Is it just me, or is there a paucity of interest in the Beijing Olympic Games, which I think are starting sometime next week?
There was the buzz over the Tibet crackdown a while ago, and I've caught some stories lately about the yucky pollution (air and algae), limitations on Internet access, and the rumor that much of Beijing will have to endure rolling blackouts in order to light up the section of the city in which the foreigners will cavort. And there's been a blip here and there about American competitors, like a swimmer who may have failed a doping test.
But that's all?
The Olympics was founded as a tool to help build a peaceful world. Its charter is over 100-pages long, and is rich in declarations, aspirations, and hope that sport will help kids grow up with the right bodies and minds, and that the world's conflicts might be better resolved (or avoided outright) by the friendly competition of the Games.
Zzzzzzzz.
The Olympic Movement's nobility aside, the original Greek idea a few thousand years ago was that competition was just shy of godliness. Naked athletes got together to best one another, and participation was limited to those who had the status or money to get in. Perhaps more important than the sport itself, they gave us drama , and my gut tells me that the narrative of the competitions was far more important to them than the scores.
Now we're talking.
The marketing machine behind our modern-day Games should have been all over the drama starting many months ago. Skip earning the right to get rendered on the side of an urn, and get people writing down the dates for various competitions. Pit athlete against athlete, or country against country. Tell us what the match-ups are, and what they might mean.
In other words, exploit the hell out of it.
Could it be that there's enough of a built-in audience that they don't have to worry about viewership? I doubt it. The Olympics programming, beamed live in the middle of the night to the Western World (which means results will precede the programming by, what, 12 hours?), has to compete with summer TV series, videogaming, families on vacation, and any number of other draws for attention.
Perhaps the narrative will emerge during the competition -- those vignettes on athlete backgrounds that run to fill space between races -- but isn't that too late?
Where's the drama now...the Russian weightlifter vs. the Swede? The hurdles teams vying for a new world record? An athlete who has overcome some terrible illness or hardship to compete? There's are zillions of media outlets, and the stories could appeal to media far beyond sports.
Have you heard much if any of this? I sure haven't. I mean beyond the repurposing of content that's underway at NBC...between the ads and the faux stories inserted into local news programs, they're doing a great job of using all the outreach tools at their disposal.
But is it enough? In a time when we could choose to get connected to the Games in so many different ways, 24/7, I wonder how many people will be connected at all?
When are the Winter Games? The time to get to work on that drama is now.
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