After a 12-year run, with stops in Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens and Turin, the CBC has reached the end of the road.
The Beijing Olympics will be the network's last until at least 2014, but it isn't leaving quietly. The plan is to wrap it up with a flourish.
The Olympic budget has been increased. The amount of programming, because of extensive online streaming, has rocketed to more than 1,500 hours, although the content on the main network has dropped slightly to 282 hours from 294 hours in Athens four years ago.
Special analysts, including Perdita Felicien, the former world champion hurdler, and Sacha Trudeau, a documentary filmmaker and son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, have been hired.
This also will be the CBC's most expensive Olympics. The corporation paid $45-million for the rights, well above the previous high of $33-million for Athens.
The CBC won't comment on whether money will be made from the Beijing coverage, but Scott Moore, the head of sports, believes the show will be worth the cost of admission.
“I'm convinced Beijing will be the most spectacular, most compelling and most important Olympic Games of our lifetime,” he said. “From a geopolitical standpoint, these are incredibly important Games. People are fascinated by the prospect of China either having a great coming-out party or not being as open as they promised they would be.”
In many ways, the Ling Long Pagoda, an impressive tower that houses the CBC Olympic studio, symbolizes two contrasting themes that television will pursue at Beijing.
One will be largely visual – the pictures of an exotic, somewhat mysterious country and the architectural edifices produced out of Beijing's Olympic investment of more than $40-billion.
The other will be news oriented – covering the environmental problems that could play havoc with the athletes and functioning inside the bureaucratic red tape of China.
“The tower is absolutely spectacular,” Moore said. “It's a great view. The problem is if the pollution continues to be as bad as it has been, the rest of the city is pretty much washed out in a haze.”
Just how effectively television will be able to cut through the haze and bring clarity to the story of Beijing playing host to the Olympics remains to be seen.
Certainly the CBC is treating Beijing, and the curiosity surrounding it, as a news story almost as much as it is a world sporting event.
The involvement of journalists from the news department will include Vancouver anchor Ian Hanomansing, who will be the late-night host, and Toronto anchor Diana Swain, who will be co-host of the morning show. Mark Kelley will report on human-interest stories. Trudeau, who has worked in China, will be part of the reporting team and will also provide commentary.
“Sacha's role for us is to provide an understanding to our viewers,” said Trevor Pilling, the Olympic executive producer. “He will help us gain some insight into the host nation.”
Some of this insight also will come from examining the Chinese media's own coverage of the Games, Hanomansing said.
“It will be interesting to get, as best we can, how the Chinese government sells its efforts at the Olympics within the country,” he said. “One thing I think the Western world got a sense of during the [protest-plagued] torch relay was that the story played a lot differently in China than it did outside China.
“Within China, people were startled that anyone would react to the torch the way people reacted to it in Europe and San Francisco.”
Moore believes Beijing programming will get more viewers than the Athens coverage, because it is China, and also because the 12-hour difference between Beijing and the Eastern time zone in North America will allow for live coverage in prime time starting at 9 p.m., something that wasn't possible at Athens.
