Olympian Operation

As Charles de Gaulle opened the 10th Winter Olympic Games in Grenoble, France, last week, ABC-TV pulled off a display of space-age electronic wizardry that was right out of Star Trek. The dour visage of le grand Charles picked up by the color cameras was fed to a control unit at the Olympic stadium, beamed to ABC headquarters in Grenoble, relayed by cable to Paris, and then to the French satellite ground station at Plumeur-Bodou. There the video signal was converted into a radio signal, bounced off the Early Bird satellite hovering 22,300 miles over the Atlantic, picked up and reconverted by a receiving station in Andover, Me., relayed by cable and microwave through ABC in New York City to 187 stations and several million homes across the U.S., and to a ground station at Brewster Flat, Wash. There the signal was ricocheted off the Lani Bird 2 satellite 22,300 miles above the Pacific Ocean, picked up in Ibaraki, Japan, and relayed through Tokyo to an additional 600 stations and millions of homes. From stadium to Scarsdale split-level to sake bar in Tokyo, the entire 100,000-mile journey took only a little more than half a second.

The color telecast represented the first time that the Olympics have been beamed live between continents. The 27 hours of programming, scheduled for this week as well, is the most extensive coverage ever devoted to any sporting event; in terms of logistics alone, it is the most complex and comprehensive effort any network has ever expended on an event, including space shots, the war in Viet Nam, and national political conventions.

Eagle-Eye Lens. The network bought the TV rights to the games in 1965 for $2,000,000 (up from $50,000 in 1960). Ever since then, ABC engineers have been skittering across the slopes of the Alps like spiders, spinning out a 40-mile web of cables. With the help of helicopters, snowcats and a detachment from the French army, they swaddled the 350-lb. color cameras in heated jackets and positioned them on rocky precipices as high as 7,400 feet.

One of ABC's 40 cameras is equipped with an eagle-eye Questar lens, can scan the full sweep of a ski run from its aerie on a mountain top. Other miniature cameras are installed in skiers' helmets and on sleds to provide a kind of rumble-seat view of the courses. To coordinate the com plex operations of ABC's crew, which at 250 strong is more than twice the size of the U.S. Olympic team, the network maintains a command post that suggests that the invasion of Normandy is imminent. Day and night, the center dispatches the network's four helicopters, six roving units and 59 cars and buses.

Head to Head. No one, unfortunately, is more impressed with this Olympian effort than ABC's commentators. All last week they continually reminded viewers that they were seeing "a sports exclusive," "a really fantastic shot," and "superb coverage." Nonetheless, it was the picture that told the story, and during the first two days it was mostly a sad tale of the young U.S. hockey team being trounced by the Czech and Swedish teams. U.S. Skater Peggy Fleming cut a fine figure on the ice, but about the only good thing the announcers could say about the U.S. hockey team came during a skirmish with a Czech player: one of the Americans got "a light left jab in there."

Action picked up later in the week with the men's downhill race. ABC had eleven cameras spotted along the 1 1/2-mile course which, through an intricate series of quick switches, caught the skiers as they hurtled down the slopes at 70-m.p.h. speeds. At one point, the cameras zoomed in on the U.S.'s James Barrows as he faltered off course and spun head-over-skis in a bone-jarring crackup.

All told, ABC acquitted itself competently and at times brilliantly. Still, it was in effect a rehearsal for the really big show coming up in October: the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, to which ABC will devote more men (400), more cameras (60), more money ($4,500,000), and more hours of coverage (45).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.