Simone Biles Walking Away is NBC’s Nightmare
They banked on her being there and now she won’t be.
The face of the Tokyo Olympics was stressed out. Too stressed out. She wasn’t hurt. She was “dealing with a few things.” So now she’s done.
“No injury thankfully, and that’s why I took a step back because I didn’t want to do something silly out there and get injured,” Biles said.
Very confusing. More so it’s hard to explain to the NBC viewers who were sold on Simone Biles presence for the next 12 plus days. Every telecast was infused with the gymnastics icon. Every commercial break. Every montage. Every tease.
NBC doesn’t have a marketing backup plan for someone who was clearly dealing with a ton of anxiety.
I won’t go down the rabbit hole of “she quit on her teammates.” Maybe she did in the old traditional way of not finding a way to compete. Yet in the 18 months since COVID began, we all can appreciate the issues that come with mental health struggles.
This sounds like a woman dealing with a lot.
“Today has been really stressful, we had a workout this morning; it went OK but during that five-and-a-half hour wait I was shaking — I could barely nap,” Biles, 24, told the media in Toyko. “I had never felt like that going into a competition before. I tried to go out here and have fun; the warmup in the back went a little bit better but once I came out here I was like, ‘no, mentals [sic] not here so I just need to let the girls do it and focus on myself.’”
Those ‘girls’ ended up with the Silver Medal.
Good for Biles. Bad for NBC. The timing is just horrendous. The games are proving to be a mess. The weather has been awful. Way too humid for the best athletes in the world, but the trade off is all about the almighty dollar. NBC as always banks on the late July / early August TV window before the NFL and college football put a stranglehold on sports viewership.
Yet, 17 million watched the opening ceremonies. A remarkable drop by 36% from the 2016 Rio games five years ago. It’s the smallest audience since the 1988 Seoul Games. Why? The anticipation isn’t there. No fans in the building and you can sense the lack of buzz as a result. The world of streaming back in 2016 wasn’t close to what we see now. Now that it’s the dominant platform, viewers can only complain so much about the fact that they can’t find what they want to watch. What platform? What channel?
They don’t know. So they move on.
On top of all of that, the reliable effort from Team USA Basketball failed in its opening game, collapsing late in a loss to France, losing in Olympic comeptetion for the first time in 17 years. That day NBC’s numbers were 44% lower compared to the first Sunday back in 2016. Folks across America woke up to two things on Sunday: The loathsome screen report on their iPhone, and news that Team USA lost. Clearly no one wants to settle in for a result that they already knew about.
The 14-hour time difference is hurting. However, what NBC will really feel is the absence of the biggest star of the games. No one to market and no one to step up in her absence.
The Casablanca line “We’ll always have Paris.” might be iconic, but NBC needs a new strategy from scratch or the 2024 Olympics in Paris won’t be their baby.
