Men’s and women’s curling live at 2 a.m.? They’ve got it. Starting Friday, with 2,600 athletes from 85 nations marching in the Opening Ceremonies in Turin, Italy, NBC and family will offer 418 hours of Winter Olympics coverage.
That’s 42 1/2 hours more than from Salt Lake in 2002, with a record eight radar guns at work on the luge and bobsled runs, and an unprecedented 15,700 Nike logos on outfits worn by NBC personnel.
OK, the logo number is only a guess.
Simply put, there’s more Olympics coverage than anyone can hope to watch, around the clock, across four networks – NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and USA Network – for 16 days. NBC will automatically win primetime ratings gold for the next few weeks unless “American Idol” surges to an unprecedented win on Feb. 15. Such an upset would mean more people watching broadcast TV networks on a single night than for any non-Super Bowl event in recent history.
The time difference – 7 p.m. in Turin is 11 a.m. in Denver – means that to preserve suspense you must studiously avoid the Internet, the radio, the television and that blabbermouth in accounting.
Some 187 million Americans watched the 2002 Winter Games. NBC is hoping to do better this time out, even though the U.S. traditionally earns more medals in bathing-suit weather.
One question hovering over the production is how much emotional juice NBC can squeeze out of Michelle Kwan, skating for what is probably her final chance to win the gold medal. Dick Button and Scott Hamilton are ready to emote on our behalf. Also, there’s a new judging system to learn as we perfect our double axels from the couch.
Figure skating drives the ratings during any winter Olympics and NBC is banking on “Olympic Ice,” a new daily hour-long figure-skating show on USA. Tennis whiz Mary Carillo hosts. A tidbit to impress your friends: In a single spin, figure skaters can do 70 rotations, as many as six rotations per second. You don’t see that on “Dancing With the Stars.”
Innovation used to mean planting microphones in the snow along the slalom course and mounting tiny cameras on ski helmets for white-knuckle views. This year, innovation means athletes blogging. “Bode by Jake” is a prime example: Jacob Serino, identified by NBC Universal as “friend, RV driver, chef, European sidekick of U.S. star Bode Miller,” will not only blog but “photoblog” for the network’s online site. Just in case Miller’s not getting enough media attention on his own.
Expect real-time results on the Web, extra coverage at ESPN.com and an interactive viewer’s guide (enter your ZIP code and get local times for specific events). The network also has created “Olympic Zones” on the Internet in partnership with NBC stations to relay news of local athletes.
Bob Costas and Brian Williams co-host the opening ceremonies. Katie Couric, who had the gig with Costas from Sydney, Salt Lake and Athens, won’t be there. NBC said she’ll be absent “as she will miss this week’s Opening Ceremony rehearsals in Turin due to her live anchoring of the ‘Today’ show from Rome, Florence and Milan.” (She needs to rehearse saying “Here come the Bermudans in their shorts”?) More likely they realize it’s smart to promote news anchor Williams rather than the woman who may end up as his competitor.
Finally, we know security will be tight and NBC News and MSNBC will have big staffs on hand. But what are the contingency plans if a news event occurs outside of the planned coverage? In the current climate, viewers can’t help but consider the unthinkable.
An NBC News spokesman responded to an inquiry via e-mail: “We won’t comment on our own plans as it relates to security measures for obvious reasons, but we have complete confidence in the TOROC/IOC (Turin Organizing Committee/International Olympic Committee) security plan for Turin. The IOC has placed top priority on security issues, dating to the early ’70s.”
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
