.
"American journalists only print lies," Jun Myung Kyu, the South Korean short-track speedskating coach, said angrily after the foul call against a South Korean skater that led to Ohno's victory.
As the Games unfolded, the figure skating pairs decision appears to have opened the door for aggrieved national federations to protest any ruling they considered unjust.
On Thursday, the Russian delegation threatened to boycott the closing ceremony and possibly future Olympics, but it appeared soothed by Dr. Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, who agreed to receive from them a list of grievances that I.O.C. executives would consider in the months ahead.
For most Americans, however, these were the Winter Games that worked. Launched in the wake of the bidding scandal and with the burden accompanying a record budget of nearly $2 billion, the Salt Lake Games did seem to find a home in Utah.
Picabo Street, the American skier who went through an extensive rehabilitation of a badly injured knee just to compete in the Games, said: "The last four years for me have been about that one moment coming into the finish when I heard the Americans roar and saw kids' faces painted red, white and blue. That's when I felt the pride of being an American in an American Olympics."
While the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, have long been credited with reviving interest in the modern Winter Games by capturing the essence of winter climate sports with an ancient setting and simple Nordic charm, the Salt Lake Games captured a Winter Olympics popularly marching into a new century.
At a time when many wondered if the Olympics could endure or remain relevant in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks last September ? when many of its sports were deemed outdated, with its international leadership denigrated or ignored and with old world alliances threatening its credibility ? the 2002 Olympics instead broke ground, altering the way the Games are perceived.
As the most costly Olympics in history, and the first to impose vast security measures that will very likely now become routine and further increase Olympic budgets, the Salt Lake Games may also have demonstrated how difficult it will be for the International Olympic Committee to bring the Olympics to Africa and South America, as it would like to do.
Ultimately, the Salt Lake Games conferred upon the Olympic movement a modern blueprint for how to run Winter Games that are cozy, attractive to a younger audience and with significance and sizzle. Like virtually all Olympic Games, whether modern or ancient, they could not avoid quarrels, frequently with political and geographic resonance. True to form, the winners were happier than the losers, and the home team won more medals than usual.
If the Olympic movement was shaken by protests and the new ground underfoot, the Games still proceeded, for the most part, as if at home in the uncomplicated and largely unadorned mountains and valleys of Utah.
Competition: It's New Age Vs. Traditional
The Salt Lake Games expanded the demographics of the television audience, but they also exposed a split in the Winter Olympics between the traditional sports, like the biathlon and ski jumping, and the new-age sports like moguls and snowboarding that appeal to younger fans.
In the future, the networks and the I.O.C. will have to confront a competition quandary: how to balance tradition with all the wily Young Turks bucking it. More specifically, how do Olympic officials ensure that Swiss ski-jumping legends, Norwegian gold medal biathletes and champion Dutch speed skaters are not obscured by all those attention-grabbing snowboarders and short-track speedskaters.
On the surface, it was business as usual in Salt Lake City. The Nordic nations ? Norway, Sweden and Finland ? won a combined 40 medals at the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan, and 35 medals in Lillehammer in 1994. Through Friday, they had accumulated 35 medals, with Norway leading the way with 11 gold, 7 silver and 4 bronze. All but one of Norway's 22 medals came from traditional Nordic sports like Alpine skiing, biathlon and cross-country skiing.
The Netherlands continued to be seen as a speedskating power. All eight medals won by the Dutch entering tonight came on the large oval.
With 35 medals, Germany led the overall medal count, as it did in Nagano. It had won nine medals in biathlon and dominated the bobsled and luge events. Sylke Otto, the gold medalist in the women's luge singles, led three Germans to the podium during a sweep of the event.
Yet the so-called extreme sports have not only lured younger viewers to the television set in hopes of catching a glimpse of their Generation X brethren catching air out of the halfpipe, they have also given American athletes a stranglehold on newfangled, made-for-TV winter sports.
Snowboarding, skeleton, freestyle skiing, short-track speedskating and women's bobsled accounted for 15 of the 33 medals won by American athletes.
Whether it was the strains of the band Blink 182 ringing through Kelly Clark's minidisc headphones as she flew out of the halfpipe to win America's first gold medal at the 19th Winter Games or Apolo Anton Ohno's body nearly parallel to the ice as Ohno, a goateed Seattle teenager, wove around the short-track oval, these were not an old-fashioned Olympics.
Younger, hipper audiences who would not sit through a 30-kilometer cross-country skiing race were glued to television sets for Jim Shea Jr.'s 51-second, headfirst joy ride on a rattling fiberglass sled in a driving snowstorm to win a gold in the skeleton.
Nowhere was the shift in the balance of power at the Winter Games more noticeable than the night when three Americans, Ross Powers, Danny Kass and J. J. Thomas, took the podium at the medals plaza downtown, having swept the men's snowboarding halfpipe. Soon after, the Foo Fighters rocked the open-air theater, as snowboarders and their legions crowd-surfed through the night.
For all the hoopla, many I.O.C. officials questioned privately whether the 19th Winter Olympiad had become too much of a good time, and whether some of the very sports that had given birth to the Games had been overshadowed.
Television: NBC Does Its Share of Winning, Too
In televising the Salt Lake Games, NBC tried to make its broadcasts more compelling ? and more appealing to younger viewers ? by reinventing its staid Olympic formula.
It integrated live and taped events to invigorate the tempo; it showed fewer and shorter athletic profiles that shed the weepy motif of many features in Olympics past; and it appealed directly to young people by producing sports like snowboarding and aerials as if they were in ESPN's hip, rambunctious X Games, not Baron Pierre de Coubertin's Olympics.
NBC crafted its Salt Lake City production template from what went wrong at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, where ratings fell far below the network's guarantees to advertisers.
But even before NBC rewrote its playbook, it had three advantages that CBS had lacked at the 1998 Nagano Games: a domestic location, a strong American team and a traditional Olympic month to show the Olympics, unlike back-to-school and back-from-vacation September when the Sydney Games took place.
The result: through the first 15 days, NBC's prime-time Nielsen rating soared to a 19.2, 14 percent better than CBS's rating four years ago at Nagano. So far, more than 182 million people ? individuals who watched at least six minutes once during the Olympics ? have tuned in. NBC will make an estimated $75 million profit.
But the lessons learned in Salt Lake City may not be easily applied to the next three Olympics: the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, and the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.
Yes, NBC can continue with fewer profiles and can still promote and produce with viewers 18 to 34 years old uppermost in its mind. And it will no doubt add to a technical arsenal that included replays superimposing two skiers racing each other on a slalom course.
Each of the next three Olympic host cities is at least six time zones from New York, however, meaning that NBC will probably revert to heavily taped productions in prime time, as it did in Sydney.
In Athens, NBC is thinking about carrying live events on MSNBC from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern time, and an afternoon program with live coverage on NBC.
"But the majority of track and field, swimming and gymnastics will be on tape in prime time," Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports, said.
The Summer Olympics have more events than their winter counterpart, and require more time on NBC. Yet NBC has learned that broadcasting for three and a half hours in prime time (sometimes four) keeps more viewers watching for longer periods than did its five-hour broadcasts from Sydney.
Controversy: Sharing the Gold, With the Pairs Wild
Perhaps nothing helped lift the television ratings like the passions unleashed over the outcome of the pairs skating competition. Russia's Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze were awarded the gold medal in a split decision that plunged the Games into controversy.
The uproar, which turned the Canadians, Salé and Pelletier, into sought-after talk-show guests, may lead to significant changes in the rules that could enhance figure skating's credibility.
It also introduced the world to the French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne, who had impeccable credentials, and who first made and then retracted statements acknowledging pressure she felt to favor the Russians.
Under an intense public outcry, skating officials suspended Le Gougne and invented a loophole that would allow them to give a duplicate gold to Canada's popular pair, even though the investigation was far from over.
Le Gougne said in an interview today that she was lobbied and pressured by Canada to vote for the Canadian pair. When she voted instead for the Russian pair, she said she was turned into a scapegoat by senior skating officials from Canada and at least one powerful official with the International Skating Union.
The Russians blamed the American and the Canadian news media for feeding the controversy and pressuring Olympic officials to award a second pair of gold medals. As the Games progressed, the Russians, South Koreans and others began to denounce the news media bitterly; in their view, it created an environment that encouraged judges in several sports to show bias toward North American athletes.
In an attempt to prop up figure skating ? which had already been besieged by ice-dance judging scandals in the past ? the president of the I.S.U., Ottavio Cinquanta, proposed a scoring system that would abolish the magical 6.0 perfect score, and would use the marks from 7 of 14 judges, selected at random by computer, to determine the final total for a skater.
Fresh Faces: Who Will Forget Sarah Hughes
The fresh faces of Jamie Salé and David Pelletier beamed from cereal boxes in Canada even before the controversy over the pairs skating competition made them the sport's most recognized faces. But the cries of unfairness that followed their silver medal and eventually won them their own gold medal catapulted them into an international spotlight.
They were among many new faces to emerge from the Salt Lake Games, athletes who were lifted from relative anonymity to international prominence.
Sarah Hughes won a sure sweetheart's place in the heart of America when she rose from fourth in the skating short program to first after moving flawlessly through a challenging long program. This was supposed to be Michelle Kwan's moment, after she had lost four years ago in Nagano to Tara Lipinski.
In skiing aerials, Alisa Camplin of Australia flipped her way to win a gold medal, even though she had never won a major event before. Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers, an American bobsled twosome, also made an unexpected appearance in the lineup of smiling gold medalists. Flowers took up the sport only after failing to make the American track and field team for the Sydney Games, and she had been dumped as the brakewoman for another bobsledding pair last fall. She became the first African-American to win a medal at the Winter Olympics.
In another first for an increasingly diverse country, the speedskater Derek Parra became the first Mexican-American to win a medal in the Winter Olympics. Parra came off as the good guy of the Games, a new father who worked at Home Depot to support himself while training.
Jim Shea Jr. was a first of a different kind: the first third-generation Winter Olympian, whose father and grandfather had both competed. The youngest Shea, a skeleton competitor, was popular before the Games, having been chosen by his fellow American athletes to take the athletes' oath at the opening ceremony, just as his grandfather had done in 1932. But Shea had not been expected even to win a medal. He placed a photograph of his grandfather, who was killed in an automobile accident last month, in his helmet before taking off down the mountain. When he arrived at the bottom, he was in first place, having won the gold, as his grandfather had done in speedskating.
Security: Organizers' Motto Is Safety First
Years of intense planning, enhancements after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the use of 15,000 law enforcement and military personnel so far are keeping the Olympics as safe as federal officials predicted they would be.
From the beginning, the Bush administration made security at the Games a priority, underscoring it in the weeks before the opening with visits to Salt Lake City by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security. President Bush attended the opening ceremony, and Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to attend the closing ceremony on Sunday.
The huge federal investment in security ? $400 million ? reflected the enormous challenge of safeguarding the 900 square miles of northern Utah in which the Olympics took place. It resulted in a huge police and military presence, with checkpoints and magnetometers at the entrance of almost any place an Olympic athlete, official or spectator might visit, including competition sites, downtown hotels, even public plazas for nightly entertainment.
Going into the final weekend of the Games, the authorities had only garden-variety problems requiring a response, including street protesters getting a little too rambunctious, a man trying to scale the fence of the athletes' quarters, dozens of bomb scares and at least one anthrax scare.
Nothing much came of any of the problems, officials said. But the greater relief was that none of the threats so feared after Sept. 11 had materialized thus far.
Early in the Games, there were waits of 30 minutes and more to get through security and into athletic sites.
But as the days passed, the system kicked in as planned, and few complained; it became increasingly evident that security was now as visible a part of the Olympics as the five Olympic rings.
Turin 2006: For Future Reference, a New Starting Point
Organizers of the 2006 Winter Games in Turin have been impressed with the Salt Lake Olympics but will not attempt any paint-by-number reproductions of these Games.
The two Olympics, they say, will be quite different.
"We cannot copy what they did in logistics," said Franco Frattini, Italy's minister of public function, who heads the Italian government's role in the Turin Games. "But we have to find a path for the Italian Olympic Games."
Turin is eager to adopt some of Salt Lake City's innovations. Turin will have a similar nighttime ceremony for medals presentation, but not in a downtown parking lot as it was here. It will take place in Piazza Castello, the city's most famous square.
"We don't need to build a medals plaza," Valentino Castellani, president of Turin's organizing committee, said. "History built it for us."
Castellani said that after the terrorism attacks in the United States, there had been concern in Italy about how much money could be raised for the Turin Games through sponsorships. The commercial success of the Salt Lake Games, he said, "takes away some of the uncertainty after Sept. 11; they give a new starting point to the market."
He added: "My hope, my expectation in the coming four years is that the world will be better than it is now and will not require the same security."
Michael Janofsky, Kathleen McElroy, Selena Roberts, Richard Sandomir, Mike Wise and Kate Zernike also contributed to this article.
And the IOC NEVER seems to be happy. " For all the hoopla, many I.O.C. officials questioned privately whether the 19th Winter Olympiad had become too much of a good time, and whether some of the very sports that had given birth to the Games had been overshadowed." Heaven forbid anyone should have too much of a good time.
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I think one of the reasons for NBC's increased rating was they actually showed some clips of what was happening in the event even though it was tape delayed.
Fewer profiles is something that is attractive even outside the prized 18-34 year old demographics.
The technical arsenal is not what brought the viewers.
P.S. A little more curling might help as well. (I actually think curling was the sleeper sport of these Olympic games. --pun intended, though a lot more people than I expected have watched the curling and are talking about it even if only to poke fun at it. I predict a curling explosion in this country)
Translation from Times-speak: too much of the media focus goes to those American athletes. They should at least have the guts to be blunt about what they don't like!
She (Flowers) became the first African-American to win a medal at the Winter Olympics.
She's the first to win a *gold* medal, not a medal (Debi Thomas was the first African-Amerian to win a medal at the Winter Olympics). The Times should know better.
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