The Summer Paralympic Games are the world’s second-largest amateur sporting event. Last fall’s Paralympics in Greece received coverage from all over the world—except the United States.
To the surprise of Paralympians and media outlets from other countries, the U.S. media was not present in Athens to relay the excitement back to American audiences.
Jim McDonald, chief marketing officer for the U.S. Paralympics, a division of the U.S. Olympic Committee, expressed his frustration when he said, “Unless mainstream American audiences are exposed to information about the Paralympics, the Games will remain shrouded in obscurity, ignorance and misconceptions.”
U.S. Paralympics officials state that there are more than 54 million Americans with physical disabilities and more than 143 million family members of persons with disabilities. That means that nearly half of the country’s entire population—measured in 2003 at more than 290,000,000 people—is in some way touched by disabilities.
According to Paul J. Gough of the Hollywood Reporter, NBC Universal attracted over 200 million viewers with its coverage of the 2004 Olympics.
Nielsen Media Research reports that 203 million unique viewers watched at least some of NBC Universal’s coverage, making it the most-watched non-U.S. Summer Olympics in history. NBC telecast 1,200 hours of Olympics programming over 17 days—three times as much as it did in 2000 and across more platforms.
This year’s Olympic Games were televised on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, USA, Telemundo and NBC HD.
But what about the Paralympics?
Those games were covered by 44 radio and television networks in 40 countries, but not in the United States, which had no live coverage.
In Portugal, the Paralympic Games were broadcast by two television and two radio networks. Several broadcasters, including CCTV in China, offered daily live coverage as well as highlights.
German broadcaster ARD/ZDF reported that Paralympic highlights aired on Sunday, Sept. 19 were watched by nearly 1.5 million, and 634,000 viewers took in the summary broadcast in Spain on the same day. Meanwhile, Italian television reported an average of 600,000 viewers for its daily broadcasts of Paralympic highlights.
Admittedly, selling broadcast rights to the Paralympic Games is a relatively new thing. They were sold for the first time in 1996 for the Atlanta Paralympics.
According to Miriam Wilkens, media director of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), the Athens Paralympics broadcast package was valued at $1.5 million dollars. “The U.S. networks have turned down the rights, citing a combination of cost and supposed lack of viewers’ interest,” she noted.
U.S. Paralympics struggled for many months to secure a broadcast rights sponsor of the Paralympic Games.
It wasn’t until a few days before the Summer Games began last September that the U.S. Paralympics Committee announced that Visa USA had acquired the broadcast media rights, and the Outdoor Life Network (OLN) had committed to air a two-hour program recapping the 11 days of competition.
The recap, however, was not broadcast until Nov. 13, with one rebroadcast four days later.
And, even when public relations agencies, marketers and individual Paralympians tried to secure media coverage of that broadcast before it took place, there was little interest. TV Guide, sports shows, E! Entertainment and daytime, prime time and late-night talk shows all turned down the story. The only media outlets to help get the word out were National Public Radio, USA Today and “The Early Show” on CBS.
With only days to go before the highlight show aired, the Outdoor Life Network’s Web site listed only “TBD” (to be determined) next to “Paralympics.” And that could be found only after considerable searching; nothing on the network’s home page indicated that the Paralympic recap would be airing.
“The U.S. Paralympics came to us because they weren’t having any success in finding a TV home for the broadcast, and we were happy to jump in and help out,” explained Marc Fein, senior vice president of programming and production for OLN. “We plan our schedules several months in advance, and the Paralympics fall out of the scope of our normal programming genre…but we carved out as much time as we could.”
Visa USA is the first and only global sponsor of the Paralympic Games, as well as a sponsor of the U.S. Paralympic team. “It was abundantly clear to us, given these athletes’ achievements, and the compelling theater of the Paralympics, that it was critically important and our responsibility to ensure broadcast exposure,” said Michael Lynch, senior vice president of events and marketing for Visa USA.
The company hosted important cardholders and partners in Athens during the Paralympics. Added Lynch, “They had the time of their lives.”
USA Today did send one emissary to cover the Paralympics. Reporter Steve Goldberg left for Athens with an assignment to write six specific articles about the games. When pitched additional stories by both athletes and sponsors, Goldberg found it necessary to turn them down every time.
“The topics of the articles I am writing here were determined together with my USA Today editor long before I ever set foot on Greecian soil,” he said.
In fact, the only American camera crew present at the 2004 Athens Paralympics was sent jointly by Ossur North America and Scott Sabolich, CP, of Scott Sabolich Prosthetic & Research Center in Oklahoma City.
And I was there on behalf of the O&P Almanac.
WeMedia Inc., a media company dedicated to “revolutionizing access for people with disabilities,” signed a $50 million deal with the IPC after successfully Web casting the 2000 Paralympics to hundreds of thousands of sports fans in 103 countries.
Under the agreement, the IPC granted WeMedia worldwide television broadcast and Internet Web cast rights for the Paralympic Games through 2006. WeMedia would provide host broadcasting capabilities to maximize international television coverage of the Games and be responsible for selling the rights to other broadcasters.
So what happened?
WeMedia Inc. no longer exists. The company declared bankruptcy in early 2003 and defaulted on its payments to the IPC just after the Sydney Games, which left the U.S. Paralympics looking for another broadcast rights holder for all future Games.
On Sept. 22, 2004, the London Times reported, “Any threat posed by New York to London’s bid to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012 may have withered in the Athens heat amid criticism for the absence of any American television network at the Paralympic Games.”
NBC, the U.S. television rights holder, reportedly had 3,500 people working in Athens to broadcast the Olympics, yet none of them stayed on to cover the Paralympics. The move was widely criticized in Athens and throughout the world.
Dr. Phil Craven, president of the IPC and a five-time Paralympian himself, said, “It disappoints me greatly, not primarily for the IPC, but for the American team and American people. We want to get the message across about Paralympians being athletes and individuals. If you don’t get the Paralympics on television, you don’t get the message. The Americans are behind and have to catch up.”
By contrast, his country’s BBC increased its output to one and a half hours daily—twice the time it devoted to the Sydney Games. It sent a crew of 100 people to Athens to report back to Great Britain’s viewers, averaging in the 2 million range.
Craven was certainly upbeat by the end of the Games. “They were a roaring success,” he said. “The ticket sales speak for themselves. If you budget for 400,000 and end up selling 850,000, then you have got to have most things right.”
The situation looked rather grim in the beginning. After the opening ceremony, the turnout was low. Then, the IPC and the Greek Olympic Committee organized schools to send thousands of children at reduced ticket prices. Suddenly, every seat at every Paralympic venue was taken.
Greek television began to broadcast several hours of live coverage and highlights of the Paralympic Games every day. Crowd pleasers like the new five-a-side blind football and fast-paced wheelchair basketball caught people’s imagination. A few days later, Athenians of every age started to show up.
NBC-TV has committed to broadcasting the Paralympic Games in 2010 and 2012. But no U.S. network has expressed any interest in covering the 2006 Games in Torino, Italy, or the 2008 Games in Beijing, China.
Both NBC and ESPN declined an interview to talk about the 2004 Paralympics or any of the Games in the near future.
Beverly Millson is a freelance writer based in Santa Monica, Calif.