Press Training for Vancouver-Bound U.S.Olympians

Around 250 members of the press attended the Media Summit. (ATR/Panasonic: Lumix)With five months to go before the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, U.S. athletes are exercising their vocal cords, practicing their smiles and polishing their stories.

About 90 athletes attended the 13th U.S. Olympic Media Summit in Chicago, rotating from press conferences with print media, to photo shoots with national publications to sessions with NBC, the U.S. broadcaster.

With the U.S. newspaper industry hit hard by the economic downturn, attendance was down from the 315 media members who attended the 2005 summit in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Bob Condron, director of media services for the USOC, told Around the Rings that about 290 media signed up, with probably around 250 attending. In a sign of how times have changed in the news business, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did not send a representative for the first time in at least 16 years. However, Yahoo! had a small army of reporters gathering information for its web site.

The Beijing summit in 2008 was also held at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago and attracted 600 media and 120 athletes.

"Economic times for journalists are tough," Condron said. "We're getting that from a lot of different angles."

The USOC also handles credentials for U.S. journalists. "We've probably gotten more back than at any time in history," he said.

But Condron said the USOC could use more credentials for Web sites like Yahoo and Espn.com, specialty publications, and "the big guys" like USA Today and the New York Times.

Tom Kelly, vice president, communications, for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, said that interest is just as high, if not higher, than four years ago.

He's also seen an evolution in the way journalists are covering the Summit.

"I do notice that there are a lot more people with video cameras and there are a lot more people doing things in their coverage that you wouldn't have seen a few years ago," he said.

"The journalists here are super interested, they're knowledgeable about the stories. As I look around, there are crowds around all the athletes here. It doesn't matter whether it's a world championships medalist or somebody they don't really know."

Some journalists posted on Facebook or Twitter as they were listening to press conferences or attending the round-table sessions.

"The support from everyone here, we love and appreciate," three-time Olympic hockey medalist Angela Ruggiero, who was attending her fourth media summit, told ATR.

She said there are lot more social media outlets now, "so there's more ways for us to reach out. The fact that it's growing speaks volumes for the fact that there's more interest in our sport and more people will follow us if it's put out there." Attending her fourth Media Summit, Angela Ruggiero said the athletes “love and appreciate” the support of the media.

Athletes Embracing Opportunity

Kelly also said the athletes "seem to be doing a much better job of telling their stories. They're more aware of how to present themselves."

At photo sessions, athletes brought rolling duffel bags so they could change into different clothes for the different photo shoots to show the lifestyle side of them.

Kelly said cross country skier Kikkan Randall had half a dozen different tops and hats in different colors, "all sorts of things that she can wear to make herself cool, vibrant, exciting and create a look that she wants. All of the athletes are really putting a lot more into that than they did a few years ago. They're understanding more how to create an image for themselves and how important that is."

Value of the Summit

Journalists get a chance to meet the athletes in the formal press conferences, where they have to identify themselves and ask a question into a microphone, and informal groups.

Some journalists double- or triple-team athletes by leaving tape recorders atop a speaker to listen to later while they run across the room to take notes at a different station.

"You fill your notebooks in hopes of something happening from the athlete you just interviewed for an hour," Condron said.

For the athletes, this decreases the wear-and-tear of doing other media while they are training or competing.

"There's an operational element where you knock off a lot of interviews that you wouldn't have to do as one-offs later on," Kelly said. "You set yourself up over the next five months to have a lot of those stories materialize. When you get to Vancouver, you have media who know you already, that have already done a story about you, so if you should be fortunate enough to have that athletic success, the media and the public know a little bit about you and your image isn't just being created in Vancouver. It has been created in what you've done in the six to 12 months leading up to the Games."

Kelly believes that even if newspapers have less space to run stories about Olympic athletes in the run-up to Vancouver, "there's more than enough space out there in the media world for all this material to be covered, probably far more than there ever has been before.

"I look at it that there's a lot more going on here than there was four years ago."

U.S. Team Hopes

The United States will send approximately 220 athletes to Vancouver. Team processing will be done in Vancouver at the airport instead of at another site, which has been the typical procedure for the U.S. prior to past Games. U.S. Chef de Mission for the 2010 Olympics, Mike Plant, declined to say how many medals Team USA would win in Vancouver, other than they would win “a lot”. (ATR/Panasonic: Lumix)

Mike Plant, a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team in speedskating and the first winter Olympian to lead a U.S. delegation as chef de mission, said Canada will "host a great Games."

"We have a lot of similarities with our friends to the North," he told the U.S. Olympic Assembly. "Canada is going to be certainly one of the top countries going in. They were very close to us in Torino. They have aspirations to win that medal race, and we have to do everything we can to help our athletes prevent that. The Norwegians and Russians are certainly ramping up their activities, and Germany is always going to be tough."

The U.S. won 25 medals at the last Winter Games at Turin -- nine gold, nine silver and seven bronze - to place second behind Germany, which won 11 gold, 12 silver and six bronze.

But Plant wouldn't make a medal prediction except to say, "a lot."

The U.S. won 25 medals in various World Championships last season, which Plant said could be used as an indicator.

"That gives you a lot of hope," he said. "And we have a lot of people close in the pipeline."

Driver Steve Holcomb won the first World Championships gold medal for the U.S. in four-man bobsled in 50 years. Slider Erin Hamlin broke Germany's 99-race winning streak, dating back to 1997, at the world luge championships. The U.S. women's ice hockey team beat Canada twice in the test event in Vancouver recently.

In June, the USOC board of directors approved an additional $16.5 million in funding for winter sports, making the total more than $58 million for this quadrennium.

Olympic Historian Joins USOC Press Team

Olympic historian Bill Mallon will be part of the USOC press team in Vancouver.

Mallon, 57, a renaissance man of sorts, played on the PGA Tour, then went back to medical school to become an orthopedist, specializing in shoulder reconstruction. Mallon is now editor of a medical journal for that specialty.

Along the way he has become a well-regarded member of the fraternity of Olympic historians, writing books on the Games of long ago. His statistical compilations have been used by the IOC and he’s a recipient of the Olympic Order.

New USOC Press Site

Kevin Neuendorf, manager of media services for the USOC announced Friday that the USOC press web site, http://usocpressbox.org/, is completely overhauled.

The “one-of-a-kind virtual pressroom”, as Neuendorf called it, features among other changes direct social media feeds from athletes, a streamlined way of delivering news, and abilities to filter news and other content to suit specific needs.

Developed using the latest versions of Microsoft’s Silverlight and SharePoint software, the site is still a work in progress with more re-tooling and new features to be unveiled before the Vancouver Olympics.

“The new generation of Pressbox is one element of the USOC’s digital media strategy designed to motivate Olympic fans to engage in the Olympic Movement online,” said Trevor Miller, USOC Managing Director of Information Technology.

“Using Microsoft technology, this re-designed site will showcase our commitment to innovation and capture the power of new media technologies and audiences to enable journalists to bring the best stories of Team USA to Americans.”

International Visitors at USOC Meetings Saso Popovski, secretary general of the NOC of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (second from right) presented plaques of appreciation to (left to right) Bob Ctvrtlik, USOC vice president for international relations; Stephanie Streeter, USOC Acting CEO and Robert Fasulo, USOC chief of international relations. (ATR/Panasonic: Lumix)

International visitors this week to the USOC meetings in Chicago included Saso Popovski, secretary general of the Olympic Committee of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. He is participating in a USOC program that helps smaller National Olympic Committees.

Taking part in another NOC exchange was Lubomir Soucek, Media and PR Executive Officer for the Slovak Olympic Committee. Soucek worked with the USOC media office in Colorado Springs during the past month in a press officer program.

Tom Degun, a reporter for London-based Web site Inside the Games, maybe traveled the furthest to Chicago among the reporters at the USOC Media Summit. He was one of a handful of non-U.S. media covering the event.

Written by Karen Rosen and Ed Hula III.

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