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By Mike Thompson

Yahoo, the Olympics! The Summer Olympics are on TV! The excitement! The drama! The skills on display! A four-year event in the making! Just one question: What else is on?

Yes, the 2000 Summer Olympic Games from Sydney, Australia, ran on NBC the past couple of weeks, ending with the closing ceremonies that were broadcast Sunday, Oct. 1. I didn’t watch, and chances are that you didn’t watch either. While they were a hit in other parts of the world, the ratings for the Olympics here in America were the lowest rated of any Olympics—summer or winter—since the 1968 Summer Olympics held in Mexico City. And NBC has no one to blame but themselves for the Olympics bombing like they did.

First of all, NBC aired the Olympics on not one, not two, but three networks. There was the main broadcast network, NBC, and then there was also the all-news cable network, MSNBC, and the business news cable network, CNBC. Some proponents of this strategy hailed NBC for giving viewers options. In the past, only the highest-profile games were shown on TV, for there was traditionally only one network to show the Olympics on. Now that there were three outlets to show them, all of the games could be shown. This was a good thing, some people said. It gave viewers a chance to see the complete Olympics.

To that I laugh. Ha. Televising all of the games on three different networks just left us with a severe case of Olympics Overkill. There’s a simple reason only the highest-profile games were shown on TV in the past. It’s because they were the most entertaining to watch. Believe it or not, folks, some Olympic events can be quite boring. We’re not meant to watch them all. But some great and powerful NBC executive thought we were. So there was NBC, broadcasting dull events like people jumping up and down on a trampoline. That’s good television? Not in my book.

NBC’s second mistake was televising all of its games on tape delay. In some cases, the games were broadcast 24 hours after they originally happened. Granted, NBC wasn’t the first network to broadcast the Olympics on tape delay. This has happened many times in the past, as TV executives have always been eager to broadcast the Games in primetime (8 to 11 PM). This traditionally is the time that attracts the most viewers and, therefore, pleases advertisers the most.

The key word in that last sentence was "traditionally." NBC needed to get with the times when it came to broadcasting the games. In this age of the Internet, an event that happens across the world can be found out by some shmuck living in Idaho in a matter of seconds, as long as said shmuck has an Internet connection (and, believe me, there is an increasing number of shmucks using the Internet). By the time NBC got around to showing us one of the Games, anybody interested in the event could have already logged on to any one of the hundreds of news and sports web pages out there and found out who won. And then there’s significantly less reason to tune in and watch. NBC’s tape-delayed coverage might have worked in years past, but by the year 2000 it is very outdated.

Of course, NBC executives won’t blame itself for the low ratings. Instead, they blame cable, Internet, and other forms of digital media for taking away their audience. They say that these rival forms of media make it impossible for there to be a television event that people gather around the TV set to watch. That’s baloney. In August, CBS televised the final episode of Survivor, and that garnered huge ratings and was an event that people are still talking about now. And while it’s true that in this day and age the kind of gather-around-your-set TV events aren’t nearly as common as they were in years gone by, Survivor proved, just as the Super Bowl proves each year, that major television events, if handled properly, can still draw a huge crowd. NBC just dropped the ball.

Now, I’m not blaming NBC for everything. After all, these were the Summer Olympics. I’ve always been partial to the Winter Olympics. The luge, the bobsledding, the skiing, even the figure skating (although I doubt we’ll ever see an event of Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan proportions again). Those are the Games for me. The Summer Olympics just strike me as rather dull. Gymnastics, archery, discus tosses. What’s up with that? I guess I’ll just have to wait for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

NBC doesn’t need to feel too bad. They’ve got plenty of time to redeem themselves to the International Olympic Committee (not to mention potential advertisers). They’ve got the 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympics, and the 2004 and 2008 Summer Olympics, to show (hopefully) that they’ve learned from their mistakes. They just screwed up with this year’s Games. Better luck next time.