The 29th Olympiad

Echoes of Olympia

Just as the Olympics strives to display the forefront of the world’s athletic development, it’s also quite illuminating to take a look at the Games in terms of strides made in media and communications. The Olympics is one of the most-watched sporting events in the world, second only to the FIFA World Cup (and that record will certainly be challenged, if not utterly demolished, by the Beijing Games).

The coverage of sporting events tends to have different priorities than other entertainment media; aesthetic concerns often take a backseat to clarity (Leni Reifenstahl and NFL Films notwithstanding). So like a genre television show, the emphasis is on form, not content. And what can we say about the form of Olympic coverage?

One of the main themes of this column is that as media technology continues to change, the viewer is given increasingly more and more control over what he or she watches. When the first modern Olympiad took place in 1896, the only way to experience the games was to physically be present, or to read accounts after-the-fact in newspapers. Since then, coverage of sports, including the Games, has continued to expand both in terms of the size of its audience and the breadth of its content. Radio gave the first taste of live coverage to a mass audience, while newsreels and films preserved and disseminated indelible images of the Games. And yet these tools seem rudimentary compared to what we have now—how can a few hours of footage capture the full experience of hundreds of events and thousands of athletes in competition?

The coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics is a highly controlled and extremely lucrative business involving hundreds of television networks around the world and extensive internet coverage. In the United States, the NBC network has sold over $1 billion worth of ad time during its Olympic coverage both on the air and online. This package is the most comprehensive yet, encompassing rolling coverage across nine different television channels and a website offering live streaming video of almost every single event. So if you, like me, are a fan of esoteric sports that rarely get television coverage, you are in luck: you can watch online Kateřina Emmon’s impressive win at Women’s 10m Air Rifle (the first medal of the Beijing Games), or the South Koreans dominating Women’s Archery (maintaining deadly accuracy in the face of both hecklers and pouring rain, all the while accessorizing with Hello Kitty chest and arm guards).

Another point of interest comes to the fore when watching the Olympics online, because the streaming coverage lacks commentators talking over the events; instead, there is live written commentary that appears below the screen. This wrinkle calls into question the relative usefulness of spoken commentators, something utterly ubiquitous in television sports coverage. They are normally accepted because they work to add value to sports coverage on two levels: they provide context and information for those who need it, and they attempt to inject some of the emotional presence that’s lost when watching a sporting event from your living room rather than in the arena.

However, watching the Games online again highlights the increasing sophistication of audience members when dealing with the internet and new media. Hearing the commentator on television explain what are legal target areas in sabre fencing is useful; hearing him repeat it every fifteen minutes for those just tuning in is not. Television needs to maintain a mass audience, the lowest common denominator; the internet as a collection of specialized niches doesn’t need to do the same. Information is just a click away; in a few minutes of reading I can find out what it means to be a man up in water polo, or the new scoring system used in gymnastics, all the while keeping the video feed on-screen.

This is because traditional mass media needs to splice together all its information streams into one; you either take it all or leave it. Newer media is all about increased options for the viewer—you pick and choose what works for you. This is especially interesting when it comes to spoken commentary because of the different ways a person processes the audio and video components of media. Video is discrete in that you can put information in one portion of the screen without substantially disrupting the experience in another part of the screen. This is the principle behind banner ads and pop-ups online which have also found their way to the television screen.

However, audio doesn’t operate in the same way; there’s only one frequency range that we can hear. To add new sound into the mix, you have to crowd out others. When discussing commentary, the question becomes: does the commentary add more than it takes away by drowning out the live audio of the actual participants, crowd, and environment? This was especially an important question during the opening ceremonies of the games; the $300 million production was one of the most dazzling spectacles ever shown on television. (I would, however, chastise Zhang Yimou for perpetuating the stereotype that the Chinese can fly.) But if you watched it on NBC, the musical and audio components of the ceremonies were often buried under a continuous stream of talking from the studio. After hearing Bob Costas and Matt Lauer’s intrusive and sometimes vaguely racist commentary during the opening ceremonies, access to an unmediated audio feed proves to be a godsend. Watching a live, uncommentated HD feed of the Olympics can create that often sought-after feeling of immersion: the illusion that you are really there. This, with the benefit of having the best camera angles and views that you could never get from a seat in the stands; and with the ability to instantly switch from a swimming race in the Water Cube to a cycling race in the outskirts of Beijing—it’s almost better than being there.

The crux of all this media development is that we’ve come a long way from 1896; we’ve reached near-total saturation of media coverage of the Olympic Games. With the multiplicity of channels and outlets for sports coverage, we’re entered into some Baudrillardesque hyperreality where it is possible, in a sense, to have a fuller experience of the Olympics sitting in your living room than if were actually in Beijing.

Faster, higher, stronger, indeed.

In the next article I’ll discuss a bit why everyone really watches the Olympic Games: pure, unabashed nationalism. (Suck it, France!)

© 2008 The Hypermodern.