How we see the Olympics is not the same as the way the rest of the world sees it — or in some cases doesn’t see it. Here are our correspondents’ dispatches from around the globe.
Not exactly cricket
By Kim Barker, Tribune foreign correspondent
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Few people really care about the Olympics in Pakistan. And the reason is obvious: Cricket is not yet an Olympic sport. Cricket news still dominates on TV and in newspapers. Even speculative stories about future cricket games beat out stories about the Olympics.
“This is like a virus you know,” said Muhammad Nazir, a driver in Pakistan. “Every street, every corner, boys are playing cricket, cricket, cricket. I don’t know why.”
If one does care, it is barely possible to follow the Olympics. No TV channel regularly broadcasts the Games.
Newspaper coverage is spotty as well. Most news obviously focuses on Pakistan, which has not yet won a medal in Athens. Any success is hyped, such as when the Pakistan men’s field hockey team beat Egypt and South Korea. Stories focus on the more than 35,000 Pakistanis who live in Greece. Or that Pakistan has fewer participants — 44 — than other countries with similar populations. Or that the chief for Pakistan’s contingent gave Pakistan’s green cap and a souvenir pin to the queen of Spain in the Olympic Village dining hall.
Other Olympic news has a more political bent. Headlines proclaimed “American stars shine, but no one notices,” “America launches salvage operation” and “Tactical error sinks American sprinters.” News about any Indian success is generally shoved into a corner of the page.
Most of the newspaper sports real estate is reserved for non-Olympic news: Six Pakistani players qualified for the pre-quarter-final round of the World Junior Squash Championship. The personal assistant to the provincial sports minister created a commotion by demanding an official car when one was not available. And Islamabad may host next year’s World Snooker Championship in Pakistan.
Wait ’til 2008
By Michael A. Lev, Tribune foreign correspondent
BEIJING — Two athletic men in red and white tracksuits dash through a modern-looking Chinese city, leaping over barriers, pausing only to swig Coca-Cola. They are Chinese star hurdler Liu Xiang and gymnast Teng Hai Bin.
“Where are you going?” Teng shouts as Liu races off.
“The Olympics!” Liu responds, at the climax of the Coke commercial.
On China’s state-run television coverage of the Olympics, there’s very little sign of American stars such as Amanda Beard and Michael Phelps but plenty of action featuring the home team. That includes handsome diver Tian Liang, a pinup boy who has won one gold medal so far, and female weightlifter Liu Chun Hong, who at just 19 already has broken the world record 21 times.
China’s Olympic team has developed into a powerhouse, but it is nowhere near what the country hopes will be its pinnacle: four years from now when Beijing is the host.
China has accelerated from winning five gold medals at the 1992 games to 25 in Sydney. At Athens, it is expecting 30 — which the Chinese hope will run second only to the U.S. The high profile sports with the best chances for gold include gymnastics, diving, judo, badminton, shooting, and women’s and men’s weightlifting. But table tennis is the national game and Chinese players are the world’s best, so the men’s semifinal match against Denmark — televised live — was fraught with tension. The Chinese announcer, Cai Meng, kept up a running commentary that was heavy on analysis and avoided jingoism or cockiness. (“The Chinese are faster than the Europeans; the Danes look more relaxed.”)
At the crucial moment (when technique is less important than how you handle pressure, the announcer explained), the Danes battled back fiercely from match point, but Chinese talent ultimately prevailed.
Send in the clowns
By Hugh Dellios, Tribune foreign correspondent
MEXICO CITY — Mexico has been very multinational and unselfish in its coverage of the Olympics — mostly because Mexicans have had little to cheer about their own athletes.
However, keeping the coverage lively has gotten them in trouble with the Greeks.
The front page of Reforma newspaper Thursday carried two photos of Paul Hamm, the gymnastics all-around gold medal winner from Waukesha, Wis. (where a certain Dellios was also born), while El Universal carried a photo of gold medal-winning Dutch swimmer Pieter Van Den Hoogenband, above a few lines about the progress of the few Mexicans still competing in judo and sailing.
The men’s soccer team was eliminated — horrors! — in the first round. Most of proud Mexico’s medal hopes rest with its 400-meter sprinter, world champion Ana Guevara, known here as “Ana” in a “Sammy” Sosa sort of way.
The big newspapers’ special Olympic sections highlighted Ana’s arrival in Athens from Hungary. So far, Mexico has not won any medals, nor has Latin America in general been fortunate. By El Universal’s count, the region has won only seven — five for Cubans, one Argentine and one Colombian. None has been gold.
To keep the media coverage exciting, however, the Mexicans have relied on humor, some of which has backfired. The big television networks, Televisa and Azteca, have sent comedians to Athens to lighten up the coverage; Televisa’s team includes Brozo, the tart-mouthed, green-haired clown who until recently had hosted an irreverent morning news program.
However, the comics have run afoul of the Greek authorities by taking their antics a little too far. Three Televisa comedians (not Brozo) were arrested after they dressed like beggars and harassed pedestrians. One apparently pretended he was robbing a store. One Greek newspaper columnist asked, “What right do five idiots from Mexico who call themselves journalists have to perform such foolishness?”
Beauty in eye of a swimmer
By Dennis Ginosi, Special to the Tribune
LODEVE, France — The guys anchoring French television Olympic coverage can get away with saying things Bob Costas can only dream about. Maybe it’s because there’s no Katie Couric here to glare when they start sounding like a bunch of drooling anti-metromales watching women’s beach volleyball on big screen TV.
They clearly wish women swimmers wore bikinis rather than skin-concealing body suits, and go on endlessly about how radiant the women’s eyes and smiles are. Amanda Beard, viewers were told, has eyes that “sparkle like the water in the Olympic pool,” and when she consented to a quickie interview after a qualifying round she was first told how beautiful she and her eyes were and how the French loved her for that.
The Olympics have always been about rooting for the home team, and France is no different. So in the first week of these Olympics, viewers have been treated to non-stop coverage of judo, which for reasons that escape me is very popular here, and fencing.
Fencing is popular enough in France that McDonald’s is running a television commercial for its new healthy chicken meal featuring silver medal winner Laura Flessel-Colovic, who is seen holding her fencing foil while waiting to place an order, her daughter perched on her shoulders and wearing a fencing mask. Cut to the table where fit-and-trim mom and daughter are sharing a carefully sliced (get it, blades, sliced chicken?) chunk of chicken. Fencers are wired, masked and padded from head to toe, and judo costumes are not particularly figure-flattering, so to give viewers a break, it’s off to the women’s beach volleyball competition, preferably when the Brazilian team is playing. In the interest of providing full coverage, the cameras focus on (1) athletes adjusting their bikini tops; (2) athletes adjusting their bikini bottoms; and (3), best of all, the forecourt player bending over to signal the play to her partner without having had time to adjust either.
A couple of minutes of that and back to the studio, where the anchor desk team is sweating more than the athletes, before heading off for more judo.
So far, it’s mostly been good fun. The French judo team is doing about as well as the U.S. basketball team, but unexpected medal wins by the swimmers have eased that pain. Paul Hamm’s miracle score on the high bar that won him gold in the all-around was greeted with disbelief by the French announcers, one of whom said it was a scoring scandal equal to that in ice skating at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. But it’s early. Track and field has started and bad things almost always happen to French competitors in those thoroughbred events. Keep your eye on French sprinter Christine Arron in the 400-meter relay. If you want my opinion, she runs like the springtime mistral and has a smile that glistens like an ice cube in a glass of pastis.
Comaneci’s legacy
By Charles Hawley, Special to the Tribune
BUCHAREST — If Bucharest, Romania, ever hosts the Olympics, here is what they will look like: Ten solid days of gymnastics competition, a couple of swim and track-and-field events for the sake of appearances — and hour-long medal ceremonies. No need for expensive stadiums, forget team sports, leave out equestrian events, wrestling, fencing and shooting. A tumbling pad and some pageantry are all that is needed.
Romanians have been crazy for gymnastics at least since Nadia Comaneci’s dramatic gold medals in the 1976 Olympics. Gymnasts are national idols. True to form, this year’s coverage has been dominated by rings, parallel bars and pommel horses — and, following the women’s team gold, so too has the nightly news. Interviews with up-and-coming gymnasts, gymnastics coaches and past winners are currently dominating the airwaves.
And yet, the coverage doesn’t feel forced. They show the entire gymnastics competition, including the complete routines of their competitors. They televise large chunks of the swim competition, though only a very few Romanians are represented.
Nor, unfortunately, do the cameras shy away from showing the medal ceremonies in their excruciating entirety, no matter who wins. But if it’s a gymnastics ceremony, the ceremony will be followed by a video montage of the winning performance complete with soft focus and triumphant music.
No shortage of coverage
By Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent
JOHANNESBURG — Olympic coverage in South Africa has focused on the home favorites, particularly the country’s swimmers, who took the men’s 4×100-meter relay gold from the favored Americans and Australians. But massive coverage of the games in the sports-mad country — more than a half-dozen cable channels are dedicated to full-time coverage of the Olympics — hasn’t stopped just with South African athletes.
South African viewers have been treated to endless hours of badminton and fencing — both sports they don’t particularly excel at on an international level — as well as field hockey and volleyball, where they have more competitive teams.
Commentators have also looked beyond South African athletes to focus on other African competitors, particularly Zimbabwean swimmer and medallist Kristy Coventry and African competitors in soccer competition.
Yngling?
By Peter Almond, Special to the Tribune
LONDON — A week into the Olympic Games and Hooray, Britain won its first gold medal — in yngling.
Yngling? A word nobody has ever heard of apparently applies to a new class of sailing, involving a crew of three in a boat with a keel and a spinnaker sail. Still it was good enough to put three attractive blond young women on the front pages of almost every British national newspaper Friday, and on repeated showings on national TV news.
Cynical Brits are already laughing. But probably most don’t care that it is an obscure part of a recreational sport. It’s a gold, isn’t it? And how about that silver medal for synchro diving (or is that two medals)? Or that mixed doubles badminton final, another minor sport in which an unknown British pair came from behind to heartbreakingly almost beat the Chinese Olympic champions?
The British will take what they can get. They know that in spite of coming in third in the all-time Olympic medals table behind the U.S. and old Soviet Union they are a faded power in international athletics.
Indeed, the conventional wisdom is that, with so many national stars retiring, the British team is unlikely to come close to the 11 gold medals and 11th place position it won at the Sydney Olympics of 2000. But the Brits are as nationalistic as the Americans, and they live in hope that somehow someone will make them as proud as the English rugby team did last November when it beat the Aussies in the Rugby World Cup and brought the nation to a standstill in front of its TV sets.
With more than 1,250 hours of coverage available to every household in the country, yet with so relatively few real gold medal hopes, the Brits have the luxury of seeing a lot more of other national stars and other sports than their American cousins. And with only two hours’ time difference with Athens it is almost all live. The focus is always on the British athletes, though without the sentimentalized “up close and personal” stories U.S. viewers get of their stars.
The contrast with NBC’s coverage in the U.S. is already stirring British comment. A commentary in Friday’s London Times is headed, “America deserves a gold for narcissistic isolation,” and says U.S. Olympics coverage “reinforces those traits that the world finds so distasteful in Americans.”
`The pocket Hercules’
By Catherine Collins, Special to the Tribune
ISTANBUL — Keeping score is more than a matter of numbers, especially when the competition is centuries old.
Turks watched carefully this week as two Greek track stars, medal hopefuls and national heroes, Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou, withdrew from the Olympics, under a cloud of suspicion after they missed a drug test.
Only a week earlier, Turkey’s most famous athlete, long-distance runner, Sureyya Ayhan, had withdrawn under a similar cloud. The morning after the Greeks pulled out but seemed to avoid a future ban, Turkish sports columnists were interpreting it as an auspicious sign for their own star.
Sometimes it just helps to share the pain.
Most of the airtime and newspaper ink has been spent on the homegrown hero, the man they call “the pocket Hercules.” Halil Mutlu’s face was on the front page of every paper in the country when he won his third consecutive Olympic gold in weight lifting in the 124-pound division.
The Olympics get full-time coverage on one of Turkey’s state-run television networks, but the diversity of the sports has sometimes undone the Turkish commentators. They understand the nuances of soccer and basketball, but gymnastics and fencing have left them tongue-tied and fumbling for a rule book.
Soccer, of course
By Colin McMahon, Tribune foreign correspondent
BUENOS AIRES — Coverage in Argentina is extensive, with a local cable sports channel providing daily live feeds from 2 a.m. Buenos Aires time until 6 p.m. A local network station also provides coverage. Not surprisingly, the coverage has focused on Argentine competitors and sports with large followings in Argentina.
There is lots of soccer coverage, of course. Lots of field hockey. Lots of sailing and tennis and basketball. Volleyball matches are carried live in their entirety. Judo seems popular.
Sports reporters and former athletes provide the commentary, and most of it is done from studios in Buenos Aires with the occasional telephone report from Greece. Argentina is still struggling to climb out from an economic collapse that threw millions of people into poverty from 2000 to 2002, so these are not the times for big budget sports shows.
What’s been missing from Argentina’s Olympics coverage is coverage of some of the premier swimming matchups and of sports such as gymnastics. Even on the wrap-up shows, certain events seem pretty much ignored.
The stories that do appear in the papers are dominated by Argentine figures. Last week, even on a day when the soccer did not play, both Clarin and La Nacion carried a color photo and story about the team’s activities-frolicking at the beach.
Statistical winners
By Kirsten Fogg Special to the Tribune
BRISBANE, Australia — Sport, typified by the Olympic coverage, is the unofficial religion Down Under. After all, this is the one area where the country, usually viewed as insignificant on the world stage, can compete.
The Olympics is front page news — every day — with photos of Australian’s athletic heroes dwarfing any political or world coverage. The national newspaper The Australian has devoted a special pull-out section to “Athens 2004,” which reads like a tribute to Ian Thorpe and the swim team.
Even after the U.S. swim team won the 4×200-meter freestyle, beating Australia, the photo of Michael Phelps carried the ambiguous title “Thorpedoed.”
And if the newspapers have their way, Australia is destined to finish first. In Melbourne’s The Age, an article pointed out that on a per-capita basis Australia was leading the total medal tally, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
As for golds: “The Yanks are way behind us. Their six gold medals amount to a pathetic one for every 49.5 million people,” the article said.
Other countries are mentioned when they’re involved in a drug scandal like the Greek runners or just beaten the Australians like the U.S. basketball team.
Frenzy for swordplay
By Michael McGuire, Special to the Tribune
ROME — Italians by the millions appeared far more interested in hitting the beaches and trekking through the nation’s cool-aired mountains on their midsummer holidays than in crowding TV sets blaring news from Athens.
President Carlo Ciampi made an effort to personally congratulate each Italian winner, while in the nation’s press, Olympic gold fever quickly replaced a daily blitz on the Iraq war and the threat of terror at home. TV and the newspapers appeared scarcely able to control their ecstasy over early Italian victories. But as the week progressed, Iraq and concern over terrorism returned to dominate the news.
The national government’s RAI 2 television network — which is providing 24-hour coverage — emblazoned Italian Olympic pride by opening its first broadcast from Athens with Calaf’s aria from Puccini’s “Turandot,” which ends with the spine tingling, “Vincero! Vincero!” The network repeated the aria in later broadcasts.
Within hours of the opening of the games, Italy had racked up two gold medals, won by charismatic bicyclist Paulo Bettini, who won the hearts of Italians by crediting his victory to love for his wife and daughter, and saber fighter Aldo Montano, whose heroic features and frenzied victory celebration struck home even with Italians cool on swordplay. By Sunday, Italy was in 10th place among medal winners, with 17. By comparison, American athletes had won 46.
