That the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics are a mess should come as no surprise. Many commentators
raised red flags
about China’s draconian COVID-19 protocols, restrictive speech policies, and ecosystem-damaging construction of sites for outdoor events. The governments of several key national participants imposed diplomatic boycotts, keeping their own officials far away from the sidelines. And then there are the always-incoherent International Olympic Committee rules about performance-enhancing drugs. The Russian national team is competing under significant restrictions for violating these rules systematically in the past, even as its top figure skater, Kamila Valieva, is allowed to continue to participate in this year’s events despite a failed drug test.
Yet more unforgivable, at least for media rights owner NBCUniversal, is how the Winter Olympics are proving to be incredibly bad television, with the lowest opening ceremony ratings in history and even a lead-in from this year’s well-received Super Bowl failing to provide much of a ratings bump.
What has gone wrong? Put aside the bad set design, the fake snow on the ski slopes, custom-built arenas devoid of cheering spectators such as the “Yanqing National Sliding Center” in suburban Beijing, where lugers and bobsledders are competing, and the veritable armies of worker bees in hazmat suits enforcing China’s zero-COVID policy. There’s something askew about the Winter Olympics. Part of it might be the 13-hour time difference between Beijing and the East Coast of the United States, but that’s hardly the entire story. And yes, some lost broadcast viewers will be offset by increased social media views, but claiming that digital media might make this “one of the most-viewed video events in U.S. history” rings of cope and desperation. Two of NBC’s biggest ratings bets fell flat: a lead-in from the Rams-Bengals Super Bowl shed 90 million viewers despite several plugs in the big game’s coveted advertising spots. And NBC’s flagship morning program Today hasn’t won the head-to-head ratings war against ABC’s rival Good Morning America offering, which it did without fail during all previous instances of the Olympics on NBC. It probably doesn’t help matters that only co-anchor Craig Melvin is on-site in Beijing, with everyone else safely back in Studio 1A in New York.
Nor is this a one-off situation, a mere anomaly amid an uninterrupted history of success for the Olympics. The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, delayed until 2021, also faced time zone barriers, yet it boasted a number of compelling domestic athletic stories, such as those of gold medal-winning heavyweight wrestler Gable Steveson and mental health-wracked gymnast Simone Biles. Even with these power players on deck, levels of magnitude greater than 35-year-old Shaun White returning to the snowboarding scene and U.S.-born freestyle skier Eileen Gu tearing up the artificial slopes on behalf of China, at least in terms of Q-Rating, the Tokyo Olympics shed 24% of the television audience that had tuned in for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics. And although streaming was up significantly from 2016, anyone forced to use the Peacock and NBC Sports apps to watch specific events not broadcast on television, such as Greco-Roman wrestling, found that it was far from a seamless process.
This year’s Super Bowl offers an interesting point of comparison. Although beset for nearly a decade by a host of problems such as CTE, discriminatory practices in the hiring of minority coaches, and race-related protests more generally, the 56th installment of the game featured a close, suspenseful game between two teams that hadn’t enjoyed nearly as much success as perennial winner Tom Brady, whose Tampa Bay Buccaneers attracted only 96 million viewers for last year’s victory over the Kansas City Chiefs, a 14-year low. By contrast, 112 million people watched the duel between two former No. 1 draft picks at quarterback, with the Rams’ Matthew Stafford way back in 2009 and the Bengals’ Joe Burrow in 2020, while veteran All-Pro defensive tackle Aaron Donald of the Rams spearheaded a defensive performance for the ages. The halftime show featuring long-in-the-tooth rappers Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Eminem drew largely positive reviews despite criticism from certain corners.
The personalities on offer in the Super Bowl matter a great deal because football at the youth level is in steep decline. Although much more widely understood as a cultural practice than, say, skeleton or luge, many parents are directing their children toward sports that present lower risks of brain damage. The NFL obviously recognizes this, though, and has also pushed its relationship with online gambling companies such as FanDuel — an interesting development for a league that once slapped suspensions on notable players such as Detroit Lions defensive tackle Alex Karras for extracurricular gambling activities.
Gambling represents a critical piece of the puzzle, at least as far as the survivals of many major sports are concerned. Five years ago, I worked as a strategist at a marketing firm commissioned to produce a report on the future of professional sports for one of FanDuel’s many competitors. Three factors seemed likely to determine the future trajectory of a sport, at least as a revenue-generating media concern: youth participation that drove increasing cultural awareness, access to broadcast and streaming revenue pools, and efficient integration with gambling apps and services. Sports needed to achieve two of the three to survive and grow — which professional football has done by finding space for gambling and its much more innocuous cousin, fantasy football, in its ranks. A sport like the UFC that’s truly on the rise successfully harnesses all three factors, combining an ESPN broadcast and streaming deal with betting analysis and live odds updated during the rounds of streamed or televised fights and a significant increase in public participation at jiujitsu and MMA training centers. It also helped that the company, nearly alone among the major professional sports, continued to operate shows throughout the early months of the pandemic.
The Winter Olympics, meanwhile, offer little besides a lot of streaming footage for NBCUniversal. Even the better-known sports such as skiing are accessed mainly by the affluent. Other sports such as biathlon and luge have almost no cultural purchase whatsoever — it’s little wonder that tiny Norway sits atop the all-time Winter Olympics medal leaderboard. But beyond these Winter Olympics-specific complaints, the Olympics, in general, are a mess, a welter of nations competing in events with inconsistently applied rules. And on the practical level, gambling hasn’t been sufficiently integrated into the presentation of the Olympics, which alone might be sufficient to draw the eyeballs of budding compulsive gamblers who will instead pass their time betting on cryptocurrencies, NFT apes, and the like. It’s a hard fact of life in the sports entertainment marketplace, but if you’re not giving viewers any compelling reasons to turn on or tune in, most of them will eventually drop out of your key demographic.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website:
www.oliverbateman.com
.
