ABC's Fall From Olympus

ABC HAS ALWAYS been pretty morbid. Saturday afternoon's most gripping moment was always the beginning of ABC Wide World of Sports: "the thrill of victory" (as Pele lays in a goal on a soccer field and a teammate throws him up in the air) "and the agony of defeat" as an Olympic ski-jumper slides sideways off a 70 meter jump, taking a few saplings with him on the way to the infirmary. But this year's coverage of the Winter Olympics wins the all-time Hubert-Humphrey-"I-was-a-Jew-once-myself" Poor Taste Award, not just for morbidity, but also for sexism, chauvinism, and plain stupidity.

The opening ceremonies were fairly innocuous, sometimes stirring but mostly boring. The contingents of athletes marched in wearing their hotdog winter stretchsuits littered with racing stripes. The mayor of Sapporo, Japan, where the 1972 Winter Olympics were held, downed a gulp of brandy with the "jolly burgomeister" of Innsbruck And then there were all those panning camera shots of Olympic flags and scenic valley vistas, and above all, whitecapped mountains, gray mountains, jagged mountains piercing blue skies. The next day, ABC said that 30 people had been hospitalized for bruises and broken bones suffered in the crush of people at the ceremonies. And all the rest, except for a witty and informative Pierre Salinger video piece on prices in Innsbruck, was downhill.

Just before the last practice runs for the men's downhill skiing event, for instance, ABC's skiing expert, a Canadian participant in the 1964 Games, traced through a map of the course with a pointer. "Here's where Jean-Claude Killy went off the edge in a practice run in 1964; and right there so-and-so got killed in a 1966 World Cup event; and that's called the Soldier Section because they found a dead soldier there in 1945." As if that wasn't enough, when an Italian named Stricker crashed on the course, ABC reran the film with comments like "What a tremendous crash, Wow!" Two runs later, an Austrian, Grissman, wiped-out and bounced and slid and quivered over a couple hundred yards of the course. ABC then treated us, as five other skiers took their runs, to playbacks of the crash, plus interspersed shots of Grissman being dragged off the course by ski patrollers, Grissman being loaded onto a sled, Grissman waving feebly to the crowd, Grissman being slid into a helicopter, Grissman flying up the valley. All they needed to complete the scene was the theme from M*A*S*H*.

ABC SPENT MILLIONS of dollars for the rights to broadcast the Olympics, and millions more for equipment like a studio assembled in New York, broken down for shipment, and put back together in Innsbruck. Then they assigned American sportscasters who act as if they knew nothing about winter sports to cover the events with only the help of some former participants, whom they title "experts." Frank Gifford, ex-New-York-Giants pro football player and connoisseur of Super Bowls, commented on the Olympic downhill race: "Look at all those people flocking to the slopes. You know, this event is the Super Bowl of Austria." Werner Wolf, former small town broadcaster, explained speed skating distances: "This is the 500 meter event--that's about five and a half football fields long." Curt Gowdy, on special leave from NBC's football and baseball coverage as well as a fishing buff, narrated the US vs USSR hockey game:

"There's the first whistle." Long pause. Brian Conacher, the hockey expert, breaks in, "Uh, Curt, that's an offside call." Gowdy: "Yeah, offside against the US. You know, the Russians are remarkable for not being offside."

Even the "experts" screwed up. Anne Henning, gold medal winner in 1972's speed skating, said that for a skater to do well in the 500 meter event, she would have to skate the first 100 meters in 10.8 seconds or less. But the first skater did an 11.7, and Henning said "Great time, great time!" And then there was anchorman Jim McKay's flub of the final hockey score, calling it 6-1 when two minutes before we'd seen Steve Jensen of the US close the gap to 6-2.

The inanity wasn't restricted to the announcing. Chevrolet paid ABC $69,000 for a one-minute commercial showing Chevy's six small cars out in the snow on the side of a mountain, while a chorus rhymed Chevrolet with U. S. of A. over and over, and the main plug came from a dude in front of a standup piano amongst the cars, in the snow, in the middle of nowhere.

The Chevy commercial was just dumb--there were others that were plain offensive. A Borkum-Riff pipe tobacco commercial showed a blonde guy stomping the snow from his boots, entering a house, taking off his coat, and being welcomed by a beautiful blonde woman who proceeds to stuff and light his pipe for him. The voiceover says something like: "In Sweden, a man has to take all the comfort he can get to make it through the winter. Borkum-Riff, a lusty smoke."

Even Borkum-Riff's blatant sexism paled in comparison with that of Chris Schenkel, who ABC had announcing the figure skating and ice dancing events. Schenkel commented on the great Soviet skater Irina Rodnina: "Look at the ice shavings in her beautiful black hair." Or after the skating expert calls the skaters "Powerful! These people are powerhouses!", Schenkel says, "She's the cutest thing you'll see. Not too long ago, she was a tiny little thing, but now she's grown up and is a match for her partner."

Schenkel wasn't the only male chauvinist pig. Jim McKay narrated a film on two British skating partners, Hilary Green and Glynn Watts, which ended with a shot of Watts lifting weights and exercising, and a flashback to Green in a kitchen fixing a salad. McKay says, "Glynn lifts the weights, while Hilary watches hers." (As if any skater did not work out with weights.) And it was an embarrassing contrast between the women's speed skating and the men's downhill skiing. Henning and Wolf were calling 24 and 27 year old women "girls" while Gifford was titling 20-year-old Franz Klammer the "men's downhill champion."

But sexism certainly isn't peculiar to the Olympics. Watch any TV nowadays--sexist stereotypes run rampant, peddling superfluous products; ABC is only part of the general glut. But where ABC has exclusive responsibility--its coverage of the Olympics--it still contributes to the worst aspects of the Games and an ultra-patriotic my-country-first-or-third attitude. It's bad enough that the competitive, winning-is-everything value system is bound up with the Olympics, but to have ABC emphasize the nation against nation aspects brings back visions of Hitler's 1936 attempt to turn the Olympics into a showcase for the "superior Aryan race." The Olympics is a grand gesture of international amity; the friendships and love affairs between athletes of different countries have always been the best outcome of the Games.

But the first statement ABC's anchorman makes is, in ominous tones, "The Russians are favored to win most of the medals here at Innsbruck." Later on, after Bill Koch of Vermont finishes an unexpected second in cross-country skiing, McKay calls it "one of the great days in American athletic history." Then Werner Wolf exults over Sheila Young's record-setting 1500 meter speed skating performance, "This is America's first gold medal." The only consolation is that ABC isn't as bad now as they were at the 1972 Summer Olympics, where they showed a chart every hour or so of the number of US medals versus the number of USSR medals.

SO, INSTEAD of recognizing international friendship, ABC pushes Cold War nationalism. To take up slack in boring moments, ABC tenders morbidity. In the place of penetrating commentary, ABC offers sexist inanity. If it weren't for the beautiful Austrian mountains, the Olympics wouldn't be worth watching.