NOT A BAD RATING FOR SNOWBOARDING

One way to look at the 12.2 national rating CBS got for Saturday night’s coverage is that it is the lowest prime-time rating for the Winter Olympics in 10 years.

But CBS was putting a different spin on it.

“It’s the highest rating ever for snowboarding and freestyle skiing,” quipped Dana McClintock, the network’s director of Olympic communications.

CBS got killed when the men’s downhill got postponed on the first day of competition. Same thing happened to ABC in Calgary in 1988, and it got a 9.9 rating.

Since it was 10 a.m. Sunday when CBS went on the air with it’s prime-time coverage Saturday, the Nagano Games were just beginning and there was nothing to fall back on. The network had to rely and canned features and filler programming.

“Everyone over here thought we came out of it really well,” McClintock said. “When [producer] Eric Mann and [coordinating director] Bob Matina walked into the broadcast center after we went off the air, [executive producer] Rick Gentile said, ‘These two gentlemen just did an incredible job,’ and the whole room applauded.”

The share for the prime-time coverage was a 21, and CBS’ two-hour afternoon telecast Saturday had a 5.6 rating and a 14 share. The late-night numbers were a 4.4 and a 12.