“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” Al Michaels uttered those words in the closing seconds of the United States hockey team’s stunning 4-3 victory over the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympic semifinals in Lake Placid, N.Y. It was an indelible moment for American sport, one Sports Illustrated tapped as the greatest of the twentieth century. It also did not air on live television in the host nation (Healy, 2020).
Wait, what? An iconic game that became the basis for a Disney movie and is still talked about forty years later and they didn’t carry it live? Keep in mind that digital capabilities weren’t in place in 1980 so ABC, the rightsholder for the Olympics at the time, could get away with it. Today, with smartphone updates and social media posts, preventing spoilers is next to impossible.
We have come a long way from the days when what was then the Big Three of ABC, CBS, and NBC dominated the sports broadcasting landscape. Even the advent of ESPN plus MLB and NBA action on superstations like TBS and WGN seem like a relic of days long gone. Now we have leagues with networks of their own to promote the games they oversee (Rein, Kotler, & Shields, 2007). The major broadcast networks themselves have sports-specific channels on cable and satellite: CBS Sports Network, NBC Sports Network, FS1 for Fox, while ABC is aligned with ESPN. The Internet is a huge part of the sports ecosystem with fan-driven websites like Barstool and Bleacher Report (B. Siguenza, personal communication, December 24, 2017). Finally, technology has allowed us to stream live sports to laptops and smartphones.
As I wrote in a 2017 personal communication, it’s hard to imagine sports media evolving any more than it already has, though the possibility always exists. Maybe someday we’ll be able to see holographic action a la Star Wars. But for right now, I’m quite content with watching games via one of the many apps on my phone or listening to SiriusXM when I can’t be in front of a TV.
References
Healy, J. (2020, February 21). The 1980 ‘Miracle on Ice’ U.S. team: 5 interesting facts. Retrieved from https://www.radio.com/sports/nhl/gallery/the-1980-miracle-on-ice-u-s-team-5-interesting-facts
Rein, I., Kotler, P., & Shields, B. (2007, January-February). The future of sports media. The Futurist, 40-43.