Alex Morgan and Caitlin Clark could be NBC stars. The Olympics don’t care.
Caitlin Clark and Alex Morgan might be NBC stars. The Olympics are unconcerned.
Some of the most known figures on the American squad that boats down the Seine for Opening Ceremonies will not be there.
The Olympics started off as a sporting event. They have transformed into a television program that NBC believes would cost $7.65 billion to air. Any type of entertainment, any serial television show that takes up nearly three weeks of idle time during what would otherwise be a boring summer, needs stars to garner the ratings that justify that financial outlay. Stars attract attention. Ratings are increased by eyes. Millions are justified by ratings.
Let’s get back to the topic of sports competition. It’s bothersome. Furthermore, those in charge of awarding medals cannot be held accountable for being preoccupied with viewership or viewership ratings.
The goal set for Emma Hayes is to turn around the U.S. women’s national soccer team’s performance. She is unable to accomplish it in Paris with a team that looks like the one that was eliminated from the World Cup after winning just one of their four games. The American soccer community loves you, Alex Morgan, and you deserve it. NBC would want to see your well-known face on the network. Whatever. You will remain at home.
The Paris Summer Games are still four weeks off, and like any Olympics they promise to deliver transcendent performances from stars both known — step forward, Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky and Noah Lyles — and those we’re just discovering. No Olympics plays out to script, which is both the point and the beauty of the thing. But it’s also true that the run-up to the Games has cost the American team three real draws. Hayes, the new women’s soccer coach, made the choice to move on from Morgan, a tie to the USWNT’s glory days who, in Hayes’s eyes, could no longer provide that glory. Caitlin Clark, inarguably women’s basketball’s most transcendent star, didn’t make the Olympic team. And Athing Mu, the elegant and riveting reigning gold medalist in the 800 meters, fell during her event at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials, leaving her off the team in her signature event.
The fact that Alex Morgan did not make the soccer team or that Athing Mu fell on an Oregon track will not determine whether the Olympics are a success or a failure. However, consider it this way: Since the last three Olympics—the Summer Games in Tokyo, the Winter Games in South Korea, and the Summer Olympics in Beijing—have taken place in Asia, many American fans find it intolerable to watch in real time due to the time difference. The previous two, the winter competition in China the following year and the covid-postponed Japan Games in 2021, were staged in empty stadiums because to the pandemic’s restrictions on spectators.
Thus, Paris ought to represent a return to normalcy. Yet this is the new normal. Customers have shifted even more away from the single-screen, over-the-air viewing experience since NBC invested the money to broadcast the six Olympics from 2022–2022. Having more recognizable characters to follow would go a long way toward encouraging more people to sit on couches and turn on televisions.
This is not to imply that Clark should have played basketball or that Morgan should have made the soccer squad. Mu’s destiny is more clear-cut since it was decided by the brutality of the no-second-chances track trials. Athlete merit was the basis for the conclusions about Morgan and Clark. That also contains cruelty.
That direction is clearly younger. Morgan, the mother of a 4-year-old daughter, will turn 35 next week. She is coming off a 2023 World Cup in which she started all four U.S. games and did not score. Hayes, a Londoner, is here not only because the Americans failed to reach the quarterfinals of the World Cup for the first time. She’s here because — after a bronze medal at the Tokyo Games and last year’s flameout in New Zealand and Australia — the program needed a reboot.
That’s the opposite of what the women’s basketball operation required. The hoopsters have won all seven Olympic golds dating back to the 1996 Atlanta Games. This year’s roster not only features 42-year-old point guard Diana Taurasi, seeking her sixth gold medal, but six more members of the team that won in Tokyo.
“Good perspective and continuity is such an important thing,” USA Basketball CEO Jim Tooley told the Associated Press, “and is why we’ve been successful in the Olympics.”
The philosophy of the soccer team is: Let’s fix it because it’s broken. The basketball team’s strategy is, “If it ain’t broke, then what’s wrong?”
It remains to be seen if those strategies are effective.
In Paris, there will be much to observe. The unmatched Biles is going back to the Tokyo gymnastics competition that tormented her so much. In her fourth Olympics, Ledecky will return to the pool in an attempt to add to her already impressive seven gold medals. Lyles is going to slay the track as he looks to win big in the sprint races.
But the American team that takes a boat down the Seine for Opening Ceremonies will be without some of its most recognizable faces. That might not help draw viewers. But if it ends with more medals, who cares?
