A Whole Different World

Every now and again, I go to YouTube and play NBC's awesome intro from the Seoul Olympics.  The theme, which they only used for that Games, was also composed by John Williams, and I actually like it better than the John Williams theme they've used for every Olympics since.  (I also love how very 1980s the entire title sequence is!)

I've also watched the NBC 1988 Olympic highlight video on YouTube more than once.  (These are the sort of things that happen when you aren't able to leave your apartment for the better part of a year!)  But it wasn't until somebody posted a few days of NBC's full coverage, none of which I'd ever seen before, that the vast differences between now and then became really clear.

The biggest difference between the Seoul Games and every Olympics and followed is obvious.  Seoul was the last Olympics prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, so it marks a transition for the Olympic movement as a whole.  It was the last time the Soviet Union and East Germany dominated the medal table.  But it wasn't just them.  Their Communist allies like Bulgaria and Romania were also featured prominently.  Meanwhile, the countries that have topped the medal table since the fall of Communism, not just the U.S., but countries like Great Britain and Australia, were hardly mentioned at all.  The Soviet/East German domination was THAT great.

But the biggest difference is the quality of NBC's production.  Let's just say they've gotten a lot better at this over the past 33 years.  Criticizing NBC's Olympic coverage is a right of passage for Americans every two years (or three, thanks COVID!).  But there's no denying that their coverage from Seoul was downright bad.  Even they admitted as such after the fact, and the 1992 Olympics were a much-improved product.

They do deserve some credit for their coverage in Seoul.  The Opening Ceremony was held on Saturday afternoon, so it was live on Friday night in the U.S.  Likewise, they got the organizers to put the track & field and gymnastics finals in the afternoon so they could be shown live in prime time...and they showed the evening swimming finals during their morning coverage, which took the place of the Today Show.  

However, that's where the compliments stop.  Because outside of hosts Bryant Gumbel, who was the prime time host that year, and Bob Costas, who did the late night show before taking over as the prime time anchor in 1992, the coverage left a lot to be desired.  Simply put, you could tell they were new at this.

Their other hosts were awful.  I can see why they used Jane Pauley, who was on the Today Show at the time, during the morning show, but she's not a sportscaster.  Likewise, many of their reporters, and even some of the analysts, weren't particularly strong.  The sideline interviewers weren't much better, often asking the most basic, simple questions.

NBC also spent a little too much time covering baseball, which wasn't even a medal sport!  There was a whole segment one night where Bob Costas interviewed Jim Abbott and another guy on the team, and they had the nightly update of MLB scores.  In a way that makes sense, since baseball was NBC Sports' big property at the time and they covered the 1988 World Series less than a month later.  But it felt out of place, especially since they did it every night!  And the amount of time they dedicated to the exhibition baseball tournament took away from actual medal events (the highlight video also does this, doing an entire segment on taekwondo, which was also an exhibition sport).

People didn't care about tape delay in 1988, so it's something they actually would've been able to use to their benefit.  (Their use of tape delay would be THE major source of contention 12 years later in Sydney.)  But the only portion of the day where they actually used tape delay was the afternoon show (which is the middle of the night in Asia).  And the "events" they covered during the daytime show were mostly highlight packages covering that day for the entire sport.

It's good that they were able to show so much live, which is very impressive when you consider NBC didn't have the clout then that it does now.  They stayed on the air pretty late, too.  The late night show usually ended around 2 a.m. ET most nights, even if the events they were showing were still in progress.  In that case, they tape delayed the rest of it until the morning.  Why not just stay on the air until those events were over?

Like most Olympics, the coverage focused primarily on a handful of marquee sports that U.S. traditionally performs well in.  Those sports really haven't changed.  In Tokyo, you'll see a heavy dose of swimming, track & field and gymnastics in prime time.  In 1988, their fourth featured sport was diving, which is less prominent now.  That spot has been taken by beach volleyball, which wasn't an Olympic sport until 1996.

However, they also tried to show everything else while still featuring those four sports, and, frankly, it didn't work.  That's not entirely their fault since it was the same model ABC used in 1984, but they did too much jumping around.  Their basketball "coverage" consisted of a couple live look-ins and a postgame wrap up.  But they still had time for plenty of those Olympic puff pieces they love and in-studio interviews that were too long.

Since NBC didn't have its slate of cable channels in 1988, people's options were limited to what was shown on the broadcast network.  So imagine if you were tuning in with the hope/promise of seeing the U.S. basketball game and all you got was five minutes?  And that's all you would get, since it's not like you could watch the entire event later or online.

That's actually one of the best things about the evolution of NBC's Olympic coverage.  They have cable channels now, and they use them all.  If something you want to watch isn't on NBC, chances are it'll be on one of the cable channels.  Likewise, you can watch every event live in its entirety online.  I can't imagine not having that freedom, but we didn't until very recently.

Some of the sports were so vastly different then, too.  Basketball still had the ridiculous setup where the U.S. had a team of collegians against "amateurs" from the Eastern Bloc countries.  Volleyball still had side out scoring, where it could sometimes take forever for either team to score a point!  Track & field had rounds in the longer events!  Swimming only had heads and finals, no semis.  Gymnastics still had the perfect 10, but scores also carried over from qualifying into the finals.  It was all normal then, but it was definitely weird while watching 30-plus years after the fact.

A lot has changed since 1988, both with NBC's coverage and the Olympics themselves.  The polished product we see this summer will look nothing like those broadcasts from 1988, when the Soviet Union dominated, the United States was the best of the also-rans, and China was there, but nowhere near the force it would become.  It was a different time, indeed.