This past week has been filled with karmic news (CNN’s Jeff Zucker resigning, Whoopi Goldberg’s suspension, Meta/Facebook shares plummeting).
It’s as if someone baked a schadenfreude cake and is now dishing it out. And the frosting on that confection is this: The televised Winter Olympics games in Beijing, China, are a ratings bust.
Thursday’s primetime coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 7.25 million viewers on NBC, marking the smallest primetime Olympic audience ever on the network. The previous low was 8.5 million for the final night of competition at last year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics.Even including concurrent primetime coverage on USA Network — 512,000 viewers — the average of 7.78 million would still mark an all-time low. An across-all-platforms figure that includes NBC’s various streaming platforms will be provided here when it is available….Viewership plunged 55% from NBC’s first night of coverage at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics four years ago (16.00M) and 64% from night one of the Sochi Games in 2014 (20.02M). Keep in mind this is only the third time NBC has aired primetime coverage prior to the Opening Ceremony. The “bonus” night of coverage is typically not factored into NBC’s averages.
There are so many reasons people are opting out of watching, despite the grace of figure skating and the thrills associated with ski competitions.
To begin with, people around the world are still struggling to free themselves from pandemic restrictions caused by a virus that appears to have originated in a Wuhan laboratory and was spread worldwide as a result, at least in part, of the 2019 World Military Games in that city.
The 7th International Military Sports Council Military World Games (MWGs) opened in Wuhan on October 18, 2019. The MWGs in Wuhan drew 9,308 athletes, representing 109 countries, to compete in 329 events across 27 sports. Many of the participating athletes fell ill with various flu-like complaints. Here is a glimpse of the sick athletes and their location in the hospitals…now seeing ill patients.
Evidence from Brazil, Italy, France, and Sweden indicate that the virus circulated in those countries by November and December of 2019, long before China officially admitted they had a significant public health problem. This was likely the global “super-spreader event.” China tried to blame Italy for the virus at one point.
To compound the insult to Americans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted athletes to remain silent about conditions in China, as she was fearful of their safety.
According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the motto of the Beijing Winter Olympics should be “Faster, Higher, Stronger — and Silent.”The California Democrat reiterated Friday that American athletes should keep any unkind word about China’s repressive Communist government to themselves, repeating an admonition from the previous day.“As I wish the athletes well, I do not encourage them to speak out against the Chinese government there because I fear for their safety if they do,” Pelosi said Friday, hours after the opening ceremony. “[To] remove all doubt about why I said they shouldn’t speak out, it’s because I fear for their safety.”
The responses to this inanity have been scathing.
Finally, corporate sponsors are afraid of being connected to a regime that is accused of atrocities on its minority populations and other human rights abuses.
The corporate sponsors that typically go big on the Olympics have kept their distance in the run-up amid global condemnation for the host country’s human-rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in far western Xinjiang – which the US state department has labelled a genocide – in addition to the persecution of Tibetans and the repression of Hong Kong’s freedoms. Those thorny geopolitical implications were only underscored when the US, Australia, Britain and Canada announced a diplomatic boycott of the event last month.Only two of the 20 official Team USA sponsors had aired spots pegged to the Olympics as of Wednesday, according to Reuters, with both focusing on the athletes while downplaying the host nation. That’s a far cry from the flood-the-zone deluge that’s critical to breaking through and building anticipation for athletes and sports that are largely in the public eye only once every four years. Bottom line: many casual sports fans, perhaps thrown off by an Olympics taking place only seven months after the last one due to the coronavirus postponement, are barely aware a Winter Games is even happening.
Beijing laughably had Uyghur cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang be the last athlete to carry the flame.
For a country that has been condemned for its treatment of the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, the symbolism was impossible to miss.The lighting of the Olympic cauldron by the final torchbearer has long been a centerpiece of Olympic opening ceremonies and marks the beginning of the Games. It is considered a great honor to be the last athlete to carry the flame.
Despite the blizzard of Chinese PR, CCP officals cannot snow potential viewers and have them forget all the damage that nation has done in the past two years.
I can only hope this is the last Olympic event hosted by this country. I also pray all our athletes come home safely, and free of lab-grown viruses.
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