The Olympics start tomorrow.  Please control your excitement.

I used to love the Olympics.  At the height (or depths) of the Cold War, it was inspiring to watch athletes from all corners of the globe walk into the same stadium to compete in a place where excellence was the only ideology that counted.  I teared up when they called upon the youth of the world to gather again in four years at the next Olympic site. 

The founders of the modern Games were idealists.  They believed you could make a better world through sport, by bringing people from different lands together to see that we are not so different after all. 

Now it’s just another bloated product of the entertainment-industrial complex.

It’s not that I think the Games were more “honest,” “pure,” or “sportsmanlike” when the athletes were allegedly amateurs.  Professionalism isn’t the problem.  Overkill is. 

At the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics – hardly in the dark ages – there were thirty-eight events in eleven days.  In 2010, over the course of sixteen days, there will be that many events for women alone, along with 46 for men and the two mixed-pair events in figure skating.

The Games take place every other year, like Congressional elections and dental x-rays.  The Summer and Winter Games used to be scheduled for the same year, but someone decided this made them less marketable, so the Winter Olympics were shifted to the middle year of the Summer Games’ four-year cycle.  Now the next Olympics is always just around the corner, and neither of them is special.

I’m not exactly sure who’s to blame for spoiling what was once such a good thing, but I’ve narrowed it to four candidates: Roone Arledge, Tonya Harding, Dick Ebersol, and Al Gore. 

When Roone Arledge was running ABC Sports, and ABC was the Olympic network, he pioneered the treatment of sports as general entertainment through the “up close and personal” portrayal of the athletes.  They were no longer just outstanding performers with athletic skills; they were characters in “the human drama of athletic competition,” and viewers were invited to root for them because they’d gotten to know them.  In less skillful hands, this soon morphed into the obligatory three-minute profile shown before taped coverage of every event, said profile generally focusing on a childhood illness, a dying parent, a recent injury, or a previous disappointment. 

The ultimate sporting melodrama – a perfect blend of athletic endeavor and trash TV – was the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan mess in 1994.  Harding, by conspiring with her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly to whack Kerrigan’s knee at the U.S. Championships, gave figure skating something it had never had before: a bad guy.  The incident brought mammoth worldwide publicity to the Games in Lillehammer, Norway, and led to phenomenal ratings for CBS’s coverage.  The broadcast of the women’s short program drew the seventh-highest rating in American television history.

The major networks decided that figure skating was the golden ticket to high ratings, because women loved it and men could be persuaded that it was a sport.  A glut of figure skating events on TV ensued.  It took a while, but eventually this trend was beaten to a pulp through repetition; by then, the Winter Olympics were NBC’s problem.

That network began televising the Summer Games in 1988, and carried them in ’92 and ’96 as well.  Dick Ebersol, president of NBC Sports, saw the ratings bonanza CBS had reaped from the Lillehammer Olympics, and was determined to lock in the Games for the foreseeable future.  In August 1995, NBC acquired rights to the ’00 Summer and ’02 Winter Olympics.  In December ’95, Ebersol completed the unprecedented coup of ensuring further Olympic telecasts for 2004, ’06, and ’08.  He bought at the peak of the market, and then had to find a way to justify the cost.

A Tonya Harding doesn’t come along every Olympiad; by 2000, the athletic young people willing to sabotage their competitors were appearing on CBS’s “Survivor” instead.  The answer, particularly for the Winter Olympics – traditionally dominated by northern European countries – was to add nontraditional events at which Americans could excel, because if there’s one thing Americans love to watch, it’s Americans winning.  Enter short-track speed skating.  Enter snowboarding.  Enter freestyle skiing – because the Olympics certainly needed more sports decided by judging.  Even traditional areas like Alpine skiing added events that essentially repeated or combined the main disciplines of downhill, slalom, and giant slalom, to stretch the competition over more days for television’s purposes.

So that’s how an already untidy-tidy winter festival became the overblown, self-promoting behemoth that will air on the full family of NBC networks over the next two weeks.  There will be some genuine drama – all of Canada will hold its breath whenever its hockey team takes to the ice – but it will be surrounded by hype and treacle, with the dramatic moments timed for the tail end of the telecasts to maximize ratings.

How does Al Gore factor in?  It’s that whole Internet thing he invented.  The youth of the world doesn’t have to gather in a stadium every four years; it meets up on Facebook every day, tweets without boundaries, and inhabits a planet that has never been smaller.  The Games are an anachronism now, no longer a vision of an idealized future.  They’re a reality-TV show – entertaining, perhaps, but no longer noble.