When sports broadcaster Jim Lampley headed to Innsbruck, Austria, for his first assignment covering the Winter Olympics for ABC in 1976, people said the network was nuts.
Not for sending Lampley, but for planning to air – gasp! – 48 hours of coverage from the Winter Games.
Thirty years later, records are already being shattered and these games haven’t even begun.
Lampley is entering his 13th turn at covering the Olympics, surpassing veteran Jim McKay’s record of 12.
And NBC is offering 418 hours of coverage over 16 days from the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, topping the 375 hours broadcast from Salt Lake City four years ago.
It all starts with the opening ceremonies, which kick off at 8 p.m. Friday on KING-TV, Channel 5.
“I don’t think we have yet reached the high-water mark for coverage of these kind of events, this kind of entertainment,” Lampley said in a teleconference from Italy on Wednesday.
But more than simply piling on the hours of coverage, Lampley said the crew’s job is to guide viewers to the stories they want to focus on and introduce them to the individuals who make the games special.
This will be the first Winter Olympics since the figure-skating judging scandal that rocked the world and resulted in two gold medals in 2002. In that vein, cable’s USA network will broadcast an hourly show each night, “Olympic Ice,” all about figure skating.
The show gives host Mary Carillo and longtime figure skating analyst and two-time gold medallist Dick Button a chance to sound off on the day’s events. They’re calling it a mix of breaking news, in-depth analysis and exclusive athlete interviews.
“On ‘Olympic Ice,’ we have the time to say whatever we want to about something,” Button said. “We can bring up ideas that may not be right for the actual performance.”
The four minutes or so during each performance offers commentators enough time to talk only about what the skaters are doing and why. The one-hour show will allow them to dig deeper into the Winter Games’ most watched event.
“I didn’t know there were other sports at the Olympics until I got to my 16th Olympics,” Button quipped.
But every Olympic Games tends to bring out new faces and personalities, or veterans who we want to see go further than they’ve gone before.
And these Winter Games aren’t lacking for inspiration.
Speedskaters Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis should draw considerable attention.
Hedrick, an inline skating champion, wasn’t skating on ice four years ago and is now a gold-medal favorite. Davis is the first black to make the U.S. Olympic speedskating team.
Of course, there’s figure skater Michelle Kwan, who was a somewhat controversial addition to the U.S. team this year after missing the national championships. She’s America’s-darling choice, but will Kwan finally be able to stand at the top of the medal platform, especially amid competition from the likes of American Sasha Cohen and Russian Irina Slutskaya?
There’s freestyle skier Jeremy Bloom, who is putting a football career on hold to go for the gold in the moguls event.
And there’s Alpine skier Bode Miller, who won a couple of silver medals in Salt Lake City four years ago and recently ruffled some feathers in a “60 Minutes” interview, talking about how difficult it is to “ski when you’re wasted.”
Such stories, and so many more, make the Olympics what they are. You don’t always know going into it exactly what you’re going to care about a few days later.
“You need those moments which draw people into the … process and create the general interest in the games,” Lampley said. “Something will happen that does that, we just don’t know what it’s going to be.”
Victor Balta’s TV column runs Mondays and Thursdays on the A&E page. Reach him at 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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