Because of NBC’s lagging television ratings through the first four nights of the Olympics, viewers will probably get to see more commercials. NBC is averaging a 14.3 national rating with a 25 share. It’s well below the final number produced by any Summer Games and 11 per cent short of what the network promised advertisers.
Official Olympic websites are getting a large number of visitors worldwide. Japanese sites lead in the Nielsen/NetRatings “Web Olympics Index” in the Asia Pacific region and the Australian site, olymics.com.au is in fourth position with 40,000 unique visitors on September 16. Another Nielsen/NetRatings report found that olympics.com pulled in 222,000 unique visitors between September 15 and 16 and there were more than 683 million hits on September 18, higher than the total for the entire 16 days of competition at the Nagano Winter Games.
The corruption trial of the Salt Lake Olympic bid executives Dave Johnson and Tom Welch has been set for June 1, 2001, eight months before the start of the 2002 Winter Games. But defence lawyers argue that they need at least a year to prepare. And Tom Welch’s lawyer hinted that the defendants may have to cut back on lawyers or expenses if they can’t settle a dispute with Salt Lake’s organizing committee over payment of attorney fees, which are more than $700,000. Magistrate Ronald Boyce set the next status conference in the case for October 13. The two executives plan an expensive defence, traveling around the world to interview former IOC members they are accused of trying to bribe during the 2002 bid.
And finally, politicians in Greece were outraged to hear that some members of the Athens 2004 organizing were earning 10 million drachmas ($256,800) a month, but the Athens 2004 Olympics committee organizers (ATHOC) denied they were paid exhorbitant salaries. ATHOC didn’t disclose any figures but issued a statement saying that the government hadn’t decided the renumeration for board members and that their staff was being paid below market salaries.
