It s hard to take nationalistic sides when the athletes are eating at your burger joints, living in your suburbs, running on your streets, swimming in your ideology. Gymnastics star Vitaly Scherbo. Of course, old paradigms are hard to break. What was fair wasn t even discussed. As a chief melodramatic device of American coverage of the Olympics, though, the cold war has lost its pizzazz.
Conflict makes a good story, and the post-cold war Olympics clearly lacked it.
With the demise of traditional geopolitical narratives, NBC reinvented Olympian melodrama, and, out of narrative necessity, turned to individuals and individual conflicts to increase the tension, drama and excitement of the Games. Checking Pulses at the 1996 Atlanta Games With perhaps the exception of the pro basketballers on Dream Team II, the would-be characters of NBC s Olympic melodrama were largely unknowns. To lure and then hold an audience, NBC s main programming strategy was to promote certain athletes as people to watch. Whether these athletes were American or not, their athletic circumstances and histories could be molded into a familiar melodramatic story. A favorite on NBC s cast was gymnast Vitaly Scherbo, a six-time gold medal winner four years earlier in Barcelona.