The agony of deceit: ladies' night at the NBC Olympics.

On the television screen, Vitaly Scherbo waits to perform on the rings in the men's individual all-around gymnastics competition. A soft, deep male voice announces, "He's probably thinking of just one person, his wife, Irina. She is the reason why he competes here tonight" Suddenly, a mellow electric guitar is playing blues muzak and, in soft focus, gymnasts are lined up for practice against a window. The sweet blues continues and, over the next few minutes, lulled by slow motion shots, layered images, the music, and the same soft male voice, we become immersed in Vitaly's triumphs at Barcelona, Irina's car accident, and "the love of a husband who would never leave her side."

Vitaly comes back on the screen in what NBC calls "plausibly live" time. As he is about to be hoisted up to the rings, we hear, "Today is Irina Scherbo's twenty fifth birthday. She and Vitaly's three year old daughter are going to be watching from. . . ."

Less than two weeks into the Olympic Games, we were to see Vitaly and Irina's love story at least five times and to be reminded of it each time he performed. Her accident and recovery, it seems, were the sole source of his will to compete.

Why such attention to this love story? In the August 5, 1996, issue of the New Yorker, David Remnick interviewed Dick Ebersol, president of NBC Sports, and Nicholas Schiavone, NBC director of research, and explored the psycho logical underpinnings of NBC's intricate strategy to capture the female audience. Remnick cites what he calls Schiavone's programming "creed"--five principles for a kinder, gentler Olympics--describing it as "a highly artificial construct, designed for maximum sentiment and ratings." The results, summarized by Marc Gunther in the July 22, 1996, issue of Fortune magazine, indicate that, while men will watch the games no matter what, women, who make up 51 percent of the viewing audience, need stories, and they need them told "in ways that touch their hearts" Gunther summarizes Ebersol's programming philosophy for NBC's Olympic splash: "The trick will be to package the events in such a way that women will stay glued"

NBC must have been convinced that the package would work. It authorized Ebersol to engineer the biggest deal in television history, spending $3.55 billion in order to nail down, for NBC's exclusive American coverage, five of the next six Olympics, through 2008.

A conspicuous part of that package are the Harlequin romance stories cooked up according to a recipe:

MIX:

1 Olympic athlete

1 Olympic sport

1 participating nation

1 adversity or 2 (arrogance, asthma, disease,

substance abuse, injury, discouragement,

death, etc.) SWEETEN with music (chosen from the 1,700

songs NBC bought from Sound Identity Group

in New York City) FLAVOR with camera techniques (fade in, fade

out, closeups, slow motion, image overlay, soft

focus, etc.)

It is these stories, processed and prepackaged for women, that came to dominate the 171.5 hours of NBC coverage. Stories mom appropriate to the global vision of the Olympic Games--such as those about other countries, about people whose economic and political hardships we have never faced, about sports we seldom get to watch (like fencing and judo)--were precluded. Rarely did NBC not filter profiles of foreign athletes through its American lens of the individual hero over coming adversity. Rarely did we hear an anthem other than "The Star Spangled Banner."

Rarely in these 171.5 hours did we get to see a whole event, unless it was short. When we did see a sport, we learned little about it--even from the experts, many of them retired athletes probably instructed by NBC not to get too technical. A stellar exception was diving commentator Cynthia Potter. From her immediate and detailed descriptions, we learned what subtle turns of the body the judges watched for and what moves helped a diver make a clean entry.

Compare her commentary with that in the swimming events, where the differences in speed seemed magically to lie in the competitors' "desire" to take home a gold or in their ability "to make a statement" Before the race, we learned which swimmer would perform in which lane and which among them would "need" or "want to make a statement." Then the swimmers settled their goggles, tugged at the crotches of their Speedos, shook their legs, bent over, shot in, and, boiling the greenish water, came to the end of the race. During the event, we heard that swimmer X, who was behind, "needed to make a statement soon" and Y, who was ahead, "was making a state meet" In the end, we learned that the winner had "made a strong statement" and that runners up "just didn't want it enough" What did this sports psychobabble teach us about the various strokes or how a slender 15-year-old could have outstripped a muscular 21 year old?

For actual sports coverage, NBC substituted hours of filler: interviews by commentators of the "how does it feel?" school of broadcasting, prepackaged stories aired whole or in a variety of interruptive sight bites, the same commentary repeated over and over, and introductions which substituted sentiment in slow motion for sports in real life. To test their filler appeal, communications professor Barbara Ross suggests that NBC should, in its summative feedback, give subjects a VCR, a remote, and tapes of the Olympics to see what footage they fast forward through to get to the "good part" Maybe NBC would find that Bob Costas' remark during the closing ceremonies applied better to the preceding 16 days: "I believe we have reached one of those points in time where commentary would be superfluous." While NBC pulled in higher Olympic ratings than previously, it might have pulled in higher still by giving viewers sports, not soaps.

Filler is one thing; manipulative and deceptive coverage is another. When Russian weight-lifter Andrei Chemerkin, not the favorite but profiled for us at the beginning of an edited match, turned out to be the gold medalist at the end, we realized that NBC must have waited until it knew the results to pick which profile to air. After this, we began to suspect that any athlete we saw profiled at the beginning of an event would turn out to be the gold medalist at the end.

Clearly, NBC misled us when it announced, as reported in the July 20, 1996, issue of TV Guide, that coverage would be live. Gymnastics, for instance, were shown live in Europe and on tape in the United States during our prime time. Even a "cut" to a womens soccer game in progress showed an American scoring a goal in less than five minutes. Was this really a live cut? Apparently NBC decided that its audience did not need to know that "virtually live" or "plausibly live" is not live.

It's not that we needed it all live and unedited. But when NBC constantly shifted back and forth among sporting events in order to create false suspense and keep us glued to our sets, when we never knew more than an ad ahead of time whether an event would be interrupted or shortened, when we discovered at the end of a particular diving competition that we had seen only selected divers, we felt cheated. By contrast, the last half of a close soccer or basketball game, for example, accompanied by some commentary about the strategies, difficulties, and amazing feats of the sport, would have engaged us actively rather than made us feel like pawns in NBC's manipulative game. It is one thing to have to sit through hours of what Steve Crowe of the Detroit Free Press called "a gigantic highlight omelet"; it is quite another to get that omelet when you expect meat and potatoes.

In NBC's arsenal of tricks, the barrage of closeups may have been its most controlling device of all. We spent more time on Michael Johnsons golden feet in the blocks and on his face--chin to hairline--than we did on his full body or on those of the seven other athletes getting set to run. We found our hands pressing our own cheeks during the endless close ups of the flesh on runners' cheeks bobbing up and down in slow motion. The faces of Dominique Moceanu and Shannon Miller cried, smiled, and watched for their scores endlessly. And why couldn't NBC have opened its camera shot from the single teammate or coach hugging an athlete to include the reactions of nearby athletes, some of them not American? Of course, if NBC zoomed in on coach Bela Karolyi or Steve Nunno, we "overheard" their words of consolation or praise captured on a strategically placed mike. We caught glimpses of other athletes at the edges of the screen, and we made up our own stories; we leaned forward and tried to peer around the corner to see what NBC wasn't showing us.

In a year when more women than ever participated in the Olympics and when softball became an Olympic sport for the first time, NBC did seem eager to put a feminist spin on its coverage of the U.S. women's softball team. Several times, NBC told the story of how shortstop Dot Richardson had once passed up an invitation to play for a Little League team because the coach had said she would have to cut her hair and let people call her "Bob." Sadly, we never did see much of Richardson playing softball, though thousands of Little League girls and local softball league women would have liked to watch an inning or two. NBC had made an explicit appeal to the female audience and then came up short. In the time it spent repeating the "Bob" story, airing choppy softball highlights, and saying how it couldn't be all that hard to hit those 70 mile an hour underhand pitches, we could have seen some exciting continuous footage of Richardson and her teammates in action and learned something about the intricacies of the underhand fast pitch.

Instead of letting real Olympic drama inherent in the events play itself out, NBC shunned spontaneity and the unexpected. Caught in its own desire for control, it had decided ahead of time what the stories of these games would be, and it tried to get the athletes to conform to the plots it had outlined. For example, NBC seemed to have in mind that American distance swimmer Janet Evans would win medals so it could air a schmaltzy retrospective of her career and talk about its high note ending. But Evans did not win medals; nor did she dissolve into tears in front of NBC's cameras. In fact, she seemed content with her Olympic performance and comfortable with her imminent retirement--not, it seems, the stuff of which stories are made.

Although NBC thought it had to control all we saw, we knew that there were real and good stories to tell about these Olympic Games. We caught glimpses of them at the outskirts and the fringes of NBC's coverage. We learned that American hurdler Calvin Davis had been hurdling only since April, that he had been a 400 meter runner before that. After he won his qualifying heat in the hurdles, it came out in a brief backside interview with Davis that Zambia's Samuel Matete, one of his competitors in the 400 meter hurdles, had spent time with Davis earlier in the summer helping him with his hurdling technique. The track and field commentator's remark on this was that Matete might live to regret helping Davis. Now there's a story NBC would have liked. Maybe the network was keeping it in reserve in case Davis won the shining gold medal. When he won a dull bronze behind Matete's silver, the network must have been disappointed because it didn't get to tell the story of the wrenching irony of student beating teacher, the whole thing set to a sweeping score.

NBC didn't respect its viewers enough. It didn't believe that anyone might be interested in exactly what Davis had to do to adjust himself to hurdling or exactly how Matete helped him. It didn't believe that anyone might wonder what it was like for athletes of the former Soviet Union to see former team mates and current friends suddenly on the other side of the field or court or podium. It didn't believe that anyone would want to know how Vitaly Scherbo--according to NBC so weak and overweight after his wife's accident and recovery that he couldn't even do a handstand--was now winning Olympic medals. These human interest stories were actually relevant to what was happening on the playing field. NBC believed that, to make women watch sports, you had to tell them stories that had nothing to do with sports. As George Puscas of the Detroit Free Press opined, NBC "ought to boot out their artsy crowd and put sports programming back in the hands of news people, who know well enough to let a good story play itself out."

NBC looked most foolish trying to force athletes to con firm its stories of bitter rivalries. For example, we heard over and over about how U.S. swimmer Gary Hall, Jr., and Russian Aleksandr Popov hated each other and had been carrying on a verbal battle in the press before the Olympics. Asked about this in an NBC interview, Hall jokingly remarked, "If you don't beat him in the pool, you beat him in the parking lot." His playful tone and genial demeanor hardly made a case for genuine animosity. NBC wanted Popov to be a villain; proper melodrama needs villains. The best evidence it could come up with was Bob Costas' account of how an unnamed reporter had asked Popov what American movie star he admired most and had been told, in essence, that he really didn't care about American movie stars. That answer hardly made Popov detestable, but it did make one wonder what kind of reporter asks the best male sprinter in all of swimming to name his favorite American movie star. Probably someone looking for a story that would supposedly appeal to women.

After Popov had beaten Hall by hundredths of a second in the 100-meter freestyle, poolside interviews continued the "bitter rivalry" theme, despite the fact that the cameras had inadvertently caught the two swimmers chatting jovially in the water as they waited for the official results to be posted, and despite the fact that they both said that their pre-race trash-talk was, as Hall described it, "just part of the psyching up process." The interviewer asked Hall if losing to the Russian would "eat away" at him, and he said, no, he was happy to have won a silver medal for the United States. He and Popov slapped each other on the back and walked off. Nevertheless, any time one of their names came up later in the swimming commentary, we'd hear again about the vicious animosity between them.

Why did NBC insist on fueling stories of nasty rivalries when what happened on-screen offered no support for its claims? What Olympic values did this teach our children? If NBC wants heartwarming stories for women, good stories that teach good lessons, it will need to reexamine the difference between the values it purports to promote-peace among the nations through friendly competition in shared sport-and those its coverage did promote-athletes worthy of respect are cut throat and go only for the gold. In NBC's script, athletes "capitalize on" the mistakes of others and exercise their "killer instinct." If the athletes make a mistake, they're said to be "throwing away" or "giving away" the gold. Because "the question is: who wants it enough?" You'd think NBC would be glad for spontaneous displays of the real Olympic spirit-like Hall and Popov chatting in the water at the end of their race, and like American sprinter Gwen Torrence leading the Olympic stadium crowd in cheering her teammate Gail Devers (according to NBC, Torrence's "bitter rival") when it was announced that Devers had won the gold medal in the 100-meter race.

It's not that NBC's initial idea was so bad. Sports stories are a good thing. Everyone, male and female, likes a good sports story-that's one reason we tune in in the first place. NBC's big mistake was in not giving sporting events themselves any credit as a source of stories. The way sports capture our imagination is by showing us stories too good to be made up. How about the one where Cal Ripken, Jr., hits a home run in the game that breaks Lou Gehrig's 2,131 consecutive game record, or the one where Michael Jordan dissolves into tears and falls to the floor when his team wins its fourth championship? And, yes, there's the one where Kerri Strug vaults on a severely sprained ankle to secure a gold medal for her team, and the one where Carl Lewis comes from fifteenth place to win his fourth consecutive Olympic longjump gold medal. These are good stories from the games themselves, stories that are immediately compelling. We don't need anyone to tell us how to feel at these moments. We don't need to be whacked over the head with a two by four of endless repetition in order to recognize their poignancy. We don't need them chewed, digested, regurgitated, and reconstituted before they can move us.

Sports naturally invoke empathy. They don't need to be injected with it-not even for women. We will take our stories whole and raw.

Katherine Mayberry is a student, dancer, and writer. Margaret Proctor is a professor of communications at Grand Valley State in Allendale, Michigan. Rosalind Srb is a former professor of English at the same university.