For X Games generation, Olympic yawn

Sitting atop the warped concrete landscape of Alameda Point Skate Park, Walter Huth narrows his eyes beneath his dirty mesh baseball cap, searching for anything at all good to say about the grandest event in world sport. The Olympics are drawing near, he knows, but he can't bring himself to care. The diving is OK, he grudgingly admits, but "watching people run is kind of boring."

Then, his dark eyebrows arch up in a "Eureka!" moment. "The winter Games are tight," he grins, a mouthful of braces. "I like the snowboarding."

Two years ago in Salt Lake, the winter Olympics embraced a largely ambivalent generation of teens and 20-somethings through the expanding imprint of "stunt sports" - events that mix the grace of athletic achievement with the attitude of an iPod. Yet at the summer Olympics, beginning Friday in Athens, the X Games ethic is completely absent.

NBC, which holds the US broadcasting rights to the Games through 2012, says it doesn't need stunt sports, since everyone can already find something they like in the summer Games. The International Olympic Committee says it can't accommodate them, with the 17-day smorgasbord already packed with 301 medal events from pentathlon to ping-pong.

But the success of snowboarding in Salt Lake was overwhelming, and if NBC's 1,210 hours of coverage in Athens fail to make inroads into that most desirable of demographics - viewers 18 to 34 years old - X sports could yet emerge onto the Olympic stage.

"There's a delicate balance between chasing fads and supporting tradition," says Paul Swangard of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center in Eugene, Ore. "But the summer Games need to be open to evolving much like the winter Games."

Even at NBC, there is no question that the network has work to do. "Eighteen to 34 [years old] is the soft [spot] of the Olympic audience," says John Miller of the NBC Agency, the network's marketing arm. "That's who we have to go after."

The sense among marketers is that NBC lost many of these viewers at the 2000 Sydney Games, when it incorporated more profiles and features to attract women. The network's solution in Athens is a healthy helping of X Games attitude - even if it lacks the sports to go with it.

Music and humor will play an amplified role on the set, and promotional spots have made beach volleyball mavens Kerri Walsh and Misty May minor deities during the run-up to the Games (although an injury might prevent May from playing). "Beach volleyball has that rock-and-roll flavor. It's the biggest hybrid," says Mr. Miller. "Our tone is decidedly young."

At the moment, however, that seems to be as far as either NBC or the Olympic movement is willing to go. After all, the summer Games - unlike the winter version - are not wrapped in the mists of the obscure. Absent are events descended from the ancient traditions of Nordic reindeer herders. Instead, there is running, and jumping, and swimming, and throwing - and the endless permutation of events arising from them. In other words, stuff any American kid has done.

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