Olympics succeed when athletic, personal challenges converge

It has become a biennial ritual for the typical jaded American sports fan: settle into the sofa for a fortnight of NBC’s Olympics coverage, and brace oneself for the inevitable blitz of saccharine sob stories — the “up close and personal” athlete profiles that tell tales of triumph over adversity through super close-ups, teary interviews, glossy scenic shots and mournful music in the key of major tragedy.

Any watcher worth his weight in (“elusive”) gold is supposed to sit poised and expectant, like a speed skater crouched on the starting line, ready to spring up and unleash a “here they go again” tirade whenever NBC begins a heartrending tale about a skier or skater or slider who overcame extraordinary life challenges to reach the pinnacle of his or her athletic discipline. As the standard cynic’s rant goes, “real” sports coverage doesn’t attempt to engage its viewers emotionally by offering tales of the strife, hardship, abuse, suffering, economic ruin, disenfranchisement, injury, illness, mono, asthma, miserable childhoods, absent parents, missing limbs, missed proms and other unspeakable hardships endured by some medal contenders en route to Olympus.

Except … we need those stories. And, thankfully, NBC hasn’t told them in that maudlin way for several years now. In a marked departure from the docudrama-style that characterized its widely panned coverage of the 2000 Sydney Summer Games, in which the actual sports action, sometimes delayed by more than 20 hours, was mostly obscured by pre-packaged four-plus-minute (but seemingly interminable) syrupy features, NBC has taken to telling the athletes’ backstories in the context of the live (or closer to live) action on the slopes or in the rinks. And so during the men’s moguls competition last Sunday night, for example, analyst Jonny Moseley was charged with not only instructing the audience on the vagaries of the scoring system (“remember, airs only count for 25 percent”), but also with informing viewers that the eventual gold medalist, Alexandre Bilodeau of Canada, has an older brother who suffers from cerebral palsy.

The latter function is essential. Most American viewers tune in to moguls skiing no more than once every four years, and therefore don’t know who — or what — they’re looking at. The personalization of the athletes, whether through a quick anecdote thrown in when a skier is at the starting gate or, in Bilodeau’s case, a shot of his aforementioned brother, Frederic, waiting at the bottom of the hill among the other adoring Canadian fans, gives the television audience a rooting interest. Even if someone hasn’t watched enough freestyle skiing to recognize Bilodeau’s back double-full or to understand why that difficult trick separates him from his peers, the 22-year old’s devotion to his disabled brother resonates. Without the emotional hook, the event would feel less like the Olympics and more like the X Games — a bunch of punks one-upping each other with what look like crazy life-and-limb-endangering stunts.

NBC, which on Monday aired a poignant CTV-produced feature on the Brothers Bilodeau as a lead-in to Alex’s gold-medal ceremony, is not entirely unselfconscious about its reputation for playing the athletes’ backstories for maximum dramatic effect. During the parade of nations in the Opening Ceremony, Bob Costas wryly delivered this line about the Cayman Islands’ flag-bearer, an alpine skier named Dow Travers: “He was born in the Cayman Islands; as a teenager attended boarding school in England; now an undergraduate at Brown, he trains primarily in Aspen. And despite this life of hardship, he has persevered to make it to the Olympic Games.”

Though the quip was apparently lost on Matt Lauer (who immediately started talking about some athletes’ black armbands), it was an instructive one: Costas was acknowledging that most Olympians don’t face serious personal or family obstacles en route to the Games. Some, like Travers, are living charmed lives during which Vancouver is just another cheery stop. Most are completely unremarkable except for the fact that they are exceptionally gifted in sports.

But when personal challenges and Olympic challenges converge, that’s when the Games get good. I was moved by the Bilodeau brothers’ joyous gold-medal celebration — Frederic’s contorted face beaming as his handsome athletic younger brother, the home nation’s conquering hero, hugged him. The CTV-produced profile that aired in the States the following evening showed Alex taking Frederic out to eat, pushing him in his wheelchair, discussing the impact his brother’s affliction has on his attitude towards training. It portrayed him as a completely sympathetic character, someone who’s fun to root for. These are the tales that make viewers like me feel invested in the Games.

So I liked hearing that moguls skier Michael Morse is a Red Sox diehard who threw out the first pitch at Jon Lester’s 2008 no-hitter (Morse finished 15th). I liked being told that married pair skaters Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo train at an athletic center in China, where they’re forced to live in separate dormitory rooms (they won gold). I liked hearing the story of men’s French figure skater Florent Amodio, who was abandoned on the streets of Brazil as a baby before being adopted by a French couple (he finished 12th overall). When the women’s freestyle competition gets underway Saturday, I’ll be rooting for Emily Cook, raised since she was a baby by a single dad after a drunk driver killed her mother.

These kinds of stories are just as prevalent among non-Olympics, but they don’t get told. Perseverance isn’t as compelling when it’s mere mortals who are doing the persevering, and no one’s going to do an interview with the assistant manager in accounts payable whose brother has cerebral palsy. But I want to know about the athletes who reach the pinnacle of sport, the Olympics Games, despite personal trauma. I want inspirational tales to dictate my rooting interests. I’m glad NBC incorporates the storytelling into the competitive action more seamlessly than it used to, but I still need to have the stories told. It may be de rigueur for sports fans to roll their eyes and scoff, but there should be nothing wrong with being entertained and affected by legitimately moving tales of triumph.

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Abigail Lorge covered five Olympics as a researcher, writer and producer for NBC from 2000-2008. She is now the managing editor of TENNIS.com.