Page 95 - Sport Culture and the Media

76 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

Smith 2000a). It is for this reason that there is so much antagonism between
Olympic rights and non-rights holders, a struggle that also inevitably draws in
sports organizations and even athletes. In Australia, for example, the zealous
safeguarding of Seven Network’s AUS$45 million television rights contract for
the Sydney 2000 Olympics was the subject of considerable anxiety among its
commercial and public rivals. At the earlier Atlanta Olympics, where Australian
rights were also held by Seven, the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC)
helped protect its ‘investment’ (that is, its opportunity to maximize rights
revenue by guaranteeing exclusivity) by breaking up an interview between a
non-rights holder (Network Ten) with two athletes, ejecting a Ten employee
from an official function and, finally, by being instrumental in the withdrawal
of the Network Ten staff’s media accreditation (Moore 1997). For the Sydney
2000 Olympics, the AOC attempted to prevent the ‘parasitical’ behaviour of
non-rights holders in making money out of athletes but not contributing to
their upkeep by trading more liberal media access rules for a substantial sub-
vention for its 2000 Olympic Medal Reward Scheme. In early colonial times
bushrangers in Australia held up travellers on the open road, but in sport it is
rights holders and official sponsors who are ‘ambushed’ in the various channels
of the media. A diverting parallel game is thus played out, with non-rights
holders trying to sneak as much sports coverage as possible, and unofficial
sponsors seeking to associate their corporate logo as closely as legally per-
missible with major sports events. Their official counterparts, in true sporting
style, do their best to stop them. If the sporting action is a little dull, especially
in out-of-stadium events like cycling, the triathlon and marathon running, tele-
vision viewers can search for ‘ambush’ corporate brand imagery strategically
planted for the cameras.
By negotiating, honouring, helping police and strategically modifying broad-
cast rights, sports organizations and personnel become economic allies, even
colleagues, of the media. Hence they need to be well versed in the arcane rules
that govern rights, such as whether non-rights holders should be bound by the
‘three by three by three’ rule (‘three minutes of Olympic footage three times a
day in news programmes at least three hours apart’) which has normally
applied in countries like Australia, or by a stricter and more complicated
variation of it which we could call the ‘two by three minus eighteen minus
two thirds rule’ (‘two minutes of coverage three times a day in established
news programmes, but no events screened less than 18 hours after they took
place’, and no more than one-third of an event to be broadcast, even if it is the
sub-ten seconds 100 metres final) as recommended by the IOC in Atlanta
(Moore 1997: 4). Such deliberations also involve national broadcast policy
priorities and the copyright laws with which any rights agreement must be in
accord, and even whether the Olympics come under the rubric of ‘news’ (and,