Over the 17 days of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, more than 70% of the American population tuned in to watch on NBC, which has owned the exclusive US broadcast rights since 1988. The official audience figure of 215m domestic viewers far exceeded guarantees to advertisers and represented the apotheosis of the network’s star-driven storytelling ethos under longtime NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol, one of the last high-profile sports TV impresarios.
But as the Olympics return to the Chinese capital less than 14 years on, the awareness and general buzz around the Games stateside, while impossible to quantify with any precision, has never felt lower. Despite a star-studded US Olympic team filled with established champions and promising newcomers that will march into the National Stadium during Friday’s opening ceremony and pile up medals in the weeks to come, the outcome could be a commercial nadir that makes the underwhelming ratings from last year’s Tokyo Games seem like a fond memory.
Why that is is down to a constellation of factors.
Advertisers keeping their distance
The athletes pushed by NBC as the faces of the Beijing Winter Games – alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, figure skater Nathan Chen, cross-country skier Jessie Diggins, snowboarders Shaun White and Chloe Kim – are no less accomplished or advertiser-friendly than previous headliners. But the network is finding that no amount of promotional willpower is enough if Coca-Cola, Visa, Procter & Gamble and co aren’t doing their part.
The corporate sponsors that typically go big on the Olympics have kept their distance in the run-up amid global condemnation for the host country’s human-rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in far western Xinjiang – which the US state department has labelled a genocide – in addition to the persecution of Tibetans and the repression of Hong Kong’s freedoms. Those thorny geopolitical implications were only underscored when the US, Australia, Britain and Canada announced a diplomatic boycott of the event last month.
Only two of the 20 official Team USA sponsors had aired spots pegged to the Olympics as of Wednesday, according to Reuters, with both focusing on the athletes while downplaying the host nation. That’s a far cry from the flood-the-zone deluge that’s critical to breaking through and building anticipation for athletes and sports that are largely in the public eye only once every four years. Bottom line: many casual sports fans, perhaps thrown off by an Olympics taking place only seven months after the last one due to the coronavirus postponement, are barely aware a Winter Games is even happening.
Timing is everything
A third straight Olympics staged in the inhospitable time zones of east Asia was always going to present a challenge for NBC, which paid $7.75bn for broadcast rights through 2032 before Beijing was awarded this year’s affair. But the network’s broadcast choices in response have been strewn with unforced errors, not least its famously byzantine Tokyo coverage spread across two broadcast channels, a half-dozen cable channels and multiple digital platforms, that managed to estrange curious passers-by while baffling even dedicated fans who knew what they’re looking for but couldn’t easily seek it out.
Perhaps the most glaring example surrounded the women’s team gymnastics final, which took place in prime time in Japan. Even as most of America woke up to a flurry of push notifications and breaking news alerts that spread word of Simone Biles’ shocking withdrawal due to mental health issues, NBC and its affiliate stations throughout the country went through the day as if one of the biggest global stories in any sport last year wasn’t unfolding in a risible effort to preserve its primetime audience – a decision better suited to Tokyo 1964 than Tokyo 2020.
By failing to update a hidebound model for a media ecosystem dominated by streaming services and social media, NBC risks letting one of the most lucrative properties in all of sports drift toward irrelevance. Avoiding last summer’s missteps in Beijing would be a good start.
The Covid question
The Olympics are, like all major sporting spectacles these days, fundamentally a made-for-TV event. The spaces where the competitions take place are often so outfitted with cameras, lighting and equipment they can feel like television studios as much as sporting venues. But the empty stadiums that hosted the Tokyo Games, a precaution that Beijing will mostly follow, laid bare the importance of live crowds to the overall package.
The quality of coverage will be further undercut by the scaling-back of resources on the ground due to coronavirus concerns and China’s strict quarantine policies. ESPN’s decision to not send reporters to Beijing was not a big deal as it tends to ignore the Olympics even in normal years, but NBC’s announcement that it would broadcast all events remotely and have only a skeleton crew on the ground raised eyebrows.
This sense of detachment can also be felt on the ground in the days before the opening ceremony. With all participants from athletes to media members having entered a closed loop that completely separates them from the general public since arriving in China, the result is a sort of panopticon-like effect, as if you’re experiencing the city from behind a window. All of it adds up to the same lack of atmosphere, emotion and human connection that diminished the Tokyo Games as a spectacle through no fault of the athletes themselves.
Hockey fright in America
Just as the decision to allow NBA players to participate in the Olympics ahead of the 1992 Barcelona Games whipped up interest among meat-and-potatoes US sports fans whose interests are bound to the four major North American leagues, the inclusion of NHL players at the Winter Games has proven a key draw for casual audiences.
That was never more evident than at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics when Canada faced off with the United States in the gold medal game. More than 26.7m people in the US – and roughly half the Canadian population – watched the Americans force overtime on Zach Parise’s last-minute goal before Sidney Crosby’s epochal overtime winner provided arguably the most indelible moment in the host nation’s Olympic history.
But as the spread of the Omicron variant was laying waste to the NHL’s regular season last month, the league and its players’ union announced they would no longer be sending players to Beijing. The gutting of star power aside, the decision will have a disproportionate effect on the US and Canadian teams, whose rosters lean more heavily on NHL players than the traditional European powers.
Changing habits
Some of the perception shift around the Olympics is simply elemental and larger than any one network or sporting event. The monoculture was dead and traditional network audiences fragmenting even before getting smashed to smithereens by the ascent of streaming services. People simply don’t watch TV like they used to, young people in particular. The Olympics is no longer event television, but neither are the Oscars.
That reality is reflected in the most recent viewership figures. Last year’s Tokyo Games drew the smallest audience of any televised Olympics, with an average viewership of 15.5m in addition to cable and streaming outlets. The Pyeongchang Olympics three years earlier averaged 19.8m viewers, the lowest ever for a Winter Games. All signs indicate Beijing will struggle to better either mark.
Of course none of that matters for the more than 150 members of the US team who have made the trip to China after years of self-sacrifice and discipline. The public apathy of the run-up will invariably turn to excitement as unexpected stars emerge and familiar names shine. But for the Olympics to command the American consciousness like when they last came to Beijing will require something extraordinary and unpredictable. Fortunately, that’s just what sport does best.
