Last month, I interviewed the author Chuck Klosterman about his new book “Football,” a very smart book about a very complicated sport. Klosterman has been obsessed with football since he was a child, and it shows: Every page drips with understanding and knowledge of the game. Which is why his response, when I asked him when he last attended a football game in person, was so funny.
“I have no idea,” he said, chuckling. “It’s been a while.” His football experience was, like most of ours, filtered entirely through television.
The importance of live television to sports is so undeniable as to be obvious. When you do attend a game, as I still do as often as possible, you realize the game is not really aimed at you anymore; you are window dressing, atmosphere for the viewers at home. This reorientation of sports’ priorities — the understanding that the money’s in TV, not the turnstiles — has transformed the industry: It’s why Cal and Boston College are in the same conference, why pregame shows are hosted by sleeveless cretins, why games can feel like extended ads for some gambling company. It can seem pointless to show up at all.
Which is why it shouldn’t be surprising that sports innovations now come more from the broadcasts of the events than their actual performance of them — whether the athletes like it or not.
These Winter Olympics have brought us many stories, from cheating curlers to disturbingly confessional biathletes to figure skating routines using AI music-bots. But I suspect what ends up lasting the longest will be the drones.
This has been one of the most watchable Olympics ever, and drones are the reason. Drones have gotten so good that they are able to keep up with world-class athletes doing absurdly fast (and absurdly dangerous) things, providing us stunning new angles on sports we’ve seen a million times. We’ve always known that downhill skiers go streaking down mountains at incredible speeds. But now, thanks to the drones flying just behind their heads, we cannot only see it, we can feel as if we’re going down the mountain with them.
Some of the footage can seem impossible, like the drone that somehow makes it through a luge route without smashing against the track. Can that be any easier than successfully piloting the sled? The ski jumping has been most disorienting. We have always watched those amazing athletes fly above us, but now, astoundingly, we watch them from above. This has the strange effect of both showcasing their achievement and flattening it: How can you be in awe of how far someone can jump when you are looking down on them while they do it?
I honestly cannot understand how they get some of these shots. But it turns out, one of the ways they do it is by bothering the athletes. While many athletes say they tune out the buzzing of the drones while they’re competing, there are increasing rumblings of frustration. Imagine, at a moment you’ve trained your entire life for, having to wonder: “Is that drone going to bump into me?”
U.S. snowboarder Bea Kim told The Post’s Rick Maese that, “I think that might just be because the people who are flying them are somewhere else, and they don’t realize how close they are.” As Maese notes, a decade ago, a falling drone nearly hit a skier during a World Cup event. Nothing like that has happened at these Olympics — drone technology is a lot better than it was a decade ago — and as long as nothing does, expect drones to become even more of a part of the Games, along with every other sports broadcast.
After all, the shots do look cool. But they also create an undeniable panopticon effect: As an athlete, it’s one thing to know that you are always being filmed. It’s quite another to have the thing doing the filming right there next to you, doing what you do, while you do it. (And making a lot of noise while doing so.) The camera is a reminder that the audience isn’t just not watching you perform in person, it is doing so thousands of miles away.
And paradoxically, the closer to the action the drone gets, the less impressive the feat becomes; by eliminating perspective, an athlete becomes less a person testing the limits of physical possibility and more just one more thing you past by on your screen. More than that: They become, like the crowd gathered around them, background. The true star of the show stops being the athlete: It becomes the person watching at home.
But why wouldn’t that be the priority, even if it means slowly marginalizing the event itself? The funny thing about always catering to the distant television viewer is that it’s not just the fans in the stands who can feel like minor characters in the larger story: It’s the athlete themselves. When all that matters is the needs of the person at home on the couch, the athlete is danger of becoming window dressing, too. This technology is amazing now, and it will only get better. Then no one will need to go to the Games at all. And then? Pardon me, LeBron: You’re standing in the way of our shot.
The post The biggest stars of these Winter Olympics? It’s the drones. appeared first on Washington Post.
