It will prove challenging to enjoy the Rio Olympics without looking behind the curtain
COMMENTARY
On the same day that it promised to address the long list of ailments marring the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, NBC kicked off its 6,755 hours (!) of coverage on Wednesday with agog correspondent Mary Carillo reporting that the place has really pretty beaches.
Not exactly a principled beginning.
To his credit, host Mike Tirico, formerly of ESPN now in his first foray at the Olympic Games for NBC, attempted to make a point about all host cities possessing some sort of civic plight in the midst of the pursuit of glory. But Carillo didn’t want any of it, apparently forgetting that, only a couple of days earlier, she said “absolutely not” in response to a question about whether she herself would get in the water.
Reality doesn’t come easy for some when your employer is trying to build a $4.38 billion Camelot in an environment better suited for the set of “District 9.”
“We would be naive to think that they don’t face security problems, that they don’t face problems with sanitation, that their politics are not in upheaval,” NBC’s Olympic primetime host Bob Costas said during a satellite summit from Rio this week. “We’re watching to see how those issues turn out as much as we’re watching to see how the competitions turn out.”
It would be nice to believe Costas, to have faith in NBC showing the world the filth, plight, and crime that plagues this year’s host city. That dose of South American authenticity though doesn’t fit with the network’s feel-good aura it pays handsomely to create every other year.
It’s been some time since the network molded its Olympic package more toward a human interest series than the competition at the center of the Games. Unfortunately, it’s the triumphant tales of American athletes that NBC will primarily focus on, eschewing the human drama of Rio for storylines that the likes of Carillo and Costas can playfully banter about on the primetime set.
Two years after the inefficiencies of Sochi, Rio has delivered Olympic critics with a wealth of new material that speaks volumes about the corruption that seeps through the halls of the International Olympic Committee. According to a terrific HBO Real Sports episode dedicated to the falsities of the Olympic movement, 80,000 residents of Rio were swept away in a cleansing for the rings, so that the local committee would be able to build its Olympic stadium. The waterways where athletes will swim, sail, and paddle, continue to be infested with human waste, creating venues where health officials have warned against dipping heads beneath the surface. The threat of Zika hovers over the region, perhaps only secondarily to the amount of thieves that have already introduced themselves and their methods to the thousands of visitors.
But NBC personnel said that they doesn’t see themselves as doormats for the IOC, even as viewers can smell the buckets of Rio water they’re slinging from 4,800 miles away. There’s the thought that NBC should have used its financial clout to try and convince the IOC to postpone of relocate the Games. But when it comes to the Olympics, such an expensive, important venture for the network, what is inherently responsible finishes somewhere below Coca Cola’s sponsorship dollars.
“You could make the case Zika is a bigger story in Florida than in Rio, where it is winter, and cooler and drier,” executive producer Jim Bell said. “Is Disneyland responsible for bringing people to Florida?”
Seeing as Disneyland is in California, the best guess is no. Bell also failed to mention NBC Universal’s own mammoth tourist attraction in Orlando on the responsibility chain too, along with nearby Walt Disney World.
In Rio, it’s a different theme park entirely, one in which NBC, the IOC, and the United States Olympic Committee can control the experience. This isn’t anything new, except that we’re more aware now about how dirty the Olympic game is. If the Boston 2024 farce taught us anything about the demands and outlandish costs required by the IOC, it’s that the frightening slice we were served during that period was but a fraction of the hell places like Rio and Sochi have gone through. And for what?
There’s more than enough evidence that Olympic host cities are almost never due a profit on their efforts, which can run into the billions of dollars. In Rio, the hope was that the Games would bring a new focus to the city, a paved bridge to the future of a region that has desperately been treading its own, filthy water for generations.
Folks in Sochi thought the same. Beijing and Athens too. All that remains are the memories of a fortnight and empty buildings that serve little more use than pagan temples to the IOC, warnings for other cities worldwide to heed. Instead, the next city thinks it can do it better, and the IOC is only happy to act complicit in the grand scheme, depending on how large the inevitable bribe ends up being.
It leaves us torn on how to watch. The essence of the competition remains a pull, the support of athletes who have worked their entire lives to fulfill this dream a warranted argument. Even though the Olympic ideal may exist only at the tail end of a rainbow at Rio sunset, it still lives in those who dream of gold.
Thus, the Games are still worth our time and attention. Two weeks where it’s OK not to solely look behind the curtain, knowing full well the disgusting measures it took to bring these athletes to Rio in the first place.
“It’s going to be impossible in some cases not to address some of the issues that have come up before the Olympics, because they will directly intersect with the competition,” Costas said.
NBC will do its best to avoid that though. The network is well-versed in egregiously bending over backward for the IOC by now.
Yay, Rio. More beach shots, please.
Meet New England Olympians in Rio
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