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This article is from September 22, 2000, and is no longer current.

The Nike Olympics

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The Sydney 2000 Olympics have just begun and already there are the usual grumblings about poor TV coverage, along with reports that viewership is down 25 percent from the Atlanta 1996 Olympics. This year, NBC has decided that the 18-to-21-hour time difference between Sydney and the U.S. is too difficult to schedule, and so no events are being broadcast live. This creates quite an opportunity for the Web to attract a sea of sports enthusiasts happy to surf the lists of the latest winners from pool, gym, and track.

From where I sit, the Web has dropped the ball and blown its opportunity to compete with television. There are plenty of places to find the results of every event long before NBC chooses to broadcast them, but I’ve yet to find any live coverage — not streaming video, not streaming audio, not even a taped replay. There are plenty of interviews and lots of footage prepared before the games began, but the Web isn’t much better than the nightly TV sports casts where this Olympics is concerned.

It all seems to be the fault of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its broadcast partner, NBC. The IOC and NBC film everything and maintain very tight control over all of it. The official Web sites of this pair — msnbc.com, cnbc.com, nbcolympics.com, and olympics.com — are without live coverage. There are a couple of Java applets, one written by IBM for olympics.com and the other by Quokka Sports for nbcolympics.com, that give updated results as events happen. But these are numeric data streams that provide no better than crude, disappointing information. Plus, there’s no video.

Frankly, I was really hoping to see badminton and table tennis, two sports I’m particularly fond of but that the networks ignore. I guess I’ll have to wait another four years to find a site that gives me the Olympics I want to see.

The Missed Olympic Moment
It falls short of my Olympic dream, but Nike has created a more exciting Web experience with its World Body site and what amounts to the Nike Olympics. Though Nike hides the URL, you can get to the site by surfing to www.nike.com/2000. Or, from the Nike home page, click on the nike.com/2000 link — the animation in the middle of Nike’s home page. Either way, when you enter the World Body site, you’ll find a sophisticated Flash movie that introduces Nike’s World Body concept, one of the universality of experience, including the Olympic experience.

Interestingly, even though Nike is a huge Olympic sponsor, nike.com is not an IOC-sanctioned Web site, so the Olympics are never mentioned by name, and the Olympic logo, with its distinctive five color rings, is absent. Rather than make World Body an Olympic Web site, Nike has created a celebration of some Olympic athletes (Nike-sponsored athletes, one assumes), and has turned this into a celebration of mankind.

Oh, the Humanity!
Impressively, the World Body site and all its content are available in eight languages, including Japanese and Korean. A team from nike.com and its partners at Blast Interactive, in Vancouver, Canada, reports every day from Sydney, and every word is translated eight times before posting. This is a huge task, especially considering the quantity of daily reporting.

The primary navigation for this site comprises six grayscale images that take on color when rolled over. The images relate to body parts, starting with the Blood + Guts link. The metaphor is perhaps a bit too literal, but Nike’s point is to show real flesh-and-blood athletes rather than to glorify and sanitize the Olympic moment. It’s the equivalent of TV’s “Up Close and Personal” interviews with athletes, but a lot hipper.

The Ear icon links to Nike’s Radio Free Sydney page, an obvious play on Radio Free Europe that likens the IOC to the organizations that controlled information in the old Iron Curtain countries of Eastern Europe. Where the IOC controls what comes out of the Olympics, Nike presents the real sounds of Sydney — crowd noises, ad hoc interviews, conversations among the athletes, talk in the locker rooms. Remember, this is in-your-face reporting, not the watered-down hyperbole we’re fed on TV.

World Body is an audacious undertaking. It’s Nike’s way of attaching its own brand to the Olympics. Given its tight relationships with its spokespeople, Nike may have a better idea than the IOC of what motivates athletes and how they view the world and the Olympic experience. At the same time, the company has created a site with a classic hierarchy that lets users find information in a logically clear way that encourages browsing. The color scheme is not only stylish, but also consistently used throughout the site. And the World Body metaphor is really quite brilliant as used in the imagery and navigation interface, and as a theme for the content.

Although focusing on the presentation of content, the site is clearly intended to sell product: Though subtle, a little Nike swoosh appears on each page. And for all its openness to political diversity and the brotherhood of man, the site remains a glorification of big-dollar athletes. Such is the present-day reality of Olympic sports, which despite the pressures of commercialization remain tremendously exciting in a way that really does unite people across cultures.

Nike.com’s World Body site is still not my dream Olympic experience, but it is the most creative Olympic site I’ve found and is a truly remarkable Web undertaking. To use a somewhat tired sports cliché, it really does set the bar higher for future sports sites. As for my ultimate dream, I think we’ll just have to wait for greater bandwidth on the Internet and more openness on the part of the IOC before the Olympic spectacle becomes a truly global event for Web viewers.

Creativepro.com welcomes new contributing editor Clay Andres, the author of “Great Web Architecture” and the forthcoming “Great Web Branding,” both by IDG Books. He also operates a Web design firm.

 

  • anonymous says:

    Clay’s certainly right about the coverage that goes to air. I just wanted to clarify how the Games broadcasting works.

    Every Olympic event is captured on video by “SOBO”, the Sydney Olympic Broadcasting Organisation, otherwise known as the “Host Broadcaster”. SOBO is a specially-put-together TV producer (for a few weeks, the largest in the world!). SOBO includes specialist crews and directors from around the world (and several hundred final-year Aussie media students in support roles).

    The IOC sells broadcast rights by geographic area to the highest bidder: NBC in the USA, Channel 7 in Sydney, etc (including multi-channel consortia for Eastern Europe, parts of Africa etc).

    These all have access to SOBO’s feeds, including English-language commentary, which they supplement with their own studio shots, commentary, and location camera work.

    The big problem with live Web coverage is the geographic breakdown of the rights. Because the rights payments pay most of the costs of the Olympics, the IOC doesn’t want the Web to compete with its precious NBC etc – and no-one on the Web is willing to put up the $750 million that NBC has!

    The Olympics will go live on the Web when they’ve figured out a way to make it pay for the Games. Until then, we’re stuck with the decisions of NBC etc.

    Here in Sydney, Channel 7 is broadcasting Olympics 23 hours/day. It’s also running on two cable channels.

    By the way, SOBO records everything they shoot and logs it all to form a vast archive for the IOC.

    Hope this sheds a little light on things.

    David Glover
    Sydney Australia

  • anonymous says:

    games footage is barred for everyone, by rulings of ioc. this reviewer obviously has never been to nbcolympis.com, as there is extensive badminton and table tennis coverage, not to mention that the live viewer offers live images and commentary. the nike site is all fluff, no content, and the reviewer obviously values design over content.

  • anonymous says:

    Like you, I looked on the net for live coverage and got disapointed. Those NBC broadcast were way too selective. Many sport events have not been shown at all (pieces on early childhood of american athletes seem to matter more). Besides, it was almost exclusively about american athletes… so much for the “international” spirit of the games and the performances of other non-american athletes. 2 thumbs down for NBC…

  • anonymous says:

    I really don’t know how to respond to Clay’s article. First he’s disappointed with the TV coverage and then he’s annoyed that there’s no streaming video on the web. Then he overlooks some of the better Olympic sites and chooses a site produced by the biggest sports marketing company in the world and proclaims that it captures the “Olympic experience”.

    Obviously, Clay did not take a closer look at nbcolympics.com, that had thorough coverage of his two favorite sports. There he could have read bios of table tennis champion David Zhuang and view picture shows of actual games- although not actual video.

    I particularly felt that nbcolympics.com captured the real Olympic experience through it’s unique design and wealth of stories, picture shows, athlete interviews and chats. Yes, you can find this on the nike site. But I doubt you will find compelling stories from table tennis athletes or the true heroes of the Olympics such as Rulon Gardner.

    Though I liked the nike site, I just couldn’t help but think that I was just buying into another promotion for it’s overpaid and heavily endorsed athletes – something that I would rather not experience when it comes to the Olympics.

  • anonymous says:

    I thought I’d respond by thanking those who agree with the article and by pointing out to those who don’t that I appreciate their criticism. I did look carefully at both the official NBC- and IBM-produced Web sites and found much information about every represented sport and many of the participants. But I was looking for action and only found it with a heavy Nike bias. This is a design perspective. Practically speaking, I agree that the more traditional sites have more information to offer, but in a decidedly uninteresting package. Nike was not pretending to offer complete Olympic coverage, but they did feature their sponsored athletes in a very dynamic way. I should have made this distinction clearer.

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