Olympics should reel in viewers again despite the pandemic chaos

New York Magazine

"In an age of ultra-high definition and the ability to watch any sporting event anywhere in the world live on your phone, it has become a mostly accepted axiom that sports are made-for-television events," says Will Leitch. "But this is never more true than at the Olympics. The Olympics are a television show. They are more than that to the athletes involved, of course — people who have trained their entire lives to master very specific pursuits, many of which only draw mainstream coverage once every four years (or five years, in this pandemic-delayed case). But for you, me, and everybody else, they are a fortnight of mini-dramas. All those years of hard work are distilled into four-minute video pieces introducing us to an athlete, getting us hooked on their story, with the entire arc of their lives edited into bite-size chunks of programming. People experience the Olympics  in short chunks, to be forgotten about quickly before they move onto something else. They are, in their purest sense, reality TV. And if there were ever a year in which the Olympics need to be exactly that — with all the chaos and boring parts edited away — this sure is it. By every account, the Olympics are already a mess. Athletes are testing positive for COVID in growing numbers. Tokyo is in a state of emergency. Japanese citizens have been begging the Olympics to stay away for months. Major corporate sponsors, the true lifeblood of the Olympics, are already bailing; Toyota, one of the core Olympic advertisers, is pulling all commercials in Japan because they don’t want to offend the locals by even being attached to these games. No spectators are allowed at any events, which has evaporated a large swath of the revenue Tokyo had been expecting (perhaps wrongly) to be injected into its economy, and neither athletes nor media members are even allowed to exit the Olympic village and, in some cases, their cramped hotel rooms....This is the thing, though: You, the viewer, don’t have to worry about any of that. Well, sure, you can worry about it in a macro, human sense; holding an Olympics in the middle of a COVID surge in an undervaccinated nation whose citizens want absolutely nothing to do with any of this is probably something we should all be hesitant to associate ourselves with. But that’s not the way any of us are going to experience it. We’re going to experience it as good television. NBC has proven expert at shaving off Olympic unpleasantness in the past. Sochi is a case in point: Heading into the games, all anyone could talk about was how much of a terrorist target they were (and let’s not forget what was going on in Crimea and the Ukraine during the Sochi Olympic fortnight). The last Summer Olympics, in Rio, are another example: They were held amid the Zika virus, mass public discontent around Brazil’s massive spending to fund the games, and widespread questions about whether the country was actually ready to host the event. But watching at home, you wouldn’t have been privy to much of any of this. The Olympics are scrubbed for television. And the Tokyo Olympics are going to require a lot of scrubbing."

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• NBC's biggest obstacle is "the Quiet Olympics": "Will the events seem as powerful and captivating without the roar of the crowd? Can sportscasters communicate the spirit and substance of the games without the hoopla fans have come to expect?" asks Variety. NBC’s top sports executives insists they can. “We’re confident that the viewer at home won’t notice a difference,” says Pete Bevacqua, chairman of NBC Sports, tells Variety via email. “In order to compensate for no international spectators, our production team has worked for months on an elaborate plan that will allow us to bring those moments between families and Olympians together.” He adds: “We’ll have cameras in U.S. homes to gather reactions and then connect athletes with their families to share those special interactions.”
• NBC already has "sound-design plans" to make up for empty facilities: “We’ve created sound-design plans with this in mind,” says NBC Olympics executive producer Molly Solomon. “We believe there’s an opportunity to bring viewers closer to the action than ever. And it’s sports like swimming, gymnastics, track, basketball, beach volleyball, you’re going to hear the sounds of the games like you’ve never heard them before — from the thrashing and splashing in the pool to those intimate conversations between competitors and coaches.”
• How far will NBC's ratings fall?: The potential audience for consuming all those hours of Olympics coverage has shrunk in recent years.
• NBC says it won't ignore Tokyo's state of emergency and the protests over the Olympic games: “Ultimately, I hope that the focus of the story will turn to the athletes — they are the focus of the Olympics — but we certainly won’t ignore the circumstances of where we find ourselves here," says NBC News' Lester Holt.
• NBC's advertisers say that pulling their commercials are "not an option": For instance, Chris Brandt, the chief marketing officer of Chipotle, said that the situation was “not ideal,” but that the company still planned to run a campaign featuring profiles of Olympic athletes. “We do think people will continue to tune in, even without fans, as they did for all kinds of other sports,” says Brandt. “It’s going to be a diminishing factor in terms of the excitement, but we also hope that the Olympics are a bit of a unifier at a time when the country can seem to be so divided every day.”
• The pandemic impacted NBC's ability to film its signature Olympics video profiles of the athletes in training
• The Tokyo Olympics are turning into a $20 billion bust after Japan expected the Games to deliver economic windfall and global recognition 
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