Tables Turned For Cbs’ Final Olympics For At Least 12 Years
What a difference four years make.
In 1994, the Olympics provided a diversion for CBS employees devastated over losing the NFL. This year, it’s the other way around - the NFL’s return to CBS is taking some of the sting out of the network’s loss of the Olympics for at least 12 years after the Nagano Games.
Andrea Joyce, who has been at CBS since 1989, remembers that December 1993 night when she was told by friends at CBS that Fox had wrested away the NFC.
“I thought they must be joking,” she said. “I was shocked and saddened. We knew it would affect sports, but few of us understood the far-reaching effect it would have on the network top to bottom, from sports to news to entertainment to affiliates defecting.”
The malaise subsided for about two weeks in February when CBS broadcast the highest-rated Olympics in history. The long hours of work and the excitement of the games provided a brief respite during a four-year stretch in which some people left the network or lost their jobs, and others struggled to keep CBS Sports on the map.
The Nagano Games, CBS’ last Olympics until at least 2010, were to be the light at the end of the tunnel. After Nagano, CBS Sports was going to return to the background, while its competitors televised the bulk of the major events.
That all changed on Jan. 13 when CBS bought its way back into the NFL.
“There is still a bit of sadness, this being our last Olympics. But at the same time, we have the NFL to look forward to,” Joyce said. “This gives a morale boost to a lot of folks here.”
As the network heads into its last Olympics before NBC takes over, CBS employees realize that Nagano will be their Olympic legacy.
“We are all sort of consumed by the feeling that we want to set the bar as high as possible,” said Rich Gentile, CBS’ executive producer for the Olympics. “We feel we brought something to the coverage of the Olympics. We want whomever follows us to have to strive to achieve what we achieved.”
CBS will broadcast 128 hours of Olympic coverage in prime time, late night and weekends over 17 days. Jim Nantz, the weekend co-host in 1992 and 1994, will anchor CBS’ prime-time coverage.
Joyce, Nantz’s partner at the Albertville and Lillehammer games, will handle the weekend duties with Olympic newcomer Bill Macatee. Michelle Tafoya and Al Trautwig will anchor the late night show.
TNT will broadcast 50 hours of coverage, mostly on weekday afternoons. Jim Lampley, working his ninth Olympics, will anchor the show, which will feature a half-hour daily figure skating program, a cooking show and various events that CBS passes on. That doesn’t bother Lampley.
“I am excited about the amount of freedom we have,” Lampley said. “That is not always the case at the network, where time is so precious because of all the events.”
There is a big difference for TNT and CBS heading into these games, however.
In 1994, the country was enthralled by the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding soap opera, which helped fuel the highest ratings in history.
The first night of women’s skating in Lillehammer is still the third highest-rated program in history, and those games as a whole had a 27.8 rating in prime time compared with an 18.7 in Albertville. Gentile projects a rating somewhere between the two this year. Each rating point represents 980,000 homes that have televisions.
“It’s difficult to say what was the cause of the spike in ratings in 1994. Certainly, the figure skating ratings were a direct result of the Tonya-Nancy thing,” Gentile said. “But I don’t know if anyone has figured out why we got 25 ratings without them.”
There were other factors that helped draw viewers - Tommy Moe winning a medal on the first day, U.S. speedskaters Dan Jansen and Bonnie Blair, and bad weather on the East Coast.
xxxx TV BROADCAST PRICES A list of dollar amounts spent by the three major networks for television rights to the Winter Olympic Games, according to the IOC archives. The Olympic Games were first televised in 1960: Year, Site Net Price 1960, Squaw Valley CBS $394,000 1964, Innsbruck ABC $597,000 1968, Grenoble ABC $2.5 million 1972, Sapporo NBC $6.4 million 1976, Innsbruck ABC $10.0 million 1980, Lake Placid ABC $15.5 million 1984, Sarajevo ABC $91.5 million 1988, Calgary ABC $309.0 million 1992, Albertville CBS $243.0 million 1994, Lillehammer CBS $300.0 million 1998, Nagano, Japan CBS $375.0 million 2002, Salt Lake City NBC $545.0 million 2006, TBA NBC $613.0 million