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The Web And The Olympics
Anonymous Coward writes: "Here is a nice article about how the IOC (International Olympic Committee) is banning the Internet from the Sydney Games. Here is the link: http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/08/15/olympic.ban.idg/index.html". This story came from the Industry Standard, but since on their site it's an unfriendly multi-page format, we'll link to CNN. Are the Olympics nothing more than eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder? Very thoughtful article. (A mostly-unrelated aside: Don't use the e-mail kiosks at the 2002 Olympics.)
...the whole 'amateur' thing was concocted up for the modern Olympics to ensure only wealthy folks could participate. A steel worker in Sheffield in the 1890s couldn't afford to seriously train for a sport and *not* get paid for it, while the Duke of Somewhereshire had plenty of leisure time on his hands. Winners in the ancient Olympic games received great material rewards, not just a medal and a laurel wreath.
Really, the whole 'amateur' thing has been a farce for a long time. How exactly were Soviet athletes amateurs? In my book, if you don't have a full-time, non-sports related job, and all you do is train, and someone takes care of your food and housing, then your *job* is being an athlete and you are a professional. (You may be underpaid, but that is another issue.) I doubt many of the Red Army hockey players spent time walking point in Afghanistan.
Lest anyone think I'm just digging on the Soviets, it's hardly better here. Carl Lewis or Michael Johnson don't go off to day jobs after their training sessions. Odds are that a track star went to college on a scholarship and hasn't seen a regular job since. Athletes get paid for appearances, for sponsorships, etc. -- the only thing they don't get paid for is the actual competition, and this is only a small portion of the money a pro athlete makes. Just ask Tiger Woods.
Save for Team Handball and Curling, there really aren't any true amateurs in the Olympics anymore, and there haven't been for a long time.
Last week ZDNet Australia ran a story noting complaints from the sight impaired community that the official site for the Games www.olympics.com failed to provide a significant amount of information formatted in ways that can be read by text only (and therefor text-to-speech enabled) browsers. Examples of non-text friendly data include "the sport index, which provides event schedule information for 36 Olympic sports" and the results of competitions, "Something which [a representative for the site] claims will cost AU$4 million and take 368 days to do," according to one of the complainants.
This also means that the site is not meeting guidelines laid out by the WWW Consortium.
The combination of not providing a site meeting the needs of all users, and then censoring what others can report from the Games, means a total blackout of Internet information for these users.
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The main problem I have with this is that any it makes it just about impossible for those of us who want to follow other countries' events here in the United States to do so. If NBC's broadcast is similar to the previous Olympics' broadcast, only the events where American athletes and teams compete AND are likely to win medals, will get any coverage. If web broadcasting was allowed, those of us who are foreigners living in this country should be able to follow our nations' events via webcasts from our national news and sports online sites. But without these webcasts, all we can do is read the results in the next day's papers.
Personally, I'm not going to be watching much of the Olympics. Why? Cuz I like to see the events, not the two dozen "Life Stories" that take up 90% of the broadcast time. Sure, it's great that Bob the Sprinter overcame but I wanna see him race. Not that I don't have feelings for the guy, but I seriously doubt said problem is on his mind when he's neck and neck with Sam the Speedy. These guys and gals aren't here because of commercials. They came here to do their best. TV on the other hand... Anyone remember that much hyped Greene vs Johnson?
My personal off topic rant - I'm a distance runner. Have been for almost 16 years now so I do enjoy watching those races that aren't over in a matter of seconds. Unfortunetly, anything that takes more than 5 minutes to complete, the Networks don't see fit to broadcast. I want to see who wins the 10,000 or the Marathon. These are my idols and heroes. These are the people who don't have huge endorsement contracts. They work their 9-5 jobs, fit in time for training, and pull this all off with very little financial support from anyone else. But unless I go to a speciality site (www.runnersworld.com for instance), I can't find out if my idols managed to pull off their life dream. The Networks don't care.
----------------------------------------- Well damn...so that's what that does...
They would compartmentalize the Games into various sections (Track & Field, gymnastics, martial arts, etc) and auction off the broadcast rights seperately. By doing so they would be likely to get much higher overall revenue, and the Games would be covered much more completely and professionally. Just think of all the events that aren't going to be covered because there is an artificial limit on TV time.
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For the 1992 Games in Barcelona, the IOC decreed that athletes from the breakaway nations of the former USSR were not in fact entitled to be recognized as such. They were forced to play for the "Commonwealth of Independent States". Just another throwback to the glorious days of Soviet domination and a slap in the face to athletes who were robbed of the opportunity to represent their native countries.
Why was this permitted to happen? Because the IOC is the epitome of a greedy, self-serving, multinational corporation.
For the link impaired, here is just a brief summary of the article:
These are the people who proclaim to represent the ideal of amateur sport: of fair play and of the innocence of honest competition.
These back-stabbing, power-hungry bastards.
Considering this, that the IOC is making another power grab and shutting out the Internet, is not surprising in the least.
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I've been involved in a bit of sports reporting, and this doesn't surprise me in the least.
First of all, no matter what the sport is, video is video, and the rights to transmit it are sold, period. Doesn't matter how it's distributed, if you're not a TV licensee, you're not allowed to do video. Some sports allow extraneous video to news outlets, like locker-room press conferences and pre-gmae stuff. But once the event starts, only the licensed video is shot. The NFL has been allowing local sports reporters to tape segments on the sidelines during the games, but that's the only exception that comes to mind.
Traditionally, the threshhold for getting media credentials was whether you had a publication or not. The cost of printing and distribution was enough of a barrier to separate the real reporters from the wannabes.
But since the 'net has come to prominence, it's lowered those barriers so much that event officials are swamped with requests. And the way they usually deal iwth it is to simply refuse credentials to all online organizations. Indeed, I've seen situations where we had been credentialled for years, but once the 'net became a buzzword, we were shut out, or at least had to remind the organizers that we had been there all along.
It also gets sticky when you realize that an online reporter can post reports before the event is over, something that print journalists couldn't do. Even a text report during the game blows their mind, since it treads on those valuable broadcast rights. One organizer offered us credentials with the provision that we would refrain from posting any reports until after midnight. When we said no thanks, they offered to sell us broadcast rights.
Not to say that this is all wrong, either; no event organizer can afford to provide press facilities for every bozo with a web site, and the lines between broadcast and 'netcast are indeed quite blurry. It's just one of the curiosities of the way the 'net has changed things. By lowering the barriers to entry, it has increased the number of "journalists" to such an extent that nobody really knows which ones have a legitimate readership.
On-line sports journalists have always had difficulty getting taken seriously by some organizations. The NCAA (at this year's Final Four) in particular has been less than supportive of this new medium for getting sports news and information out to a waiting audience. A nice summary of the issues involved can be found here
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