In Atlanta, It’s Not Easy to Get Into These Home Games

As he looks out the window of his 13th floor office at One CNN Plaza -- virtually ground zero for the 1996 Summer Olympics in downtown Atlanta -- Harvey Schiller has a magnificent view of the Georgia Dome and Omni Arena, both major Games venues fewer than 100 yards away. Just across the street is the newly constructed Olympic Park, where thousands will gather when the action begins in two weeks.

Schiller, president of Turner Sports and vice president of programming for the Turner Broadcasting System, has every right to feel a touch of sadness during the Games. NBC Sports, not Turner, has the U.S. television rights, having paid a then-record $456 million to the International Olympic Committee to televise the Atlanta competition.

But these days, Schiller, executive director of the U.S. Olympic Committee for four years until he took the Turner job in 1994, is far too busy to get too upset.

For one, he’s overseeing a crew of 80 Turner Sports production people who will help beam the Games outside the United States, many of them working as event producers for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, which is charged with providing the television feed to the rest of the world.

Turner men and women will be producing basketball, baseball, gymnastics, canoe and kayak and water polo, among other sports, trying to make the Games as picture perfect as possible for a global audience. CNN, Turner’s all-news operations domestically and internationally, also will have a significant presence, with an Olympic unit of more than 100 people.

Schiller is also overseeing a project that will provide entertainment programming -- including many of the classic films from the old MGM library owned by Turner Broadcasting -- for the athletes’ villages. During the Games, Schiller and other top Turner executives will be busy entertaining advertisers, Olympic officials, foreign dignitaries and even the more than occasional man on the street who would like to peek inside one of America’s mega-multimedia operations.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘frustrating,’ ” said Schiller of his coming Olympic experience, even if he did play a major role in persuading the IOC to award the Games to Atlanta while he ran the USOC. “Emotionally it’s a tough thing for me, having come out of that world. But we’re still going to be a major presence here. We’re going to have a lot of visibility. And by the way, Turner owns the most important feature of the Games: We have the single largest parking structure in the city, and that’s nothing to laugh at.”

Turner had hoped for much more. Ted Turner, the company’s visionary founder, was never shy about trying to get a piece of the rights for Games being held in his home town. The company made an initial pitch when the IOC first took bids. Even after NBC acquired the rights, Turner and Schiller tried to persuade NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol to farm out some of the events to Turner’s cable networks, either TBS or TNT.

But NBC’s affiliates just said no. They are helping the network and parent company General Electric pay that big-ticket rights fee and some of the production costs, and they’d like to get the biggest bang for their buck as possible.

With the Games only aired on NBC, they’ve got a monopoly, otherwise known as a license to make more money. The affiliates also are banking on the long-term promotional value of the Games; during commercial breaks, NBC will preview its new fall shows, the better to lure viewers to their stations long after the torch has been doused in Atlanta.

Schiller still believes NBC would have done the Olympic movement a major favor by showing some events on cable, allowing the Games even wider dissemination at home and abroad, particularly for entities such as Turner or ESPN with a number of international channels.

“I felt that through cable, we could distribute a lot of events,” he said. “I was willing to do something at any time of day. They’ll never be able to get it all in. Traditionally, there are always eight to 12 sports that get little or no coverage. We would have worked hand in hand with them. The business elements just did not work.”

CNN, meanwhile, will be working around the clock to provide blanket coverage of the Games and everything surrounding them for their domestic and international feeds.

“It’s not that frustrating for us because we don’t carry sports events, we cover the news,” said Jim Walton, vice president for programming for CNN. “We’re at ground zero. We have all the access we need. Our relationship with the athletes has always been good. And we know how to go and where to go when we need to. We have a way to show the world what’s happening here. We’re going to have a very high profile.”

Walton also insists he’s not that concerned with an odious embargo that calls for all broadcasters other than NBC to wait 30 minutes before they can air video or audio tape from news conferences held in the Main Press Center. NBC Sports recently sent out a memo detailing those restrictions.

But any broadcast journalist worth his media credential and network blazer knows full well that if real stories break out -- the Ben Johnson steroid scandal in Seoul in ’88 or Tonya-Nancy two years ago in Lillehammer, Norway -- all bets will be off and it’s every newshound for himself/herself.

It will be damn the torpedoes and damn the embargo imposed by a network that surely must be embarrassed by the 30-minute head start it’s been handed on a $456 million platter. Still, no one at CNN seems particularly concerned. Why should they? At least they’ll be able to park.