Olympics on CBS: Not That Much to Cheer--or to Jeer

The serious flooding problems are behind you. -- Mark McEwen in Conflans, France,

giving the weather report for Southern California during Thursday’s edition of “CBS This Morning”

Southern California braces for more flooding. --Charles Osgood in New York, a few minutes later during the same edition of “CBS This Morning”

You know you need to get a life when it’s 9 p.m. and you’re watching the luge.

Somehow, CBS is managing to get strong Nielsen ratings for its coverage of the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. Perhaps it’s the picturesque Old World setting that has turned many Americans into temporary Francophiles. Perhaps it’s those engaging features, ranging from a demonstration of French cooking to Charles Kuralt’s profile on mothers of Olympic ice skaters.

It can’t be the 1992 games themselves.

What they say about the luge--”The harder you try, the slower you go”--also seems to apply to the Winter Olympics on CBS, which, so far, appear suspended in some kind of energy warp: Nothing that much to complain about--or to cheer about.

Is it merely that the Soviet Union and its former Eastern Europe allies are no longer on the scene as political bogymen for Americans to root against? Not likely. The so-called U.S.-Soviet sports competition at past Olympiads has always been as much a product of the style of coverage--ABC’s sometimes shrill ethnocentrism, for example--as a product of real-world politics.

More than anything, the Olympics this year seem relatively unimportant and uncompelling principally because of corresponding larger-than-sports events that are overshadowing it.

A poignant feature by Morley Safer--using the relative statelessness of pairs-skating gold medalists Natalia Mishkutienok and Artur Dmitriev as a metaphor for the East’s altered political landscape--made the point. “In the old days, you would be national heroes,” Safer said to them, referring to the elite status of world-class athletes in the former Soviet Union. But now even their future as citizens--to say nothing of their future as athletes--is uncertain.

The quotes that opened this column--McEwen’s California weather report from the Olympics in France conflicting with Osgood’s in New York on the same CBS program--also gave a sense of the competing realities.

It was hard getting emotional Wednesday night about someone hurtling down an incline on her back--even if it was “the best finish ever by an American in the luge”--after earlier seeing incredible TV pictures of a doomed 15-year-old boy swept along like a log in the 35 m.p.h. current of the turbulent Los Angeles River.

Moreover, the women’s combined Alpine skiing event was anticlimactic, to say the least, after watching TV pictures of a submerged trailer park in Ventura and two recreational vehicles being carried out to sea.

If the Winter Olympiad is largely being eclipsed by other events, it is not always being enhanced by CBS either. Morning co-hosts Harry Smith and Greg Gumbel and weekend daytime co-hosts Andrea Joyce and Jim Nantz seem comfortable in their jobs. But prime-time hosts Paula Zahn and Tim McCarver are another matter.

Zahn shines in her normal role as Smith’s co-host on “CBS This Morning,” and McCarver for years has been the best baseball commentator on TV. As a team working out of a studio in Moutiers, however, they are an odd coupling, unnaturally formal with each other and the viewing audience. They have no chemistry, and rarely do they project a sense of involvement in what’s happening outside their sealed environment.

Compared with ABC’s army of experts at previous Winter Olympiads, moreover, CBS has so far offered a rather lackluster group of announcers and analysts. In women’s Alpine skiing, for example, CBS has set up a marvelous camera shot at the 19th position, showing competitors zooming by as if propelled by jets on their skis. Yet some of the announcers working this event--Tim Ryan, Christin Cooper and Cindy Nelson--are anything but jets, failing to convey the excitement that this competition has engendered in the past.

The biggest CBS disaster to date, however, has been former American gold medalist Scott Hamilton’s work in the figure skating events with low-key journeyman Verne Lundquist and former Canadian champion Tracy Wilson.

Although finding the good in everything is an admirable human trait, it’s a hindrance when it comes to being an Olympic commentator. Hamilton appears never to have met a skater’s lutz or landing--even when it’s on two feet--that he didn’t love. During one stretch in the pairs skating competition, he gave one “great performance” tag after another to teams that went on to earn mediocre to bad marks from the judges. Wilson is much better, and at times has had to step in and rescue Hamilton from his own exuberance.

All in all, not a great performance.

What a curious, almost surreal ceremony it was this week, meanwhile, when the teams of Mishkutienok-Dmitriev and Elena Bechke-Denis Petrov--now representing the tenuous, fractionalized and flagless Commonwealth of Independent States instead of the old Soviet Union--stood on the podium to be honored for winning their figure skating medals. The flag they saw raised on their behalf was not a national one, but the banner of the Olympics. It was a deeply symbolic moment.

It’s obvious, though, that more than just a flag has been missing from the 1992 Winter Olympics.

OLYMPICS ON TAPE

Highlights of some past Winter Games are out on video. F24