THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 18, 1996 TAG: 9607180485
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
DATELINE: PASADENA, CALIF. LENGTH: 115 lines
It starts with the parade of athletes from 197 countries and the lighting of the towering Olympic cauldron Friday night - 171 1/2 hours of the Atlanta summer games on NBC.
The Peacock network is promising that this Olympiad will be the easiest to watch ever.
Very viewer-friendly, says NBC. Very.
For starters, there will be fewer commercials - no more than nine minutes of pitches per hour. In past summer Olympics, 10 to 15 minutes of every hour was spoken for by sponsors.
You will see high-tech coverage such as the use of the Dive Cam during the hours when NBC focuses on the graceful, dangerous sport of diving off a board three stories high into a pool 16 feet, 5 inches deep.
NBC designed the Dive Cam to better cover an event in which the Chinese are expected to dominate. The Dive Cam, encased in a Plexiglas tube and operated on trolley tracks, follows the diver from the moment he or she leaves the platform until the diver rips through a hole in the water.
NBC is also promising slower slow-motion instant replays.
The on-screen graphics and animation, as previewed for a gathering of television writers here this week, are as good as any you see in a Disney movie. NBC will use these graphics to zoom in on 24 sites of competition such as the cyclists' Velodrome and the hilly route of the marathon.
It's almost 3-D.
Why is NBC working so hard to make watching the Olympics as painless as possible? Because it has sold $680 million in advertising to 55 companies including Coca-Cola, Reebok and AT&T by promising them that roughly one-third of all U.S. households will be watching the 78 hours of competition it will air in primetime.
``We know from our research that 90 percent of the audience will not know who the athletes are or very much about their sports,'' said NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol when he spoke to the TV press by way of satellite from Atlanta.
Ebersol's job will be to educate viewers as he entertains them.
That includes millions of women.
Wives and girlfriends may be restless and bored to tears when they share a sofa with a man watching football. But when it comes to the Olympics, women are all eyes and ears.
``In over 10,000 interviews we've done with viewers, we determined that women watch the Olympics in great numbers, at times making up 51 to 52 percent of the audience,'' said Ebersol.
``They tell us that they are drawn to the games by the idealism, purity of competition, and that they love the idea of seeing an unscripted drama in which people overcome great obstacles to succeed.''
Women love the stories that spring from the competition, said Ebersol whose negotiating helped NBC secure the TV rights for the Olympics through 2008.
``Storytelling is what our coverage will be about,'' he said.
NBC starts the games with 140 features on tape including the saga of weightlifter Andrei Chermerkin, who is seen devouring several Happy Meals (including four desserts) at a Moscow McDonald's. Better than borscht, he says.
It takes a lot of fries to muster the strength to lift 550 pounds of dead weight over your head.
From the briefing that Ebersol gave to TV writers, here is what else to expect from NBC during what amounts to a 17-day miniseries in Atlanta:
The games will be held on U.S. soil and a U.S. company will broadcast the games, but Ebersol's announcers will show no favoritism to American athletes. ``There will be no rooting,'' he said. ``No `we' and `us' against the world.''
Events will be live in primetime, principally gymnastics, swimming and basketball. The team final of synchronized swimming, everyone's favorite, will be seen in primetime on Aug. 2. No need for tape delays because Atlanta is the Eastern time zone. Primetime most nights means 7:30 p.m. until midnight followed by late-night coverage from 12:41 a.m. (after a little dose of Jay Leno) until 2:11.
Only one basketball game - the game that decides the gold medal winner - will be seen in its entirety in primetime. That's because the U.S. ``Dream Team'' is expected to crush all opponents in the preliminaries.
``We don't think that viewers want to see every dribble and dunk in a game in which the Americans are leading 116-48,'' said Ebersol. NBC will have a bit of the U.S.-Argentina game on Saturday night before midnight.
In NBC's inventory of features, there are no long travelogues as are common when the games take place in foreign lands. Said Ebersol, ``I don't think there's much about Atlanta that the viewer in Omaha doesn't already know about.''
Been wondering why the Olympics are being held in the heat of an Atlanta July, and not later in the year? Because the athletes are using Georgia Tech's dorms for living quarters, and they must be vacated in August.
The Olympics will chase away the summer rerun blues, bring millions back to the TV, and NBC will use them to promote its fall primetime lineup. But NBC had nothing to do with setting up the schedule, said Ebersol. Honest.
NBC's anchors are better known than most of the Olympic athletes, and after 17 days on the air from Atlanta, they'll be as familiar as your family. Bob Costas is the primetime anchor, Greg Gumbel is midday anchor and Jim Lampley and Hannah Storm will handle the job in late night. NBC will use more than 50 reporters in the field including Magic Johnson for some early-round basketball games.
A feature of the anchor desk at the International Broadcast Center will be video in the round - a huge cylindrical screen above the anchors. It will take 2,500 people in Atlanta and 300 in New York City to produce the coverage.
Here is how much Olympic coverage has grown since the 1964 games: That year, TV covered all the events in 15 hours. This year, NBC on July 28 and Aug. 4 will have 15-plus hours of coverage those days beginning at 7 a.m.
When Costas spoke to reporters, he said he's been studying the Olympic competitors for months, relying on 17 thick briefing books prepared by NBC researchers. By now he can probably rattle off the names of the Estonian cyclists.
``Ask me anything about kayaking,'' said Costas. ``I'm ready.''
It's the last summer Olympics for a while, if not forever, to be covered from start to finish by one network. Starting in 2000 and beyond, NBC will share coverage with the company's cable channels - CNBC and the all-news MSNBC, which was launched Monday and will be available to Cox Communications customers in Hampton Roads on Aug. 1.
NBC, which is in now in a partnership with Microsoft in the MSNBC channel, has established the NBC Olympic on-line site for computer users:-
http://ww.olympic.nbc.com.
It features day-by-day, hour-by-hour coverage of the Olympics, plus behind-the-scenes features and daily chat in the Fan Forum.
KEYWORDS: OLYMPICS 1996 by CNB