Olympic Preview: The Living Room Games, Up Close and Personal

Shortly before Thanksgiving the wagon train loaded up and started rolling. Twenty 60-ft. trailers spent nearly a week lumbering more than 2,800 miles, from the streets of Manhattan to a cavernous warehouse next to the Saddledome near downtown Calgary. Their cargo: 640 tons of gear, including a mobile studio and two fully equipped video control rooms, to be set up for ABC-TV's coverage of the Winter Olympics. A scant five days after the Games end, the whole traveling broadcast center will be torn down and shipped out to make way for an auto show. But over the next 2 1/2 weeks, the center will hum with life as it brings American viewers what they have come to expect from the Olympics: a blockbuster TV show.

That show, ABC confidently believes, will be an improvement over the '84 Games in Sarajevo, which had ratings 23% lower than Lake Placid's four years before. In Yugoslavia, the six-hours-earlier time differential meant that U.S. viewers saw most of the action on tape -- after the results were already known. Safely back in the Mountain standard zone, much of this year's competition will be broadcast live, with many of the glamorous events -- including figure skating and hockey -- in prime time. Even speed skating, traditionally held outdoors during the day, has been moved inside (and thus into the evening) for the first time. Another change that should boost TV appeal: the medal round of the hockey competition has been expanded from four teams to six, giving the U.S. squad (which was quickly knocked out in 1984) a better chance for a lengthy prime-time run. "If we get a win by the hockey team, a great downhill and a gold medal in speed skating," says Coordinating Producer Geoffrey Mason, "we'll be off to a great start."

ABC, broadcasting its tenth Olympics out of the past 13, has scheduled 94 1/ 4 hours of coverage, up from 63 at Sarajevo, where the Games were three days shorter. For the task, the network is assembling a De Millean army of 1,200 people, readying 62 cameras and 106 videotape machines and preparing 82 "Up Close and Personal" profiles. ABC News and Sports President Roone Arledge, who virtually invented Olympics coverage, will take his quadrennial turn in the Winter control room. Jim McKay, anchoring his tenth Olympics for ABC, will again head the on-air brigade, joined by such network stalwarts as Frank Gifford, Al Michaels and Keith Jackson. To give it all that down-home feeling, the studio will be gussied up with a real (well, gas fed) fieldstone fireplace, real wood posts and bookcases with real books -- the whole thing a dazzling recreation of what Manhattan apartment dwellers think a Western lodge looks like.