Olympics Cheat U.S., Think Tank Says

WASHINGTON —  The United States finances much of the Olympic movement and in return both American athletes and fans are cheated, a U.S. economist said.

“The funding setup for the Olympics is a travesty,” said Robert Lawrence, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, an independent research organization normally dealing with economic, social and foreign policy issues far removed from sports.

When it comes to paying the costs of the Olympic Summer and Winter Games, “Americans get bilked in three ways,” he said, while the rest of the world pays much less than a fair share.

Adding insult to financial injury, he said, Americans “have to put up with an excessive number of (television) commercials to see the Games, and our athletes receive little of the money we do pay.”

Lawrence and co-author Jeffrey Pellegrom, a Brookings researcher, advocated wholesale restructuring of the broadcast charges that now finance much of the Olympics. Their recommendations appeared in an unusual cover story in the fall issue of The Brookings Review, titled “Fool’s Gold: How America Pays to Lose in the Olympics.”

For last year’s Winter Games at Calgary, ABC paid a record $309 million for U.S. television rights--compared to $5.7 million paid by all of Western Europe and $1.2 million by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe combined, they said.

“Canada, the host country, with an economy one-tenth the size of ours, paid about one-hundredth of what the United States did--$3.65 million.”

For the 1988 Summer Games at Seoul, “outbidding the other two U.S. networks, NBC paid the Olympic organizers $300 million for the rights to broadcast. . . . Western Europe, with a population 25% larger than that of the United States and an economy about as large, paid just $28 million, or 9% of the U.S. payment,” The Brookings Review said.

To meet the huge cost, “unfortunately, the U.S. networks must run an enormous number of commercials to recover their investment.”

Lawrence and Pellegrom said the International Olympic Committee “exploits the intense rivalry among the (U.S.) networks to its own benefit” to drive up the U.S. bids, but “when it comes to the rest of the world, the IOC extends its hand with a kid glove rather than a tight fist. . . .”