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Friday, Jan 9, 2009
NBC's jingoistic provincialism is missing what the Olympics are all about -- but the Games will prevail.
Feb 11, 2002 | The Winter Olympics have made it through NBC's parochial, flag-waving take on the Opening Ceremony, and it ought to be all downhill from here.
The Salt Lake City Games are in their second full day, and the drama's already in high gear. That's inevitable. Every Olympics is the athletic equivalent of a newly discovered play by Shakespeare -- you know it's going to be great, you just don't know how. From the miracle silver medal of Home Depot's most illustrious alum, speed skater Derek Parra - sending thousands in the Low Countries gliding disconsolately over the canals -- to the tiny Italian cross-country skier Stefania Belmondo, overcoming a broken pole to kick to a thrilling victory in the 15K, to the balletic elegance of the top Russian pairs skaters, to the determined Finnish skiers who shook off the doping scandal that rocked their small nation to take the gold and silver in the Nordic Combined, we've got Games. And NBC is doing a fine job of bringing us the action.
But would someone remind whomever is in charge over there that the Olympic Games are an international event? One would have thought this was obvious, but it apparently hasn't sunk in at the Nativist Broadcasting Company, which on Friday night pandered to the lowest common denominator with embarrassingly USA-centric coverage that made the Olympics seem like America's Salute to Itself. If there were an Olympics judging committee for broadcasting, the network would be disqualified for doping the American people. The Games, and the American public, deserve better.
The red-white-and-blue note was struck from the very beginning of the prime-time broadcast, as NBC rolled out a lugubrious introductory piece whose obligatory assertion that Sept. 11 has changed everything forever, combined with the fact that the accompanying film was mostly of American athletes, set a tone of blinkered patriotism. As sweet old Jim McKay, whose emeritus status as voice of the Olympics made him the requisite choice for the quasi-official pronouncement, informed us that the "sweetly serene Games of Sydney" were "ceremonies of innocence we may never see again," an American equestrian gold medalist appeared on the screen. I attended every day of the Sydney Games, and I can safely say that that four-legged triumph, while no doubt memorable in its own way, was not one of the deathless moments of the XXVII Olympiad. Apparently in warlike times it is important for Americans to see a man on a horse.
A few moments later, following dark allusions to Sept. 11 and shots of firemen, we suddenly found ourselves in full patriotic newsreel mode, as McKay intoned, over music that suddenly swelled into full martial-inspiration mode, "In defense of liberty, [America] summoned a call to arms." We were mercifully spared shots of cavalrymen charging up the slopes of San Juan Hill.
The narrative eventually wandered back to the properly Olympic tone, ending with the affirmation that "what unites us is far greater than what divides us." But the message had been sent loud and clear: What the Olympics is really about, for reasons in which Nielsen ratings and patriotism play an equally important role, is America. America the wounded, America the heroic, America the triumphant, America the country that provides the only athletes we are really interested in - American athletes.
This just in: It is now time for quasi-official messages of national healing that accompany major sporting events to come to an end. Such messages have increasingly begun to take over the tragedy they attempt to commemorate -- the reality of Sept. 11 is buried beneath a mountain of red, white and blue treacle. The Super Bowl was bad enough (the Budweiser Clydesdales bowing their heads at the New York City skyline was offensive kitsch beyond the most fevered imaginings of Milan Kundera), but the Olympics is the last straw. Let our tragedies be our tragedies, and our ceremonies of innocence be our ceremonies of innocence. They really don't have anything to do with each other. When we come to the point where we'll never see that innocence again, we'll know it. Just ask the people of Sarajevo.
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