CBS to Say Sayonara to Olympics

By MIKE PENNER

Nov. 30, 1997 12 AM PT

Three months from now, it will all be over. The flame will have been extinguished, the skis, skates and sleds will have been packed up and shipped home, and CBS will have covered its last Winter Olympics for at least a decade.

CBS, it bears pointing out, does not stand for “Ceasing to Broadcast Sports.” But the network that lost the NFL, the NBA and major league baseball will relinquish yet another valuable sports property when its Albertville-Lillehammer-

Nagano Winter Olympics run ends in February, reluctantly relinquishing the torch to NBC and--heaven help us--John Tesh rinkside at the women’s figure skating long program.

It is not a happy time at CBS Sports, but Rick Gentile, senior vice president and executive producer for the Nagano Games, refuses to accept the notion that the lame duck be added to the CBS eye on all Winter Olympics promotional spots.

“I don’t think it affects morale--certainly not in the

preparations,” Gentile says. “You get ready to do an Olympics and it’s an extraordinary undertaking. People work their whole careers getting ready for this.”

Lapsing into gallows humor, Gentile points out, “I have been involved at CBS as executive producer when we did our last NFL game.

“And our last baseball game.

“And our last basketball game.”

He speaks from experience, then, when he notes that “the morale issue comes in as you get close to the end. It gets emotional. But there’s absolutely no less dedication and preparation as we get close to the Games.

“We’re going to put this thing on because this is what we do. This is what we do for a living. This is what we take pride in.”

The idea, Gentile says, is to go out with an exclamation point--and in that regard, Nagano presents a unique challenge.

Covering an Olympics, in Gentile’s view, is “really about covering the drama. In this particular case, in Japan, it’s about covering the culture, the people, the land.

“Nobody’s ever been to Nagano. Nobody’s ever heard of Nagano in this country. Something we’ve done well in the past and hope to do again is bring the American viewer to this incredibly exotic place. It’s in a valley surrounded by these exquisite mountains. The city itself is built around this old Buddhist temple.

“It’s a fabulous place, and part of the challenge is not worrying about how small we can make our cameras and where we can place them. It’s really about bringing this place home to the people watching.”

Those who suffered through NBC’s soft-focus Up-With-America! approach to the 1996 Summer Olympics, however, will want to know: What about the sports?

Will hockey coverage be sacrificed for a cutaway in-depth profile of Tara Lipinski’s teddy-bear collection?

Will coverage of the biathlon be reduced to a long silence, punctuated, finally, by an uproarious cheer from the booth: “Yesss! An American has actually finished in the top 38! Let’s take you now to this heroic young man’s hometown in rural Wisconsin . . . “?

“In respect to our colleagues at NBC,” Gentile says, “if you go into a Winter Olympics looking to tell just American stories, you’re going to have a very short broadcast.”

CBS has 128 hours to fill in February, and Gentile promises, “We will cover everything that moves”--although, when pressed, he concedes, “No, we’re not going to do a lot of curling.”

He also promises that every U.S. men’s hockey game will be aired live in the United States--past midnight on the West Coast--in its entirety.

But the oft-dreaded soft-feature approach--at a Winter Olympics, Gentile maintains, there’s no getting around it.

“In the Winter Olympics, one of the problems that we have is that people are not familiar with these sports,” he says. “You don’t see a lot of bobsled and luge in off-years.

“There needs to be a certain amount of explaining that goes with these sports. To just say, ‘OK, now we’re going to cover bobsled. Here’s run after run after run’ doesn’t really work for the American viewer.”

Allowing that “it’s always awkward” to discuss the work of a competitor, Gentile graciously notes that “NBC had a lot of ratings success in Atlanta” while adding, “I think they would have liked to have had more critical success. . . .

“[CBS’] Lillehammer broadcast was the most-watched TV event of all-time [apart from soccer’s World Cup]. When you know that you’re going to get that kind of attention, I promise you, there is no less commitment to the product.

“You know, when the closing ceremonies are over, we’ll all sit down and cry and get on with our lives. But there is no sense of a lame-duck situation.”

PRECAUTIONARY TALE

The cast on her left foot kept Michelle Kwan at home for Thanksgiving and out of the NHK Trophy competition in Nagano, where she could have done some scouting of the conditions where she will try to win an Olympic gold medal in February.

A missed opportunity, no doubt, but Kwan’s coach, Frank Carroll, preferred the blessing-in-disguise spin when discussing the stress fracture that prompted his skater to pull out of the NHK event.

“Michelle had had pain in her foot for a long period of time,” Carroll said. “She first hurt the foot in August, but she thought she could skate through it. She skated great at Skate America and won, but it started to bother her again at Skate Canada [in early November].

“Eventually, we decided, ‘If it’s hurting her at Skate Canada, what’s it going to do at the Olympics? Let’s take whatever precautions we need now.’ ”

Doctors put a cast on Kwan’s left foot to immobilize it for about two weeks--”to keep her from pushing it,” in Carroll’s words.

Kwan could resume training as early as this week, but Carroll said her participation in the Champions Series Final in Munich (Dec. 19-21) remains doubtful.

“Michelle would very much like to participate in that event, but we have to take this day by day,” he said. “If this relieves the pain she’s had for a while, it’s probably better to get it over with now.”

GRAND SLAM OF DISTANCE RUNNING

Mebrahtom Keflezighi’s victory at last week’s NCAA men’s cross-country meet gave the UCLA runner a total of four individual NCAA titles during the 1997 calendar year--the three others being the indoor track 5,000-meter championship and the outdoor 5,000- and 10,000-meter championships.

How rare a feat is that?

The last distance runner so successful was Suleiman Nyambui of Texas El Paso and Tanzania in 1980. And he was even more successful. Nyambui, 5,000-meter silver medalist in the Moscow Olympics, won five individual NCAA titles in 1980--cross-country, outdoor 5,000 and 10,000 meters, indoor mile and 3,000 meters.

UCLA cross-country Coach Bob Larsen said his assistant, women’s Coach Eric Peterson, sent an e-mail message throughout the athletic department, describing Keflezighi’s 1997 accomplishment as “a little like winning the Grand Slam in tennis or the Triple Crown in horse racing. Every NCAA [championship] race he ran in 1997, he won.”

Within hours of Keflezighi’s triumph at Furman, promoters for the Los Angeles Indoor Track Invitational announced the UCLA runner had agreed to compete in the 3,000-meter race at their event Feb. 7 at the Sports Arena.

Also among the first wave of athletes to commit to the L.A. Invitational: 1996 Olympic champion Randy Barnes and two-time world champion John Godina in the shotput, NCAA pole vault favorite Scott Slover of UCLA, Stanford milers Jonathon Riley, Michael Stember and Gabe Jennings, and former NCAA women’s high jump champion Amy Acuff.

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Calendar

CHAMPIONS SERIES OF FIGURE SKATING

* Dec. 19-21: Champions Series Final (Munich, Germany)

ALPINE SKIING WORLD CUP

* Friday-Saturday: Men’s downhill and super G (Beaver Creek, Colo.)

NORDIC SKIING WORLD CUP

* Dec. 11-13: Nordic combined (Steamboat Springs, Colo.)

FREESTYLE SKIING WORLD CUP

* Friday-Dec. 7 at Tignes, France.

LUGE WORLD CUP

* Saturday-Dec. 7 at Innsbruck, Austria.