Stark contrasts. Our amateur athletes in London, most of them subsistence-funded, making the most of their brief moment in the sun, doing the country proud. Our National Hockey League owners and players in New York bellyaching. The multimillions they've made from $100 ticket prices are not enough. They threaten to cancel another hockey season.
If the past is prologue, most of the amateurs and the sports they play, despite all the excitement stirred in London, will now recede into obscurity for another four years. They've had their quadrennial moment. Now we disengage and kiss them goodbye, as pro sport overwhelms the airwaves. Our media will give the NHLers, no matter what kind of show they put on, 50 times more attention. It's the way it works.
The number of young girls and young boys playing soccer in this country count in the hundreds of thousands. The sport's immense popularity is evident on every playing field you drive by. In Christine Sinclair, who most of us probably hadn't heard of until these Olympics, we have one of the best players in the world. Let's watch and see if she gets even one-tenth the notice of a Joe Average hockey goon over the next year. As for the national team, despite all the hoopla generated by the London bronze, watch it vanish from the radar screen.
It's always been this way. I remember when I was a sports reporter covering the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Myself and other ink-stained wretches marvelled at some of the performances and vowed to start paying more attention to amateur sport. But we soon fell back into old knee-jerk patterns. And it's been pretty much the same with every Olympics since. Some efforts to change things by those who cover sport have been made, especially since the Vancouver Winter Games. Our government deserves credit for the support of amateurs with its Own the Podium program. But with few exceptions, Olympians and their sports are still only quadrennial fixations.
The problem, as sports media executives explain, is that beyond pro sport the public isn't interested. "Look at the readership, look at the ratings," they say. "The numbers aren't there. We're in the business of market pandering. Don't you know that?"
Capitalism, to be sure, must heed its driving imperatives, market maximization being the big one. But as the athletes argue, isn't there a self-fulfilling prophecy at work here? The chicken and the egg thing? If you don't show it, people won't come.
Between Olympics, if you started covering the Christine Sinclairs of the world and their sports with even one-tenth of the frequency of pro football or pro hockey, wouldn't the numbers start to move?
Reality tells us that many amateur sports are never going to attract a big audience. Trampolining, women's boxing, the hammer throw, anyone? But there are many others like soccer, track and speed skating which, if given the chance, might capture audiences the way they do in many European countries.
At the same time, market pandering need not always be the overriding motivation for what is aired and published. The media value system need not be governed totally by ratings – and thankfully in some cases it isn't. Witness, to use a non-sporting example, this newspaper's laudable focus on Third World issues. It's not done for readership reasons.
Between Olympic Games, exposure given to amateur sport has been weak. But imagine how much worse it would be were it not for the CBC, which hasn't always had to slavishly follow the ratings game.
The success of the London Olympics presents another opportunity for new thinking. Nothing against pro hockey, as I am a fan, but maybe there are some sports editors out there who are going to say, "You know what, instead of filling my pages every year with hundreds of hockey photos, most of which look the same anyway, I'm going to devote half that space to other athletes and other sports." It would be a welcome change. It could start a modest little culture shift.