IOC Expects Seoul Games TV Pact This Week : 1988 Olympics Will Cost Successful Network Less Than Was Once Predicted

International Olympic Committee officials and agents for the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee say they expect an American television deal for the 1988 Seoul Games to be announced today or Thursday--and that it will be at a comparatively low price as demanded by the networks.

A meeting is scheduled today in New York under the chairmanship of Richard Pound of Canada, who heads the IOC’s television negotiating committee, to consider the latest bids from NBC, CBS and ABC.

Seoul refused to accept last month’s high NBC bid of $325 million, with a profit-sharing arrangement that could have brought the payment as high as $450 million. Pound said, however, that Seoul probably will settle this time.

If they don’t, Pound said, “things will only get worse” in terms of the price the American networks will be willing to pay.

In the last round of bidding, in Lausanne, Switzerland, in mid-September, the Seoul organizers reportedly held out for a minimum bid of $550 million. Pound and other IOC officials have said that the IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, warned the South Koreans in advance that the minimum bid was unrealistic. Pound said that when he heard it, “I just shuddered.”

Pound would not say what the new network bids are, but Neal Pilson, executive vice president of the CBS broadcast group, said Tuesday that they are not much higher than they were last month, when the CBS and ABC bids were well below the amount offered by NBC.

Pound and the chief Seoul agent in the United States, Barry Frank of the International Management Group, agreed with each other in separate interviews this week that the market for selling sports advertising has, in Frank’s words, “gone very, very soft” in the year and a half since the Calgary Winter Olympics organizing committee managed to sell the 1988 winter rights to ABC for $309 million.

Previously, the Winter Games spanned 12 days, but in Calgary, Canada, the Games will be held over 16 days, and they also will be on North American time.

Even so, Frank and his Los Angeles-based colleague, Michael O’Hara, said that if the Calgary rights were being sold today, they think that the price paid would be about $100 million less. Pound added, “ABC paid far more than the rights would go for today.”

The point has bearing on the Seoul discussions, because the South Korean organizers insisted during the last round in Lausanne that the Summer Games’ rights should go for twice as much as the winter rights. Based on that supposition, the South Korean delegation, headed by Sports Minister Young Ho Lee, vetoed the NBC offer, despite entreaties by Samaranch and Pound that it be accepted.

The commercial American networks traditionally pay far more for Olympic television than all foreign networks combined.

By arguing, no matter how truthfully, that the market has softened and that Calgary would not do so well today, Pound and Frank appear to be seeking a face-saving way out for the South Koreans, some of whom are reportedly suspicious that they are being treated as a small country and a pushover.

In today’s talks, it is also possible that the IOC may seek to sweeten the deal by agreeing to take less than its traditional one-third of the television rights money, or by simply designating that a large part of the money go for so-called television services and not be considered rights money at all.

There is precedent for such concessions. Both types, in fact, were made by the IOC to the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. For instance, only $100 million of the $225 million ABC paid for the American rights to the Los Angeles Games was labeled rights money, so all the LAOOC had to pay the IOC from that contract was $34 million. Then, in the LAOOC’s $19.8 million deal with the European Broadcasting Union, the IOC agreed to take only about a 20% share.

Los Angeles made its television deal with ABC in 1979, before then-President Jimmy Carter launched the American boycott of the Moscow Games. With all the political uncertainties that this engendered for the Olympic movement as a whole, there is no question that had the American rights been sold for Los Angeles as late as they are being sold for Seoul, considerably less than the $225 million would have been obtained.

The Seoul rights bids were delayed by the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Games, and then further by a controversy over the timing of certain events during the Seoul Games. The American networks have been seeking a large number of morning finals in Seoul, so that, with the 13-hour time difference between Seoul and New York, they can show the events in prime time in the United States. After much hesitation, most of the international sports federations have agreed to this.

b