NBC’s Coverage of Olympic Track and Field

I told everyone I knew who cares even the slightest about sports or my hometown of Toledo that it was happening at 2:00 pm on Tuesday, August 7. It was the men’s high jump final, and Toledoan Erik Kynard, an alumni of my junior high and who spent his freshman year at the high school where I teach, was in the Olympic high jump final.

I had been telling people for the last three years that when this day came, Erik would be one of the last half-dozen jumpers still competing in the Olympic final. I was watching at NBCOlympics.com, I had a score sheet set up and kept the chart, and was live-tweeting and Facebooking the competition as it happened.

Toledo has had Olympians before, including gold-medal boxer named Skeeter McClure (a former student of my grandmother’s who went out of his way to introduce her to his friend, Cassius Clay), but it had been a generation since one was a real medal threat in a high-profile sport. Local media has long known how good Erik already was and how good he could be and kept him in the news. The city was plugged in on this competition and lots were watching online, and many people told me that the webstream made it so easy to follow the competition.

I got a jolt of adrenaline when Erik was the first over 2.33 meters. The weather was cold and windy and had been interfering with other athletes but not Erik–you’d better get used to it if you plan on doing high school track in Toledo–and as more and more athletes missed, it became obvious that Erik was in prime position to win an unexpected medal. A few more misses, and it was down to him and Ivan Ukhov for the gold.

I immediately contacted my sister-in-law, as the regulars at the sports bar she owns and operates are mostly graduates of Rogers High School, Erik’s alma mater. I said she needed to organize a watch party, and she sent the word out through her social media advertising.

So we all went. People were pumped. We watched. And we waited. And we waited. Finally, a small amount of high jump competition was shown and the place exploded in cheers for Erik’s serious face, goofy socks, and stern conversations with the high jump bar.

And then NBC went back to gymnastics, and we waited and waited and waited some more. I’m not a late-night kind of guy so I finally gave up and went home. The next day I was told that the remainder of the competition was shown at at 11:55pm and occupied 37 seconds of air time.

Our collective mood was joy at the success of one of our own but was deflated by irritation and annoyance. I know we were not alone, that millions upon millions of American viewers felt similarly mistreated and put upon by the most failure-prone network of the last two decades.

Erik will be on The Late Show with David Letterman tomorrow night, and I’d hazard a guess that his air time there will three to four times as long as the air time for the entire Olympic high jump competition. Four days later, NBC gave nearly four hours of live television coverage to the men’s 50 kilometer race walk–that’s right, the least interesting competition of the Olympic Games got more air time than the high jump, and by a factor of more than 100. These two points illustrate how horribly NBC mistreated not only its audience but itself, by lowering the value of the most expensive property it owns.

I’m not here to rant about NBC’s general ineptitude in showing the Olympics. There are plenty of others who have already written about how NBC simultaneously managed to get near-record numbers of Americans to watch the Games yet get them pissed off at the same time. No, I’m here to talk about how NBC in particular has screwed up its coverage of track and field and how it has screwed up the sport.

Finally an alternative

In response to an Ato Boldon tweet of a news story pumping up NBC’s massive viewership, a professional sprinter responded with “that’s because we had no other choice”. In other words, just because lots of people watched the content NBC had to offer doesn’t mean they liked the way it was presented. (And, I might add, just because they were big doesn’t mean they couldn’t have been bigger had NBC operated differently.)

I should start by saying that 2012 is literally the first time I’ve ever had to depend on NBC for coverage of the Summer Olympics. I have always lived close enough to Canada to be able to watch CBC’s coverage on its Windsor affiliate. They never tape-delay anything nor over-produce it, and commercial breaks are far fewer and shorter than on NBC’s coverage. They presume you have at least half a brain and treat you accordingly. Unfortunately, privately-owned CTV won the rights for this quadrennium and none of their affiliates are available in Toledo. So I was stuck with NBC.

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