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It's the 'Spring Olympics' in upside-down world
Thursday, September 14, 2000 By Steve Levin and Bill Schackner, Post-Gazette Staff Writers
This much is known: The games of the XXVII Olympiad officially begin tomorrow in Sydney, Australia. Or later today, since that part of the world is 15 hours ahead of Pittsburgh time.
To be perfectly honest, the games actually began Wednesday with some preliminary soccer games, but let's not confuse the situation.
We do know this, however: It's almost springtime in Sydney. Located in the Southern Hemisphere -- the equator divides the earth into halves -- its seasons are opposite from ours.
The expected average temperature in Sydney late this week is 71 degrees. This is critical information because Americans have questions about the Olympic athletes running around in thin shorts and tank tops when Katie Couric of the NBC Today show was bundled up in gloves and a coat for Tuesday's broadcast from Sydney.
Of course, barring a tape delay, her 7 a.m. appearance here would really mean it would be midnight there, one of the coldest times of the day. The expected average low in Sydney late this week is 51 degrees.
But, these are the "Summer Olympics." And since the "Winter Olympics" are always held in the winter, why wouldn't summer ones be held in summer? It's actually a misnomer; in the 25 Olympiads held since 1896, fewer than half -- 12 -- have been held during the summer.
The Sydney Games aren't even the latest dates on the calendar; the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, southwest of Sydney, began Nov. 22 and ran through Dec. 8. (Because of strict Australian equine quarantine laws, all the equestrian events had to be held in Stockholm, Sweden, in June.)
The 1964 and 1968 Olympics in Tokyo and Mexico City, respectively, both began in October. And the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea, started Sept. 17.
Grumbling about the Olympic calendar is a practice as old as the Games themselves. The original Olympics were celebrated as a religious festival honoring Zeus and ran from 776 B.C. until A.D. 393 when they were banned by the Roman emperor Theodosius I.
When they resumed in 1896 in Athens, Greece, a decision to schedule them in April didn't sit well with U.S. officials, who said it interfered with athletes' collegiate schedules, said Mark Dyreson, a Penn State University author and historian of modern American sports. Organizers of that year's Games chose the spring to avoid Athens' summertime heat and the crowded summer travel period, he said.
In more recent years, decisions about when to hold the Games are being influenced by television networks, particularly those in North America and Europe.
"They're ponying up big money," Dyreson said. "North America and Europe are the biggest consumers of televised sports and they have the most disposable income."
Television executives prefer that the Games be scheduled in a way that enables them to use the relatively high ratings to promote their fall lineup of prime time shows, said Dyreson, author of the 1998 book "Making the American Team: Sport, Culture and the Olympic Experience."
"It gives them sort of a captive audience," he said.
Ideally, they want the Games to run across three separate weekends to enhance viewership. But they do not want to risk losing their audience by allowing the Games to drag on too long, he said.
Fortunately, TV wasn't invented for the 1900, 1904 and 1908 Games in Paris, St. Louis and London. Those Games, tied to World's Fairs and expositions and occurring before the International Olympic Committee took control, lasted between 19 weeks and 24 weeks.
John Findling, a professor of history at the Indiana University campus in New Albany, Ind., said it wasn't until the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, when European athletes pooled their resources to cut travel costs to the United States, that the Games first became packaged in two-week affairs spanning three weekends.
One other thing. While there is a force called the Coriolis effect caused by the earth's rotation that deflects a moving body to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, it only affects large bodies of air or water such as hurricanes. It does not affect the direction of water in toilet bowls, regardless of whether they're located in northern or southern hemispheric bathrooms. That is preset at the factory.
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