Lurker4 wrote:
The point of the NBC coverage is to get people to signup for an Ironman. If "they" can do it, I can do it, is the desired response after seeing all the human interest stories.Agree. The reason the format feels tired is that it’s a basic template used year after year, and one that has shown to be award-winning and very effective to convey a few stories, some fop coverage, and create if not mythology around the brand, at least some equity around IM that pays off later.
The really interesting thing to me is where it will go from here. The broadcast started when “Appointment television” was a thing, and even when it was shown on the shittiest (or cheapest) timeslot available for sports - the Saturday the week after thanksgiving, when half the world would be out bricks and mortar Christmas shopping - it still drew an audience in the millions (just a guess, based on what a TV show in a major network would pull back in the day). Nowadays, thanks to endless channels and the internet, appointment television is an anachronism, and the pull for the show must be minuscule, eroded, or at least no longer carry anywhere near the cost-benefit pull that it used to have. Also, people know about IM.
I guess the one thing that the show did achieve - and ironman is kind of a victim of its own success here - is the creation of the mythology of the sport and Kona through image and storytelling. Absent the NBC program, there would be no collective experience of the Ironwar, the energy lab, Julie Moss, and the myriad other legends or myths that kept coming up as “tradition” on the threads discussing the IMWC off-island. These wouldn’t come to us, and sustain, if they’re were stories in Legend magazine, or were carried from lived experience by elder athletes and passed along to the young entering the sport … it’s only television, and well-produced television at that, that could achieve the durability of stories that we’ve made the bedrock of the sport.
A former coach described racing your first time as Kona as like walking on the set of Seinfeld: to me, that’s the power of image and TV. As we’ve struggled with the departure of IMWC from Kona, I also have to wonder if there’s a way to wean us off racing on the big island by creating new images, myths, and larger-than-life dest8nations using the same thing for Nice, or wherever. Shit - I’ve been to Nice x3 (* raced 1x), and could at best, tell you that the race had a part on the Promenade de l’Anglais (sp?), and maybe went through a town called Gillette in the mountains. Meanwhile, more than a few of us could tell you the topography, roads, intersections, hot spots, and where magical moments of the sport occurred of the Kona course before ever setting foot in the island.
I think the production team were called the Austin Crew, or something like that? I would be fascinated to hear some of the behind the scenes on how the broadcast comes together, and what they had been trying to achieve with it. love or hate what it has done for the “sport,” it has made for great television.