The Living Room Games, Up Close and Personal

By Richard Zoglin

Shortly before Thanksgiving the wagon train loaded up and started rolling. Twenty 60-ft. trailers spent nearly a week lumbering more than 2,800 miles, from the streets of Manhattan to a cavernous warehouse next to the Saddledome near downtown Calgary. Their cargo: 640 tons of gear, including a mobile studio and two fully equipped video control rooms, to be set up for ABC-TV's coverage of the Winter Olympics. A scant five days after the Games end, the whole traveling broadcast center will be torn down and shipped out to make way for an auto show. But over the next 2 1/2 weeks, the center will hum with life as it brings American viewers what they have come to expect from the Olympics: a blockbuster TV show.

That show, ABC confidently believes, will be an improvement over the '84 Games in Sarajevo, which had ratings 23% lower than Lake Placid's four years before. In Yugoslavia, the six-hours-earlier time differential meant that U.S. viewers saw most of the action on tape -- after the results were already known. Safely back in the Mountain standard zone, much of this year's competition will be broadcast live, with many of the glamorous events -- including figure skating and hockey -- in prime time. Even speed skating, traditionally held outdoors during the day, has been moved inside (and thus into the evening) for the first time. Another change that should boost TV appeal: the medal round of the hockey competition has been expanded from four teams to six, giving the U.S. squad (which was quickly knocked out in 1984) a better chance for a lengthy prime-time run. "If we get a win by the hockey team, a great downhill and a gold medal in speed skating," says Coordinating Producer Geoffrey Mason, "we'll be off to a great start."

ABC, broadcasting its tenth Olympics out of the past 13, has scheduled 94 1/ 4 hours of coverage, up from 63 at Sarajevo, where the Games were three days shorter. For the task, the network is assembling a De Millean army of 1,200 people, readying 62 cameras and 106 videotape machines and preparing 82 "Up Close and Personal" profiles. ABC News and Sports President Roone Arledge, who virtually invented Olympics coverage, will take his quadrennial turn in the Winter control room. Jim McKay, anchoring his tenth Olympics for ABC, will again head the on-air brigade, joined by such network stalwarts as Frank Gifford, Al Michaels and Keith Jackson. To give it all that down-home feeling, the studio will be gussied up with a real (well, gas fed) fieldstone fireplace, real wood posts and bookcases with real books -- the whole thing a dazzling recreation of what Manhattan apartment dwellers think a Western lodge looks like.

Out of sight will be the largest control room (1,000 sq. ft., 100 TV monitors) ever put together in North America, and that facility is matched by a second fully manned control room on backup in case of failures. Virtually every phone line and broadcast system also has a backup duplicate. Though there are few new gewgaws, ABC is celebrating the Olympic debut of its tiny point-of-view camera, a 2-in., 2 3/4-oz. black box that can be attached to the front of a bobsled, a skier's boot, even (via a special wheeled apparatus) a hockey puck. No P.O.V. camera will be used during actual competition, but ABC plans to strap one, for example, to the helmet of the "forerunner" who skis the course just before the start of the downhill races. "We're putting cameras where they have never been before," says Pierre De Lespinois, a consultant for special effects. "We are taking the viewer off the 50-yd.-line and putting him in the game." Microphones have also been carefully spaced along ski routes for a more even and realistic whoosh.

ABC could do without one of its firsts, however. Not since TV and the Olympics were introduced to each other has the network covering the Games lost money. Though ABC projects a healthy 21.5 average rating in prime time and commercial time is virtually sold out (up to $300,000 for a 30-second spot), network executives admit that advertising income will not cover the costs. They are spending a reported $100 million on the production, in addition to the whopping $309 million paid for the broadcast rights, more than three times the cost in 1984. The problem developed because the rights were auctioned off before the '84 Winter Games had taken place and before the network business soured. "With our original projections, we were bidding with the expectation of making a profit," says Arledge. "But then the economy changed, and the television advertising situation changed."

Still, executives claim that there will be no skimping on coverage. "We've got to maintain the image of ABC Sports here," says Dennis Lewin, senior vice president of production. "Plus there's our own pride at stake." Other things are at stake as well. The Games come in the midst of the important February "sweeps" period and will give the No. 3 network a big, if temporary, ratings boost. The competition, however, will not be playing dead. NBC, for example, has scheduled its biggest mini-series of the season, eight hours of James Clavell's Hong Kong epic Noble House, smack in the middle of the Games. ABC may find Calgary more congenial than Sarajevo, but it still has to persuade viewers not to skip off prematurely to the Orient.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York and Paul A. Witteman/Calgary