Why People Aren't Watching the Winter Olympics

Instead of writing a narrative, I'll give you a Letterman-like Top 10 list (I'll concede that I might not be as funny as Dave).

10. Most of the civilized world doesn't participate in the sports that are featured in the Winter Olympics. It's hard to relate to half-pipe or whatever it's called if you can't do it in a schoolyard or in someone's backyard.

9. There is no suspense. Why watch a hockey game when you know the result unless a) you follow certainly players with an almost religious-like fanatacism or b) you're related to someone involved with the team. We watched USC-Texas and we watch the NCAA hoops title games (men's and women's) with a nice turnout nationwide because we haven't seen the result hours before.

8. There are so many choices on television. After all, if there is no suspense, why give up "CSI", "24", "Lost" or any other shows to which the American public has become attached. I, for one, haven't become attached to those, but I wouldn't pass on St. Joe's-UConn or the Spurs, Mavs or Pistons to watch skeleton or curling. Apparently, most Americans wouldn't either.

7. The big names have not fared well so far. I remember years ago the networks hyped the "Dan" and "Dave" show for the decathlon before the Summer Olympics, only to have one or both fail to qualify for the U.S. team. Talk about a bad ad campaign. Michele Kwan was controversial to begin with, and Bode Miller didn't exactly make himself likeable with his pre-Games interviews. You want to root for the underdog, the Bill Koch, the 1980 U.S. men's hockey team, the Dave Wottle of the '72 summer games. Not selfish people who either don't know when to yield or when to keep quiet.

6. In most of the events, you can't see the full heads of the participants. Somehow, the NFL transcends this, as does NASCAR, probably because the action is so compelling to their fans that the players and drivers get tons of endorsements that plaster their otherwise helmeted faces all over the U.S. Still, we like baseball and basketball because we can see the full profiles of the players. In most Olympic sports, you can't, and that's problematic when most of the participants aren't household names to begin with. How can you identify with someone whose name you didn't know in the first place whose head you can't see? Unfortunately, to most viewers these athletes are relatively anonymous.

5. Figure skating is not as popular as it used to be, in my opinion. There have been too many controversies about judging, and the Kwan affair left a bad taste in the mouth of many casual fans. The U.S. skating body whiffed big-time in letting Kwan on the team at the expense of Emily Hughes, who now must be weary having had the snow storm of '06 delay her travel to Torino. I have written a lot about judged sports, which, in my opinion, aren't sports at all precisely because of the judging. The one thing you have to respect about downhill skiing is that the fastest people win, and the judges aren't involved much unless a participant misses a gate.

4. As a corollary to #10, the Winter Olympics just aren't a major event any more, at least for most people. If you doubt this contention, watch how many people go gaga over World Cup 2006. Many more millions than either flocked to Torino or watched the games on TV. Think they're watching luge in Uruguay? Speed skating in Sao Paolo? Not a chance.

3. It's not "American Idol", is it? I suppose the attraction to picking the best unknown singer is that people come from out of nowhere, while many Olympic athletes train full time. I recall when ABC covered the Olympics in the 1970's, they made the stories so compelling, including one about a Belgian librarian who was a weightlifter in the heavyweight class. Jim McKay was classic in his role, and, without the internet, the world was a bigger place and those stories were more compelling. It's hard to spring stories like that anymore -- we know about them before the Olympics if we at all care about the competition.

Okay, so I've run out of contentions at this point, but I think you get my point. There are many interesting items that comprise the Winter Olympics, but the average American would rather watch "Desperate Housewives," if for no other reason than they don't know how a new episode will end and because they can relate more to the downhill lives that the residents of Wisteria Lane are leading than to the downhill racing that people who aren't named Picabo anymore are doing in Italy.