Attractive, telegenic American swimmer Janet Evans, in Atlanta for her third Olympics after winning five gold medals, was perhaps NBC’s favorite female star. The network handpicked Evans, who had "grown up before America’s eyes," to carry the torch during the final lap of the opening ceremony; she passed the flame to the surprise torch-lighter, Muhammad Ali.

Muhammad Ali as Olympic torch-lighter.

Janet Evans during a post-race interview.

NBC had great plans for Evans. Her dramatic story revolved around the very last race of her professional career (she announced plans to be a sportscaster, presumably for NBC). The unplanned drama — which only added to the athletic human drama, NBC seemed to think — was that Evans would swim with a broken toe. The tragedy (she whacked the toe on hotel furniture) was repeated incessantly by NBC sportscasters, even after a somewhat embarrassed Evans reminded them that such an injury has little consequence for a long-distance swimmer. Still, NBC was relentless on this point. In a prime-time interview with Evans on July 24, the day before her final Olympic race, Bob Costas waxed sycophantic in order to get more melodramatic mileage out of the swimmer’s taped toe: "Are you trying to be, as you usually are, too classy to cop an excuse, and you don’t want anyone to think that — and this is really going to have an effect, but you just don’t want to say it?"

 
In profiles of other athletes, we learned that the inspiration for Australian cyclist Kathy Watt is her cyclist father, who died in a freak snowstorm. Watt also overcome an Achilles tendon problem and was up against the most arrogant cyclist in the world, unlikable French star Jeannie Longo. American diver Mary Ellen Clark’s melodramatic "problem" is that she had just overcome vertigo. And American wrestler Dennis Hall was still dealing with his brother’s fatal car accident, which occurred eight years earlier. Most packages consisted of thickly written copy, a few athlete soundbites, music that jogged between serious/tragic and punchy/competitive, and close-up shots that attempted to "get in the mind" of the athlete. In all cases, the more teary-eyed confessionals, the better.

Olympic athletes soon discovered that the interest of the cameras had less to do with their athletic skills and more to do with their melodramatic possibilities. In one rare video package, swimmer Jeff Rouse revealed NBC’s programming (and interviewing) strategy as he realized his own narrative shortcomings. Portrayed as a rival of team member Tripp Schwenk ("they are friends, rivals, and America’s premiere backstrokers"), Rouse admitted to the interviewer that he didn’t have "a real big" personal background story. "My life has gone really well for me," he apologized. "I didn’t have any major childhood diseases I had to overcome or any major setbacks."

NBC’s 1996 Olympic coverage typically considered American athletes as hometown favorites. But, under the new melodramatic rules, the American hero’s "evil" challenger didn’t have to be from far-off Russia, or embrace an "anti-American" communist value system; the "bad guy" could very often be an American teammate, even the hero’s own training partner. In a single-minded quest for ratings and athletic human drama, the melodramatic miracle workers at NBC began to "find" potentially polarizing rivalries everywhere. If one American swimmer displayed "intense competitiveness" towards a fellow team-mate (merely swimming well was enough for NBC to justify such a charge), winning the race became an allegory for satisfying a personal grudge, or overcoming the greedy aspirations of an upcoming teenage star. After a swimming race where US teammates Tom Dolan and Eric Namesnik came in 1 and 2 respectively, sideline reporter Jim Gray took pains to provoke discord between the swimmers, who were interviewed in NBC fashion, side-by-side.

GRAY: Eric, Tom, what about that race? He was with you every stroke, wasn’t he?

DOLAN: Yeah, it was a great race. I’m just happy to win a gold medal. I think you can’t ask for any more than that. I’d like to have gone faster, it was definitely a struggle to get through it, but it’s a great race for our team, 1 and 2. They were planning us to get 1 and 2 and they really relied on us, and we came through.

GRAY: Were you concerned at all going into the race tonight because this morning you had trouble breathing?

DOLAN: Yeah I had a lot of trouble breathing. I had some more tonight, but I know if I could just get in a race my body would work through it and it worked out.

GRAY: Eric, you guys trained together...did you prey upon his weakness tonight? Did you know you could stick with him?

ERIC: I was just going out to the stretch, going as fast as I could tonight, eight laps, all I had in me and I tried to give it all I had, and let the results take care of itself.

GRAY: This is your second straight silver — you won a silver in Barcelona. Going up against the best in the world, is it disappointing or are you satisfied?

ERIC: Right now you know it’s hard to feel the emotions...I’m happy to get another medal. Second Olympics, got two silver medals — I’m proud of that.

One of the network’s longest and most excessive melodramatic rivalries involved America’s two best female sprinters. In coverage of the 100m track race, Gail Devers was cast as the "sympathetic hero" while teammate Gwen Torrence was an evil spoiler, the "lightning rod for controversy," according to NBC reporter Tom Hammond. The story developed from a conflict the sprinters had in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics: Devers won the 100m and Torrence publicly questioned the race results. In various short and long packages — one a week before the race, one three days before, and two on the day of the race — and in sideline commentary, Devers was described as a saint, a competitive athlete with "no innate sprinter’s nastiness" who didn’t "have anything against anyone." Meanwhile, Torrence "ran with an attitude" and understood this race as "a battle." For visual aids, NBC regularly portrayed Devers as relaxed, communal and smiling, while edited shots of Torrence, usually taken immediately after a race, showed her grimacing, troubled and alone.