It’s Not Sporting How NBC Treats the Olympics

If Michelle Kwan were involved in a car chase on the San Diego Freeway, any time, day or night, it would be shown live and in its entirety on Channel 4.

But if Kwan makes the U.S. Olympic figure skating team and is going for the gold medal--which figures to be the most anticipated event of the Winter Olympics in February at Salt Lake City--that won’t be shown live on Channel 4.

We’ve become used to tape-delayed sporting events. Wimbledon, British Open, Olympics in places like Nagano and Sydney. Fine, those places are 10, 12, even more time zones away from Los Angeles. Salt Lake City is one time zone away. One hour difference from Los Angeles. Yet television viewers in New York, two time zones from Salt Lake, will get to see figure skating live. We won’t.

Why?

Here’s the NBC western affiliates’ spin:

They polled 1,000 people in the Pacific time zone and asked if they’d be available to watch TV at 5 p.m. during the Olympics. Of course most said no.

So we get a 2 1/2-hour delay on an Olympics one time zone away.

If they’d asked the same 1,000 people if they’d be home to watch the Laker-76er finals at 6 p.m., the majority would have said no.

Yet there is no way the NBC West Coast affiliates would have delayed showing those games.

But it’s not the same according to Penny Martin, vice president of programming and creative services for San Diego’s NBC station.

“The NBA championships was more of a sporting event. The Olympics goes beyond that,” Martin says.

That’s a bad break for those of us who think of the Olympics as actual sporting events. Martin’s advice for avoiding the results?

“You’ll probably be in your car and won’t see TV,” she says.

But what about the radio? We’ll be listening to the radio, trying to hear traffic reports so we can get home in time to watch the tape-delayed Olympics.

“I guess my advice would be not to listen,” she says.

Maybe it’s useless to be writing this. No minds will be changed. The decision has been made. Get over it. The survey says we lost.

As Jack Sander, national head of the NBC affiliates, says, “The Olympics are more about the story than the result.”

It’s apples and oranges, Sander says, trying to compare the NBA Finals or the World Series with the Olympics.

Those sports, Sander says, are about the score.

And this is where he loses some of us.

The Olympics are about the score first.

We watch to see the costumes, sure; to listen to the music, maybe; to make fun of the spangly cowboy costume on some poor Danish male skater, absolutely; but mainly we watch to see who wins.

It is the honesty of sports that makes them special. It is the stark reality of the final score that draws us to the TV or radio. And when sports becomes “programming,” just another show like “Survivor” or “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” then maybe the “programming” becomes less attractive. And maybe fewer of us watch each time and maybe, every two years, the “programming” becomes less special.

On Thursday, NBC showed the Wimbledon semifinal between Jennifer Capriati and Justine Henin on tape delay. The match, completed nearly seven hours earlier, came on here as if it were live. We heard John McEnroe say of Henin, “It’s going to be too much for her today, the experience of the semis at Wimbledon. Especially since she’s playing Capriati.”

Sounds kind of dumb when you already knew Henin upset Capriati. Even dumber? NBC, trying to keep up the farce that we were watching a live event, didn’t edit out a rain delay in the third set.

“We would always prefer everything live,” Sander says.

So would we.

Sander says the Olympics are “18 consecutive days of ongoing events.” That’s why, he says, it’s OK to tape-delay much of the Olympics but not the NBA Finals or World Series.

It’s too much to expect viewers “to rearrange their viewing schedules for 18 days,” Sander says.

It is not too much to ask, apparently, for those of us who wish to be surprised when we watch a sporting event to rearrange our news gathering schedules for those days. We are to be expected to turn off all the TVs, silence the radios, stay off the Internet, not answer our phones.

Even with tape delay, the Pacific time zone gets the short end of a tiny stick. Somebody trying really hard not to hear the result of the Pete Sampras-Roger Federer fourth-round match Monday picked up the phone to hear her mother, in Chicago, say, “Did you see Sampras lose?”

Nope, not yet.

The less we feel like watching sports on TV, the less we’ll watch.

Jack Nicklaus was a shot off the lead of the Senior PGA stop Sunday. Fans of Nicklaus, who thought the golf would be on live, if early, were disappointed. It was on tape delay. We’d already heard--Nicklaus hadn’t won. So some of us didn’t watch.

NBC has all the numbers on its side. It has the surveys, the polls. The Olympics aren’t news and aren’t sports. They are a story to be told when NBC wants it to be told. But if you already know the ending, will you still want the story?

NBC says you will. It’s not sports after all.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at

diane.pucin@latimes.com.