Swimming leaves athletics in its wake
Email Printer friendly version Normal font Large font Philip Derriman
March 22, 2008
Advertisement
ATHLETICS fans are probably still grumbling about the fact that the national titles in Brisbane a few weeks ago - which doubled as our Olympic selection trials - received no live television coverage whatsoever, not even on pay TV. All viewers saw of them was 90 minutes of highlights on SBS the following Sunday morning.
Tonight, the Olympic selection trials for Australia’s swimmers begin in Sydney and, for the next eight nights, starting tonight, the event will be televised live in what the free-to-air networks call prime time - that is, from 6pm onwards.
Channel Nine will screen it on five nights, starting at 7.30pm, and Fox Sports on the other three.
So why does swimming get heaps of good TV coverage and athletics almost none? We all know swimming is a more popular sport, but it’s not that much more popular. (How could it be, an athletics supporter might ask, when all you see of the competitors is the backs of their heads as they go up and down the pool?)
Swimming obviously has other things going for it, one being a history of international success. Within the television industry it’s accepted that viewers are willing to tune into the swimming because it’s a sport they subconsciously associate with Australian gold medals.
[b]But there’s more to it than that. Swimming provides a case study in how a sport can raise its profile by marketing its star performers skilfully enough.
The story begins in the early 1990s. Swimming Australia (as we know the organisation today) adopted a policy of trying to get more media exposure by making itself as media-friendly as possible, which meant the swimmers themselves had to be media-friendly.
They had to be willing to give interviews, smile at cameras, that sort of thing.[/b]In Australia, this was quite a break in tradition, for in most sports the relationship between sportspeople and the media was generally strained, sometimes hostile. Cricketers - especially Test cricketers - were probably the hardest of all to get on with. In fact, one former cricket writer known to Square Eyes says he has lost much of his enthusiasm for the game as a result of having to deal for years with obnoxious Test cricketers.
Swimming’s strategy was to make popular heroes of its top performers. Fortunately, by the early 1990s, especially after the 1992 Olympics, several swimmers had emerged that were able to fit the bill - most notably Kieren Perkins and Susie O’Neill.
Later in the decade, they were joined by another wave of rising stars led by Ian Thorpe. Someone who was involved then in the marketing of swimming recalls, "We grabbed every opportunity to get the swimmers on TV or in the papers. We made the athletes as available as possible. We needed to get our sport on TV outside the Commonwealth Games and Olympic years, and we kept knocking on the networks’ doors. Channel Nine kept saying, “No, no, we can’t do it,” but eventually Nine succumbed to the pressure and said they’d have a crack at the '99 Pan-Pacs.
"They did seven or eight nights live or as-live. It was a major gamble for Nine, but it paid off. It paid off for all of us. There were 12 or 13 world records set that week.
“It all came together in a magical week of swimming that really has set up the sport as a major TV product.”
Swimming’s problem today is it needs to stay on a roll. If the supply of heroes dries up, swimming will be in the same position as athletics - on the outside looking in. Already there is some concern about a shortage of emerging male stars.
Cue the next Ian Thorpe.