Your Ticket to the Games

By Richard Stengel

New technology and good old Jim McKay to tell the story

Ah, yes, those five interlaced rings, the stirring 70-year-old symbol of Olympic unity and international brotherhood. Not quite. Look closer. The three uppermost circles have been transformed into the letters a, b, c, and they are linked arm in arm with the lower two. ABC's logotype for the Sarajevo Games is more than just clever corporate iconography; it symbolizes the union between television and the Olympics, a continuing love affair between technology and the athletes it covers. It is a match made in advertising heaven and the visionary mind of Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News and Sports.

ABC has telecast seven of the past ten Olympiads, Winter and Summer. It has worked hard, spent mightily and trumpeted loudly to make itself "the Network of the Olympics." Starting this week, it will be beaming 63.5 hours over 13 days. The network is expecting (and praying) that at one time or another, 200 million Americans will tune in to the true, permanent site of the Games, the TV screen.

ABC spent $91.5 million in 1980 for the opportunity to televise the Sarajevo Games, a figure that at the time seemed astronomical. Yet two weeks ago, Arledge and company purchased the rights to the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alta., for $309 million. Way back in 1980, the Lake Placid Winter Games cost the network only $15.5 million. A phenomenal escalation but, so far, not an insane one. For the Sarajevo Games, ABC is charging advertisers an average $225,000 for 30 seconds of prune time, down to a bargain-basement $75,000 for late night, and every spot is already sold. ABC'S total expenditure for the Winter and Summer Games, including production costs, is $500 million, and the network expects to take in about $615 million in advertising revenues. A nice 23% profit, plus prestige and potentially high ratings during February "sweeps" month, when network affiliate ratings are measured.

"The Little Olympic Village" is what insiders call the nerve center of ABC's massive operation. The $70 million concrete broadcast center, set on Sarajevo's main street, is a 60,000-sq.-ft. marble-floored palace of technology. Two control rooms, one with a wall of 70 flickering TV monitors, relay pictures from rinks and slopes around the city. In addition, there are ten editing cubicles and 36 Ampex VTR-30 videotape machines, which can play three hours of tape, then rewind it in 90 seconds. Snaking through the building are 150 miles of cable. Designed and constructed in Los Angeles, the center was disassembled and shipped to New York City, reassembled and tested in a warehouse for what ABC dubbed a "war games" dress rehearsal, then disassembled again and shipped by boat in 30 mammoth trailers to Yugoslavia. A few days after the Winter Games are over, technicians will begin breaking it down yet another time, so that it can make the return trip west for the Summer Games.

The center has innumerable toys for ABC technicians to play with. The "paint box," for example, is essentially an electronically sensitive canvas on which an artist can use 5,000 colors to sketch designs on the TV screen. Need some music to go with the painting? ABC's directors can choose from thousands of musical selections catalogued not by composer but by theme: achievement, panorama, fanfare. A speed skater grimaces with effort; just flick the switch for "determination." ABC engineers have also developed a computer animation device that within 20 seconds of, say, a hockey goal will produce gyrating stick figures that re-create the entire play and display the image from any point of view. All together, the systems are 90% computer-controlled, but unfortunately the center depends on something much less sophisticated: the Yugoslav power-supply system. Brownouts are not uncommon, but ABC says its back-up generators can kick in fast enough to prevent computer data crashes.

The Yugoslav television consortium known as JRT is providing the video feed to the rest of the world, but ABC is buttressing some 75 Yugoslav cameras with 74 of its own, fearing that JRT's coverage would seem like a drab coaching film to American viewers. Explains Dennis Lewin, vice president of production coordination: "We believe in more tight shots, more low shots; we're used to an 'up close and personal' approach in documenting events." During the men's downhill, for example, JRT will show only the starting line and the bottom half of the run. ABC has added five mounted and three hand-held cameras to the upper portion. Only the American audience will see each skier's run without missing a single turn.

U.S. viewers will also see some things that no one has ever seen before. ABC has a fist-size camera that works on a silicon chip and can be attached to a skate or even a hockey stick. Ski jumpers, among other athletes, have been enlisted to wear the camera during practice runs, so that a viewer experiences the rush and speeding descent of the action through the jumper's eyes. This electronic gadget has already been strapped to one of Scott Hamilton's skates to record the tracings he makes as he performs his school figures.

While the minicamera reveals the microcosmic world of the skater, another camera will offer the macrocosm. ABC has mounted it on an 18-ft.-high crane in one corner of the 8,500-seat Zetra Arena. When Hamilton does his patented fancy-footwork entrechats from one end of the rink to the other, the camera can shoot him from on high, then swoop slowly down as Hamilton approaches, capturing at ice level his final jump. Function follows form: the camera's movement will mirror the sinuous grace of the skater.

To control and operate all this equipment, ABC will have some 900 people on its payroll in Sarajevo, including 325 engineers, 125 production people and 75 representatives from management. (Of these, 180 are young Yugoslavs, who are being paid an amount that ABC will not divulge, but enough so that they are making in a day what their fathers earn in a week.) Presiding over everything, Arledge will produce the Olympics from a special burgundy chair in the broadcast center, which is not unlike the chairman of General Motors showing up to supervise the Cadillac assembly line.

If, in this Olympian world, Arledge is Zeus hurling electronic thunderbolts, then Jim McKay -- good, kind, gentle Jim McKay -- is the homespun Homer, a bard who recounts the feats of the heroes and, out of the kaleidoscope of events, pieces together Arledge's desired story with a beginning, a middle and an end. McKay, now 62, has been the on-air oracle of the Olympics for 20 years; Sarajevo will be his ninth Games. The voice, like that of McKay's idol Bing Crosby, is mellow, relaxed, always in control and is the unifying harmony of the Olympics. McKay, who reads only what he writes, sees his role not as an announcer but as a storyteller. "You're supposed to be perceptive enough to see some sort of script that's writing itself," he says, "some thread that goes through an entire event, that you can point out to people."

Any story is built up with details, and those odd bits of Olympic arcana that McKay so facilely drops into his narrative are the result of two years' worth of preparation. In 1982 a team of ABC researchers set about gathering statistics, biographical information, trivia and whatever facts might conceivably add spice to the story. McKay has diligently read through a thick volume of accumulated data. In Sarajevo, that information is accessible to ABC employees through a computer hooked up to ABC'S data bank located in, of all places, Hackensack, N.J.

To help McKay weave a narrative, there will be 27 other on-camera announcers covering the events, including such regulars as Frank Gifford, Keith Jackson, Al Michaels, Jack Whitaker (but not Howard Cosell), along with former Olympians Donna de Varonna, Eric Heiden, Mike Eruzione and Bob Beattie.

There is even a celebrity troubadour, John Denver, who has composed some new ballads (Sarajevo High?) to serenade viewers. For the "Up Close and Personal" profiles shown between events, a staff of 20 researchers was dispersed across the world for a year to film and interview athletes in their home settings. ABC has featured 65 likely contenders in these segments, although probably only half of them will end up being used.

Neither the equipment nor the research was available to McKay when he announced his first Olympics, the 1960 Summer Games, the only one he did not do for ABC. He recalls that the tapes were flown to New York from Rome and often arrived frozen. Says McKay: "I can remember standing in the tape room holding them, trying to get them thawed out in time." For McKay, every Olympics has a personality that he tries to convey to the viewer. He saw the Games at Lake Placid, for example, as a kind of icebound Our Town. But the Games for which McKay is most remembered had a darker character: Munich 1972. The grisly murders of eleven Israeli team members by a terrorist group turned a television fantasy into a nightmare. For more than 13 hours, he narrated the ordeal with a kind of mournful intensity. It was the nadir of the Olympics but McKay's finest hour, and won him the fourth of his ten Emmys. "As much as I hate to say it," McKay acknowledges, "Munich advanced my career."

While spinning out the story of the Games, McKay avoids the cliches with which so much of television sports is infested, concentrating on small events in time, not the record-setting times in events. His own favorite moments tend to center on individuals like the Japanese gymnast at Mexico City in 1968 who competed with a broken kneecap. "Television has made it possible for the audience to identify with individual athletes," he explains. Every four years, McKay searches for something rarely seen nowadays, something that, ironically, has been lost in part through the very medium in which he works. He looks for people who strive for perfection for its own sake. Notes McKay: "The word amateur comes from the French and Latin words for lover. So what I really admire are people who do it because they love to do it."

Although far from an amateur, McKay obviously loves what he does and performs with the same concentration as that shown by the athletes he describes. With his 65th birthday on the horizon before the next Olympiad, he thinks about slowing down some, spending more time at his Maryland farm and racing a small stable of horses. Perhaps this will be his last Games. But then he stirs restlessly at the thought of Calgary in four years. "The Olympics," he says, "is the last real drama." That is precisely what he and ABC are striving to create for 13 days and nights in the 19-inch prosceniums in America's living rooms.

With reporting by Peter Ainslie, John Moody