In NBC's Olympics, it's no pain, no gain
By DAVE EGGERS
For sheer emotional bombast, you just can't beat the Olympics. When people talk about the "sports" and "competition" currently taking place in Atlanta, they're missing the point. Yes, the athletes all try real hard, try to beat records, and, in the spirit of international goodwill, try to beat each other. Sure, everyone gets a little thrill when a gymnast "sticks" a landing or a volleyball player makes a "good dig" or a runner "runs real fast." But what truly electrifies us, what sends chills down our spines and drives our friends in the NBC control rooms to stand up and high-five each other, is when these athletes -- these indomitable machines of grace and power, these beautiful earthbound gods and titans -- when these athletes, after winning or losing or just plain finishing, can't stand the emotional weight of it all and just break down and weep. The Olympic sport that towers above all the others, the one that is undoubtably the most popular in Atlanta and on which NBC has seemingly pinned its ratings hopes, is crying.
Until recently, crying wasn't even an official Olympic sport. Sure, it's always been part of the Games to some extent, but it wasn't until Barcelona, 1992 that the shedding of tears was first accepted by the Olympic Committee as a medal-worthy endeavor. A longtime favorite among both fans and television cameras, its inclusion came none too soon.
Open to all participating athletes and their families, Olympic crying has understandably taken a dominant role in NBC's skillful and sensitive coverage of these centennial Olympics. Officially labeled an "auxillary" event, crying is unique in that all athletes are encouraged to participate before, during or after their own more traditional, specialized events. It provides a wonderful opportunity for someone like Carl Lewis to not only capture his ninth gold medal in the long jump, but pick up a little extra hardware afterward, provided he can pump out some quality blubbering on the medal stand.
Employing dozens of highly trained, highly empathetic camera crews, NBC has been doing a superb job of bringing us all the Olympic crying a fan could desire. It's always poignant, always touching, and it almost always beats the tedium of watching athletes run around in skimpy clothing, spinning and jumping and landing on mats.
Watching the highlights of any given day's events, a lucky viewer of NBC's Olympic broadcast is virtually bathed in the tears of the world's best athletes. Every night Bob, Greg and Hannah look fondly back on the highlights of the day, and it's no surprise that the most powerful and memorable moments belong to crying. Who could forget Kerri Strug's pained tears, sprung from a mixture of gold medal joy and limitless physical anguish? Who doesn't recall the single beautiful tear streaking down the cheek of the otherwise unshakable sprinter Michael Johnson? Who would deny that we shared a deep moment with Matt Ghaffari, the 260-pound wrestler who blubbered on the world's stage?
As one would expect, the Americans are the best at on-cue emotional outpour. We are a nation who knows how to live our lives like a movie, and when the camera's on, we deliver. The rest of the world lags far behind. Although the Irish are pretty good, and the Italians can break down here and there, gallon for gallon (of brine), the American team dominates the field, leaving much of the world choking not on tears, but on our dust. The Scandinavians haven't really left the starting blocks, the former Soviet republics look promising but have a ways to go, and the Germans, well, it's not surprising that the Germans are really struggling with the concept.
It's simple enough: when you lose, you cry; when you win, you cry; when you get a medal and you're standing there listening to your national anthem -- even if you're from some embarassing place like Trinidad or Canada -- you get overwhelmed by the utter magnitude of the situation and let the tears begin. It's easy, and we as viewers have come to expect it. In fact, we have come to assume that those who do not cry, who instead weather the emotional maelstrom undaunted, are either godless heathens or hardened communists -- or, more likely, both.
Letting the culmination of a lifetime's worth of training overcome you is completely natural, and, more often than not, it's profitable. Without tears you are a cold, stuck-up automaton. In one, mild outburst, you can win the hearts of your countrymen and take one step closer to endorsements for breakfast cereal and/or feminine hygiene products.
Still, NBC knows that it's not safe to rely on the spontaneous flow of tears during competition, and has wisely taken a pro-active role in seeking out and dispensing the requisite dosage of Olympic poignancy. Interspersed with the action, NBC has been regaling us with the personal stories of many of the athletes' long journeys to the glory of Atlanta. In virtually every profile, the emphasis is on the seemingly insurmountable odds overcome by the athlete in question -- obstacles that would surely ruin the hopes of mere mortals, if not drive them to institutionalized madness. An announcer tells us that Ukrainian gymnast Lilia Podkopayeva loved her grandmother, who then died: "Her grandmother almost lived to see her gold medal." We learn about that American mountain biker Tinker Jaurez had a tough relationship with his dad: "Tinker escaped the only way he knew how -- on his bike." We discover that Carl Lewis, by contrast, had a pretty good relationship with his dad, who -- wouldn't you know it -- died.
In the real world, people die all the time, and if you're, say, a bank teller, you don't necessarily think to dedicate the rest of your career's deposits to the memory of that dead person. But it's different in the Olympics. There, each and every athlete is required, by a recently instituted Olympic statute, to have at least one dead relative, friend or pet, and to strive to achieve Olympic gold in the memory of the deceased. It's a tough rule, but no one said the Olympics was easy.
Death narrowly overcome is perhaps the favorite device of the producers of these poignant profiles. In their most affecting segment, NBC took an intimate look at the life of Russian gymnast Vitaly Scherbo. Turns out that not only can Vitaly do cool things with bars and rings, but he also has a wife that was in a big car accident a few years ago. In the true spirit of the Games, the folks at NBC actually brought the wife of the Russian gymnast back to the site of the car crash with her young daughter -- and a full camera crew. Soon enough, she cried. The camera was there, circling her, getting closer, closer, closer until we felt like we just couldn't watch this woman relive her near-tragedy again. We squirmed and cringed and some of use even wondered: My god, what does this have to do with the games of the Olympiad? But then we remembered: Like politics, the issue here is not performance, it's character. NBC smartly plays on what savvy viewers have known all along -- that more than a competition, the Olympics is about the tortured personal lives of people who spend most of their lives in spandex. We then could sit back and relax, soon learning that, with one of the highest scores in the preliminaries, Vitaly's wife was almost assured a place in the final medal round.
Dave Eggers is editor of Might magazine.