great points.
I’m around everday people, non endurance athletes, daily.
What do they talk about? How much NFL, NBA players make. They bring up Phelps because of the money he makes. They bring up Lance because of his celebrity status, they bring up Tiger because of the money he makes.
Yes, these people jumped out to capture the publics imagination. But, last time I checked, popular music and movies get known because of being over hyped. Do you want a hero in triathlon? Create it, throw money at it, everybody has story - publicize that story. Is Wellington not a Tiger? Is Potts not a Lebron?
The difference between triathlon and pretty much all of these other examples you’ve touched on in your post is that each of them has an audience in its own right. The NFL, NBA, baseball, tennis, golf, and the Olympics have become marketable properties without specific athletes. Music, movies, and TV are all marketable without knowing anything about the specific actors, musicians, or personalities involved. If the everyday people around you are talking about how much these athletes make, it’s not because that’s what drew their interest – they were already interested in the game, and the salaries are just an aspect of that.
Let me give you another example: Michael Phelps has some phenomenal and historic performances at a number of meets outside of the Olympics. In the 2007 World Championships, for example, he won seven gold medals and broke five world records, but how much mainstream media attention did you hear about that? Where was the million dollar bonus from Speedo held out as a carrot for him there? The answer is that the reason the media blitz for Phelps worked in 2004 and 2008 is because the Olympics already had a built-in audience, hungry for heroic and historic performances. That audience just doesn’t exist in the same way for the World Championships, and as it stands, no amount of money from Speedo, Powerbar, or whoever is going to change that.
Wellington is, to be sure, a wonderful story, bursting onto the scene from almost nowhere, but can she capture the imagination of mainstream audiences? I’d love it if she could, but I don’t see it happening, even if she breaks PNF’s career victory record and best finish time at Kona. I think the most she’ll be to mainstream audiences is someone who was better than most at a slightly crazy endeavor.
The reason NBC highlights the emotional stories in their broadcast is because those are the things that have a better chance of appealing to the mainstream. They want the people who have overcome the odds, battled back from the brink, beaten back the skeptics to achieve the impossible. Marc Herremans is probably the closest thing we’ve had to the type of story that could capture the imagination of the mainstream audience – a former pro paralyzed in a crash only to battle back and win the physically-challenged title. A great story, but somehow still not enough …
Triathlon, in and of itself, doesn’t have a mainstream audience. People don’t pay attention to the game for the game’s sake alone, as it currently stands, and until it does, there won’t be a way to throw money at the sport’s professionals to create the kind of hype you describe, simply because nobody will be watching.
The one tactic that’s been mentioned on this thread that actually might have a shot at attracting more mainstream attention is a reality-show take on IM. Take, say, 20 average, sedentary people (10 men and 10 women), and follow them in a weekly reality show as they prep for IM. To create the week-in, week-out nastiness that people have come to expect from reality shows (and that tends to create an audience), limit the number of slots into the race to two per gender. The finale is to have the two “qualifiers” in each gender race for the prize – $1M. It’s unfortunate, but I think this has a better chance of reaching the average joe out there in TV-land than spending that $1M on the professionals. (And, just to make it clear, I do agree that the pros in our sport deserve better for the work they put in – the current reality, though, is that they can’t expect things to change any time soon.)
cramer