Bring on the bathos

By the standards of the modern Olympic Games, American diver Kimiko Hirai Soldati is the perfect athlete. She has visible scars from sports-related surgeries. She has had a major career setback -- the knee surgery left her unable to continue to compete in her first love, gymnastics. She has known personal adversity -- her mother died after a long battle with breast cancer when Soldati was just 17; she wears her mother’s wedding ring whenever she dives.

Her father was born in an internment camp in Idaho, making the family’s patriotism even more poignant for being hard-won. And should she win at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, she would be, at the advanced age of 30, the oldest U.S. female diver to win a medal.

No matter what her diving scores, Soldati is already a favorite for the gold in the Personal Narrative Event.

In the last 10 years, the Olympic narrative has changed. In previous decades, the network broadcasting the event would focus on the stories of a few athletes, highlighting the immense dedication and sacrifice it takes to be an Olympian -- the 8-year-old girl getting up at 4 in the morning to go skating, the young man who gave up Little League so he could keep running.

More recent Games seemed to have three-hankie back stories for every competitor, chock-full of incredibly personal details -- the loss of friends and family, bouts with cancer and other illnesses, poverty and misspent youth, even issues of addiction and physical abuse.

In 2002, there was snowboarder Chris Klug, who underwent a liver transplant 18 months before the Games; Apolo Anton Ohno, a latchkey kid turned bad boy who cleaned up his act to become a short-track skater; and Hungarian bobsledder Ildiko Strehli, a breast-cancer survivor who painted a pink ribbon on the side of her sled.

Two years before, there was Terence Parkin, a South African swimmer who is deaf, and figure skater Diana Munz, who had broken her back a year earlier.

The sadder, the better

Critics have begun deriding the deluge of such stories with headlines like “The Crying Games” and wondering whether the sports are taking a backseat to the pathos. But the soap-operatic details are not going to decrease any time soon -- they are the bait with which NBC hopes to draw in enough non-sports fans to boost ratings to the record levels of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

Multiple personal features are also a logistical necessity -- NBC will be providing 1,200 hours of coverage in Athens starting Friday; there isn’t a commentary team in the world that can fill that kind of time. So there will be plenty of cue-strings-type stories like Soldati’s and that of modern pentathlete Anita Allen, a West Pointer who has competed wearing an armband bearing the name of a close friend killed in Iraq.

“Each year, the narrative has moved farther and farther away from ‘He’s a very hard-working wrestler,’ ” says David Shields, author of “Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine.” “Now it seems almost as if the sport hardly matters. We can’t wait to segue to the half-hour about the pill-popping mom, the abusive stepfather, the cancer. And, ‘Oh, yeah, she stuck a 10 on the unevens.’ ”

NBC, which has broadcast the Summer Olympics since 1988, is not at all apologetic about its attempts to reveal the heart-wrenching backgrounds.

“The mantra is ‘find the golden nugget,’ find out something about these people that no one else knows,” says Molly Solomon, coordinating producer of NBC’s Olympic coverage, who is juggling 1,500 athlete bios in preparation for Athens. “Most of these sports are never seen on television, so we need to find the stories to help people understand these athletes, to give them a reason to root for them.”

Blame, or credit, ABC news legend Roone Arledge with his “Up Close and Personal” features in the 1960s. Blame, or credit, the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding drama that made the women’s skating final at the 1994 Winter Olympics the sixth-highest-rated program in U.S. television history. Blame, or credit, a culture of personal revelation and an exploding sports media that require endless commentary on events that last less than five minutes and live-air coverage of those that last five hours.

At NBC, a team of three researchers put together a 7,000-page, nine-volume manual that covers every sport. For two years, they traveled to 16 countries, attending world and national championships and inviting athletes to have a seat and tell them their life stories.

Solomon, who started at NBC as a researcher in 1992, says she is astonished by how much these biographies have grown in number and depth in the last 10 years.

“In the ‘90s, the information available multiplied,” she says. “Through the Internet but also in general coverage. When I started, there wasn’t much out there but Sports Illustrated. Now the coverage is tremendous -- we will be showing 1,200 hours of it, and so you need to have more stories.”

Getting women to watch

NBC has broadcast the last nine Olympics, which means its research team has been following many of the athletes throughout the length of their careers. That familiarity over the years has allowed the stories to become much richer, more in-depth, Solomon says, adding that they are designed to draw in viewers, particularly women, who would not normally watch the Olympics. “We want everyone to have something they’re interested in,” she says.

Television, of course, changed the nature of Olympic coverage just as it changed just about everything else. From the time of the ancient Greeks, there have been athletes, like Jesse Owens and Babe Didrikson, who were “personalities” and some of their star power derived from having overcome great odds, personally and athletically. But pre-TV coverage focused on the events and relied on interest in sports and national pride to keep people engaged.

But those aren’t enough to keep people glued to their televisions for 1,200 hours.

“There is just so much pre-coverage now,” says Olympic historian David Wallechinsky. “The stories are prepackaged, and it’s true for so many sports. Watch the Kentucky Derby and hear the stories about the horses. By the time we got to Belmont, the violins were playing.”

Wallechinsky, who lives half the year in southern France, finds the American coverage markedly different from the rest of the world’s. “In Europe, it’s still competition-oriented,” he says. “Oh, you have to hear about Beckham’s haircut, but it’s mostly about describing the event for sports fans.”

Europeans, he says, don’t want to know much about the athletes until one wins. “Then, they will descend on the family,” he says. “In Italy, they always go to the mama, want to know what Mama thinks. But before the Games, not so much.”

Nancy versus Tonya

According to Wallechinsky, it was the 1994 Winter Olympics that changed everything. In one arena, there was Nancy Kerrigan competing against Tonya Harding, who was linked to the club attack on Kerrigan at the earlier U.S. Figure Skating Championships that injured Kerrigan so that she could not compete against Harding. In the other was speedskater Dan Jansen, who four years before as an odds-on favorite had raced the day after his beloved sister died of leukemia and, not surprisingly, lost. At Lillehammer, he again lost one race after another until, in his last event, he not only won the gold but broke a world record and did his victory lap with his baby daughter, named for his late sister, in his arms.

In terms of ratings, 1994 remains the gold standard for the Winter Olympics and, Wallechinsky says, it proved once again Arledge’s revelation that televised sports are about television even more than sports.

“These were real stories,” says Wallechinsky of 1994. “But if you’re a network executive and you see those kinds of ratings, you will sit up and start looking around.”

Flannery O’Connor believed that anyone who has survived childhood had enough material to become a writer. So it’s not surprising that in this culture, where so many taboos have been shattered and people go on television to confess their sins and reveal their weaknesses, it’s fairly easy to find among athletes the sort of stories that once filled the agony pages.

“Certainly, general concerns in America are carried over to the Olympics,” says David Halle, a UCLA professor of sociology. “So we see the breaking of all sorts of taboos, the huge transformation of our attitudes toward the handicapped, and our concerns about the barriers to success.”

Americans are in general obsessively interested in people’s personal stories, he says. The Olympics, and sports in general, allow them to get involved with little risk. “If a presidential candidate or a big business executive has cancer, or takes a fall,” he says, “that might actually impact us. These athletes don’t, so we can just enjoy their stories.”

“It’s also possible,” he adds, “that sports is getting boring. That it needs to be enlarged. Many of these events are boring, and what is there to say really when the race is over in 40 seconds?”

As for the athletes, the only hope of monetary reward for most are endorsement contracts and public appearances, both of which rely on emotional resonance with the audience. Many Olympic competitors now have their own websites, complete with personal history and explanations of what keeps them going -- Soldati’s site emphatically proclaims her faith as a Christian and includes a list of inspirational texts. These sites are a way for the athletes to humanize their image and connect with the fans.

Likewise, the national and international federations of each sport have a vested interest in getting publicity. When Wallechinsky is doing his research, he says, the federations provide much of the background material. “A lot of these sports get very little attention except from the Olympics,” he says. “So they plumb their members pretty thoroughly.”

But some feel the emphasis on personal suffering lends an air of bathos to an event that historically was considered a gathering of international elite. Where once athletes had to be virtually invincible, now they must seem vulnerable, as if winning sympathy was even more important than winning the event.

“It’s a lazy empathy,” says Shields. “These days it’s hard for viewers to be empathetic with stoicism or determination, people who are willing to give up so much for a sport. But they can say, ‘Oh, yes, I empathize with him because he lost his father at 12.’ ”

Cable television and the Internet have also created media that over-cover any and every event and create an exponentially increasing demand for drama. The generations weaned on Arledge’s “thrill of victory and agony of defeat” now need something more to hold their interest.

A generation ago, the Olympics had the competition between East and West, between the Soviets and the U.S. That tension -- the rare sight of athletes from behind the Iron Curtain, the desire to prove that excellence thrived in a free society -- is hard to replace, as NBC’s Solomon admits. “Well, Iraq is back at the Games for the first time since 1988,” she says. “And that will be interesting. But it’s not the U.S. versus the Soviets.”

Instead, catharsis will be offered in the form of Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, who had been in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and was heading back to take pictures when the planes hit the towers. Or the equestrian firefighter whose co-workers worked extra shifts so she could take the time off to compete; the water-polo team member who almost died at age 5 after a fall in his backyard; the wrestler who lost his toe to frostbite when he drove his snowmobile into a lake.

It’s tough to compete with an amputated toe.

Contack McNamara at Calendar .letters@latimes.com.