THE SOAP OPERA GAMES

By MARGARET CARLSON

I don't know much more now about the challenge of the parallel bars than I knew before the start of the Atlanta Games, but I do know a lot about the human spirit triumphing over adversity, both real and trumped up. I know a whole lot, for example, about Irina Scherbo, not a competitor but married to one, which is enough to make you a star in your own feature film. Irina, the wife of Belorussian Vitali Scherbo, who won six gold medals in the '92 Games, slammed into a telephone pole on her way to the hairdresser last December, splitting her BMW in two and winding up in a coma. Her husband quit training for months to keep vigil at her bedside, washing her hair, cutting her finger- and toenails. But as soon as Irina was on the mend, she insisted that Vitali return to pursuing his dream. In this year's Games, his team finished out of the money and he had to settle for bronze in the all-around, but never mind. To extract the last bit of drama from the Scherbos, NBC had Irina and their daughter transported back to the crash scene for a four-Kleenex finale.

Is this the Olympics or One Life to Live? The story of Vitali took almost as much time to tell as Vitali took to perform. While the soap opera content of the Games has been growing ever since ABC's Roone Arledge invented "Up Close and Personal" for the 1972 Games, this year the mush quotient is out of control. The Dick Enberg Moment has become the tail wagging the dog. The spot on fencer Peter Westbrook prevailing over his humble beginnings ran four minutes, and we saw only three seconds of Westbrook actually jousting.

This upsurge in schmaltz is the result of much study. Men, the broadcast industry believes, will watch anything with a bouncing ball or bodies colliding and grunting. But women, the ones who actually go to the store to buy the beer, the pretzels and the kids' Reeboks, require something a little more human and uplifting. So NBC spent millions getting the heart-wrenching stories behind the stories, about 140 of them, on everyone from diver Mary Ellen Clark, whose cancer-stricken father made it to poolside, to the horse Nirvana II, which was an embarrassment to its Thoroughbred family--which traces its lineage to 1964 Preakness champ Northern Dancer--until giving up the track for a life of dressage and show jumping. To further nail the female audience, NBC brought back the soothing, soft John Tesh, formerly of Entertainment Tonight, a far cry from the prickly Bryant Gumbel and downer sidebars on orphans aired during the Korean Games in 1988. It is hard to forget that Tesh's expertise runs more to the marriage of rocker Tommy Lee and Baywatch's Pamela Anderson than to hard news when he uses "histrionics" to mean history.

All the gauzy filler also helps obscure the fact that much of the NBC coverage is "plausibly live"--a phrase that rivals "preowned car" and "peacekeeping missiles" for disingenuousness. Many of the most popular activities, like gymnastics and swimming, take place during the day but are broadcast in the evening. To keep up the suspense artificially, NBC doesn't let on whether a segment is live or Memorex--and Tom Brokaw warns viewers to turn down the volume of the Nightly News lest they inadvertently hear the day's results.

NBC has done very well. Prime-time ratings for its first full week of coverage were 23% higher than they were for the Barcelona Games, and the network pulled in as much as $500,000 for a 30-sec. spot. But the network didn't need to go so soft to attract women, who have always watched the Olympics in much greater numbers than they tune in to other sports extravaganzas like the Super Bowl. The attraction is not simply that the weaker sex likes weakness (did someone tell the losers it's O.K. to cry?) or syrupy bios.

If you really want to appeal to women, how about some discussion of the anorexia the baby gymnasts obviously suffer from--or the fact that the females are mostly teenagers while the male gymnasts are in their mid-20s? Resist overcovering women's beach volleyball, which is no better than the swimsuit competition at the Miss America pageant. And don't labor to make heroes of the nonheroic. Airbrushing swimmer Gary Hall Jr., the spoiled grandson of savings and loan cheat Charles Keating Jr., by not mentioning that he was a major goof-off, blowing up mailboxes and tearing up golf courses, is formulaic hagiography. And after 11 p.m., don't make us sit through any more motivational infomercials. Let the Games finish before dawn.

The Olympics are appealing to women not because of hokey scenes of swimmer Amanda Beard cuddling a teddy bear but rather because they used to be a pure communal event--of which there are so few--with moments of real sentiment and real heroism instead of the Oprah kind. They are one of the few times when TV celebrates hardworking role models instead of the self-absorbed doofuses on most of prime time and in big-time sports--and one when parents can watch with the kids without cringing at explicit sex scenes. That's more than enough reason to tune in. So stuff the stuffed animals.