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Mon. Aug 16, 2004

Olympics: 404, Spectators Not Found

All weekend long, I watched the Olympics, and despite the wide variety of sports I watched (weightlifting, gymnastics, basketball, equestrian, and both kinds of volleyball), they all had one thing in common. The level of spectator attendance was roughly what you’d expect to find at a high school sporting event. In a small town.

Apparently gymnastics not a “glamour” sport in Greece like it is in America, but at previous Olympics, you couldn’t even get tickets to a practice session. In Greece, the stands were maybe half full for the competition preliminaries. I watched the Women’s 53 kg Weightlifting finals, in which an incredibly focused Thai woman not only became the first Thai woman to ever win a gold medal, she set a world record (creating the amazing site of a 119 pound woman holding 275 pounds over her head, with a face of Zen-like calm and concentration). And there might have been 100 people watching, in a venue that looked like it would hold about 2,500.

It wasn’t just a bad draw of TV events with small crowds, it was bad all over:

In the Olympic tennis stadium, Venus Williams’ grunts echoed loudly off several thousand empty seats. There were so few people at the gymnastics preliminaries that it looked like a high school meet.

Wrestlers grappled in front of only a few hundred fans, archers had the old Olympic stadium nearly to themselves and softball was played before a backdrop of empty stands.

“I watched it on TV and when you looked in the background, you were like, ‘Wow, it’s the Olympics and nobody is there,’” former gymnast Bart Conner said.

At gymnastics, huge sections of seats had no one in them while the women competed, a fact Greek state television duly noted.

“This must be the first time there is an Olympic gymnastics event that didn’t have a full arena,” a commentator said.

“With all the interest that’s followed Greece winning the European Championship, I’m surprised that there haven’t been more people at the games,” said FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who attended one. “But it’s the same at many other events at the Olympics. I saw a rowing event where you could have had time to shake hands with all the spectators.”

Indeed, at the new Nikaia Olympic weightlifting hall there were more volunteers and officials than paying spectators for the early sessions.

SFGate.com: “Lots of seats, not many people filling them on opening weekend of Olympics”

Of course, the IOC is lowering the lifeboats and declaring an emergency:

IOC officials, worried by the television images being flashed around the world of athletes competing in near empty stadiums, have told the Athens Games organisers to give tickets away for free if necessary.

At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the then IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch told the Korean organisers to fix the situation and within 24 hours the main stadium was packed every day as school children and soldiers out of uniform were shipped in.

Four years ago in Sydney, free tickets were given away at the start of the Games after IOC complaints that there were not enough people in the stands [...] So far 2.9 million tickets have been sold out of a target of five million.

The Age: “Empty stadiums set off alarm bells”

But it’s not clear to me that free tickets will make much difference. Even the scalpers are having a hard time getting rid of their tickets, at any price: “At the women’s gymnastic team qualifying round Sunday, so few people showed up that hawkers were trying to dump tickets for less than half price [...] They announced that they would open 35 more sales locations and begin an advertising campaign on Greek television [...] But lines at ticket booths were nonexistent at the main Olympic stadium complex on Sunday, another national holiday that saw many Greeks head to the islands or the beach instead of the Games.”

Now, three million tickets may seem like a lot, but for perspective, 6.7 million tickets were sold in Sydney, and nearly 9 million were sold here in Atlanta. In other words, attendance is down one half to two thirds from the last two Olympics.

Is it the potential security threat? I don’t know, but that didn’t seem to impact the attendance of the European championships earlier this year. In fact, many thought their success heralded the same for the coming Games. Is it high ticket prices? The fact some seats were $11 face value, and now scalpers are having a hard time getting less than half of face value indicates that’s not the problem.

Is it the remoteness of Greece? Well, “remote” is relative. If you consider the physical center of the European continent to be Munich, the distance to Athens appears to be roughly the same as the distance from Atlanta to New Orleans. One would think Europeans would be flocking to what is only the second Olympics on their continent in past 32 years.

Obviously, everyone misjudged this one, from the Greeks to the IOC. And it’s probably too late to do anything much about it. Thus, we will witness amazing performances and world records on TV, while the actual event will occur in front the equivalent of a small family reunion.

I’m not sure what this says. It the lesson cultural, and if so, is the lesson European or specifically Greek? Is it that a gathering of the greatest athletes in the world at the Olympics no longer has the hold on man they once did, in a time of terror threats and economic doldrums? Is it the overwhelming presence of money, in the form of IOC coziness with and coddling of corporate sponsors, and in the form of the outlandish overall costs ($8 billion cost divided by 3 million spectators equals an outlay of about $2700 per attendee)?

I don’t know, and for the next two weeks, I really don’t care. That’s a long term question someone else will have to answer (though I doubt attendance will be an issue in 2008 … in China). I only know one thing, even after just a couple of days. It isn’t the performances. Once you strip away all the external BS, they still shine.

Maybe the packaging, the marketing, and the means of delivery appear to be riddled with holes. But the product is still great, seemingly in spite of its “organizers.” Maybe that’s the key; the “organizers” don’t “make” the Games, the athletes do. And for the most part, the problems of these Games have little to do with the athletes. They are doing their part.