Olympics sans the Spirit: When ‘profits’ leap over ‘values’

As an avid sports fan and a bigger Olympic fan, I find that Olympics is moving away from the true Olympic spirit these days.

I feel cheated that we don’t get to see most of the Olympics live on TV in the USA. Btw, we are living in a world where all communication is instant and yet NBC chose to show the events as a delayed recording. The reason is simple, they get more ad revenues during primetime. And what do they do with the recordings, they end up showing all events full blown that you have to sit through the night to see the events you are interested in, or record them on the DVR and then watch them the next day.

Did NBC really think that people will get excited to watch the delayed recording of the 100m finals after knowing the winner already via other media? Will advertisers truly get their bang for buck with dissatisfied customers? Instead what NBC could have done is to show the events live and then have a 2 hr highlight show of the main events for the day, and reaped ad revenues from both. The combined revenues would not be too low from what they get now and they would have had a lot of satisfied customers. Profits don’t equate to happy customers, you need to have a balance. When firms and organizations are focused on profits, they miss the finer points of life. More on this topic for a later iVichar…

Another ironical factor is that in the days of childhood obesity and junk food, the main sponsors for the Olympics are Coke and McDonalds. You want kids to aspire to be an Olympian, and not wanting to be a kid with a coke on one hand and a big mac on the other. Oh IOC, where did you leave your spirits? Some credit to the IOC president  Jacques Rogge for questioning the suitability of McDonald's and Coke as Olympic sponsors, but it was after the fact. Again, the reason to go for these big sponsors is big money. There could be other firms that could have paid good money too, but it will be difficult to match the amounts doled out by these food giants. Question is should the IOC forgo the Olympic spirit for a few dollars more, I don’t think so.

Oh and by the way, can the media in the US come clean on the overall standing?, the team that wins the most gold leads the table (even if that is China) and not the team that wins the total number of medals. Every media in the world, including the official Olympic sites go by the gold first rule. The ‘win at any cost’ approach is so un-olympic. It is a mockery on all the great champions...

So much for the Olympic spirit...

-RamanujaIyer

PS: There is still a lot of great champions out there who play in the true Olympic spirit and I still enjoy watching the Olympics....