Ed Sherman talks with the Tribune's Olympic reporter, Phil Hersh

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: Tribune's Hersh has seen evolution of Olympics : Posted by Ed S. at 2/10/2010 2:55 AM CST on Chicago Business : To know Phil Hersh is to know that you will be hard-pressed to find another sportswriter more passionate about the Olympics. : A talented writer and tenacious reporter, the Tribune's Mr. Hersh leaves it all out on the table when it comes to these affairs. I covered the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney with him, but I can't say I saw much of Mr. Hersh. He was a frenetic whirlwind of motion, working with an obsession to make sure he and all of us got it right. : Mr. Hersh is in Vancouver, where he will be covering his 15th Olympics; ninth in the winter. However, he still acts as if he is going to his first Olympics, at Lake Placid in 1980. When I called to chat with him the other day, you could feel the intensity as he said he only had a few minutes. : "So many things to do," he said. : OK, no small talk. I wanted Mr. Hersh's perspective on covering 30 years of the Olympics. : What's been the biggest change? : Mr. Hersh: In my time, you've gone from a small-town Olympics (Lake Placid) to the Olympics where the last two have been in very,very large cities (Turin, Italy, in 2006 and Beijing in 2008). : The single biggest change has been the breakup of the Soviet Union. It ended the Cold War rivalry on the playing field. China is our biggest trading partner. But you're not going to get people as excited about the U.S. beating China as you did about beating the Soviets and the East Germans. The one overriding storyline through the '60s, '70s, '80s was the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. The U.S.-Soviet hockey game (in 1980) was the biggest example. That's gone. You're not going to get that again. : It's clearly impacted ratings. There's a gigantic difference in the way the casual viewer perceives the Olympics : How has commercialization impacted the Olympics? : The sponsorship program began in the early '80s. Los Angeles (1984) changed the whole financial model for the Oly games. Yes, it has gotten much, much more commercial. The argument the IOC uses is that (sponsorship money) gives so many more opportunities to so many more people to come to the games. With the scale of the summer games, you could never dream of holding them without massive commercialization. : Is there commercialization? Yes. I've never found it offensive. I can't see any downside. It's clear the commercial sponsors love the idea that all the best athletes in the world are there. It's probably motivated the hockey players, pro basketball players, tennis players to enter the Olympics. There's a change that's occurred. In the modern world, you can't do it without the sponsors. You either scale back to something of 1/3 or 1/2 the size or you live with what commercialization leaves. : In 1980, the U.S. hockey team that stunned the world was comprised of amateurs. Now the pros dominate sports like hockey and basketball. How has the entrance of the pros changed the games? : I believe to cut the size of the Olympics you should get rid of some sports. In my mind, I would get rid of the sports for which winning an Olympic gold medal is not the highest prize. I never would have put golf in the Olympics. I don't think tennis adds anything to the Olympics. Neither did baseball. : Hockey doesn't make any difference to me. There are so few sports in the Winter Olympics. For some of these people, the Olympics almost are as big as the Stanley Cup. : I'll make a couple of exceptions, and one of them is men's basketball. The "Dream Team" had such impact on the sport of basketball worldwide, it would be silly to go backward. It helped to grow the game. The caliber of players throughout the world has grown. The U.S. had to work hard to beat Spain (in the gold medal basketball game in 2008). : : How has TV impacted the Olympics? : The famous Triplecast of 1992 (NBC aired the Barcelona Summer Games on three networks) was deemed to be an enormous failure. Now it's the model. Is there oversaturation? I don't think there is when you're talking about something that's only on for 34 days every four years (if you combine both winter and summer). TV and the Internet clearly changed the playing field. (Instant information) makes it tougher for the networks to attract an audience in prime time, because people know the results. That's why NBC got swimming switched to the morning (in Beijing) so it could be shown live in prime time here. : Except for providing more coverage, I don't think TV has been that intrusive. Some sports have changed the rules to become more telegenic, but they were sports that were on the risk of dying anyway. Volleyball used to have interminable matches. Now you don't have to win by two after a certain point. That has helped. : Do you expect any tuneout from Chicago viewers, some of whom might be upset about the way the IOC treated the city in its bid for the 2016 games? : I don't think it will have an impact. If the weather stays freezing cold, people will watch the Olympics. If skier Lindsey Vohn goes off and wins the first race Feb. 13, and she's the wholesome, Midwestern girl from Minnesota. . . .If you get that kind of buzz, people will be interested in Alpine skiing. This is a hockey town. There are six Hawks players in the Olympics. People will watch that. I don't think Chicago not getting the games will have much of an impact. : After all these years, do you still get excited about covering the Olympics? : I'm always more excited about the Winter games. It's like you're attending a dinner party for eight as opposed to a banquet for a thousand. At the winter games, you always have a sense of what's going on. The summer games are so big very little sense of what's going on outside of where you are at that moment.

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