3 Stories Behind Iconic Olympic Sounds

00:00:19 Speaker 1: A big reason that sports are so popular is because they're story based. There's always a winner and loser, a Cinderella and a goliath, a higher funded team and a team on the brink of financial collapse, a comeback story or a fall from grace. Every game, season, series, and play itself is a story. In the case of the four major sports leagues in the United States by revenue, So no arguments about the MLS please the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. Their stories, heroes and villains aren't all the same. Just like your religion, how you eat your pizza, and what you call the carbonated beverage I call soda. They depend on when and where you grew up, how you are raised, who raised you, and a lot of other factors too. All right, think about it this way. If you ask someone in Cleveland about Lebron James, his story is the prodigal son who left, returned, and overcame a three to one final deficit against the goliath Golden State Warriors to take the Cavaliers to the Promised Land, the city's first professional championship in over fifty years. If you ask that same question to someone in Boston, you'd hear a lot different of a story, one in which Lebron is probably the villain. Tom Brady's story in Boston, on the other hand, would be a lot different than history in Buffalo. And then there's the whole aspect of which teams your family supports, which teams your favorite player growing up played for. You get the idea. Now, most of the teams in these leagues play in the United States and Canada, I guess, and that splits a lot of Americans up. But the pinnacle of sports stories, of underdogs, miracles and unified support is the Olympics. I don't know about you, but while I personally am not a Dallas sports fan, I will get more than hyped up for a man or woman popping off in the steeple chase or saucing up the slalom races if they're from Dallas. And that's because star athletes and the Olympics rise above the territorial rivalries, school yard squabbles and mixed debates that Ray John and those North America and leagues. That's not to say there aren't haters. There will always be haters, but just to say that the Olympics really do bring together most of the country, heightening the drama stakes and storylines of the athletes, teams, and competition itself. Since the Summer Olympics are on in Paris right now, in case you didn't know, today's episode will be slightly different than usual. I'm going to cover three separate stories on sounds from the Olympics, and you know, because of the three medals. Yeah, pretty deep stuff, I know. And just so you know, I'm Will Gatchel, and you are listening to sports Dot mp three, the podcast that dives into the true stories behind iconic sounds from sports. Speaking of diving, let's dive right into the first story, which is about how the splashes of divers, wushes of arrows if that's a thing, and clashes of fencers you'll hear during these Olympic games are mostly pre recorded and audio engineered for your televisions and not what live audiences would actually hear at all. But that's just a silver, sorry sliver of what's to come, and I won't meddle around any longer, so let's get right into it. The nineteen sixty four Summer Olympics in Tokyo were the first to be broadcast internationally, a satellite sent over fourteen hours of black and white video footage to twenty three countries across the world, not necessarily YouTube TV, but pretty damn good. The opening ceremony featured the use of a few microphones to amplify and modify more than nine hundred performing musicians and singers, and there were also pre recorded sound effects added to radio and TV broadcasts, setting the stage for a few decades later when the sounds of the sports themselves would be the pre recorded effects added in digitally. Some sixty years later, thousands of microphones cover the Olympic venues, capturing all the noises one could imagine and more. Still, yet, most of the sounds you hear on your TVs are pre recorded and added in after hours of painstaking editing, mixing, and mastering to make the perfect sounds possible for the audiences that aren't watching the events in person. What sparked this tectonic shift in Olympic sound design, Well, it's not a way what, but rather a man named Dennis Baxter. Dennis Baxter first started his career by recording music and owning a studio, but in the early eighties he took a job as the sound supervisor for TV Sports at an up and coming sports broadcasting company founded just a few years prior ESPN. He honed his sports audio engineering skills there, which blended with his background in studio and music production, gave him a fairly unique skill set and perspective. Baxter later took on a role as the first and only full time sound designer for the Olympic Games, starting in nineteen ninety two. Over the next twenty years and nine Olympic Games, Baxter would sonically alter the sounds of the sports forever, and he did it by bringing a recording starre udio style approach to the games. Previous Olympic Games tended to only capture the commentary or occasionally the applause and booze of fans. That was basically all you could hear. There weren't any sounds of the sport itself, and that was because they were drowned out by the environment. The yelling, crowd, buzzing of birds, and just anything was making sounds that would interfere with the mics. To solve this, Baxer used recording techniques and lots and lots of mics to capture specific sounds in each event. For example, he would place microphones by the crowd, by an archer's bow, by the area the raw would fly past and at the target itself. Another of Baxter's pioneering techniques was one that dabbles into the idea of what's fake and what's real. Some events like rowing were captured by helico, making it impossible to capture other sounds. You see. Apparently, the sound of oars splashing in the water with a helicopter overhead sounds a lot like the sound of a helicopter spitting overhead. Baxter captured pre recorded sounds of the rowing teams during their practice sessions before then performing a bunch of audio wizardry and adding them into the live broadcasts. So while the audience is watching the actual events in person might not hear the sound of an arrow flying through the air or a ball bouncing on the court if the crowd is yelling, those watching on screens will hear those sounds. Except my dad's mom. Sorry, that was probably too far, making for a more entertaining action heavy view. And just as a side note, that's just because she always forget to connect the bluetooth hearing aids. Whether the sounds themselves are truly real or fake, they definitely enhance the viewing experience, and for what it's worth, that was what Baxter was going for, saucing up those sports sound effects. It's pretty hard to talk about sounds in the Olympics and not mention Al Michael's legendary do you Believe In Miracles play call that forever memorialized the US ice hockey team's shocking upset victory over the USSR in the nineteen eighty Winter Olympic semi finals at Lake Placid, New York. Between the fact it's considered one of the greatest upsets in sports history, at least American history, Al Michael's extremely successful career since then, and the famous movie called Miracle that features Michael's re enacting the call, it's also hard to say anything new about it. Plus I'm scared of getting sued if I say on ice one more time, So instead, let's talk about the other call that was made live at the same game by a fellow ABC colleague, Kurt Chaplin, best known for his role as the in court reporter on The People's Court. Yes this is real, And lastly, I'm team Judge Judy. All the way. ABC's coverage for the game involved three reporters, al Michaels who was on TV, Don Chevrier, who was on radio, and Kurt Chaplin, who was supposed to be roaming the area to get reactions and cover the scene. Chaplain, however, felt the game was too big to not watch, and instead he found a perfect spot to view all the on ice action within thirty feet of where al Michaels was sitting. He pulled out a cassette tape hit play and proceeded to call the play by play the only hockey game he had ever called in his entire life, and what a game it was. My honey comes over flee the second by play the play made little talk. Chaplain recorded three separate sixty minute cassettes that day and took them home, where they'd sit for years until one day he decided to record them onto a CD, which sparked another idea, why not synchronize the audio with the actual TV footage? That led to more why nots, and those why nots eventually resulted in Chaplin posting the sinct footage and commentary on YouTube to share with the world, but only a ten minute version. The full hour long version, which does exist, is reserved for a select few, like Jim Craig, the US team starting goalie all those years ago, who wrote a letter to Chaplain saying the video made him break down in tears in a good way, though like happy tears. Obviously, there's no proof that Craig's letter was just a ployed to get Chaplain to send him that longer version. But enough of that, let's move on to the final story about a man who accidentally won gold. Australian speed skater Steven Bradbury won a gold medal, Australia's first ever in the Winter Olympics at the Salt Lake City Games in two thousand and two, and in fact, not only was it Australia's first ever Winter Olympic gold, but the entire Southern hemispheres, and if you search it up, by most popular accounts, his win was completely accidental, with the cherry on top being who he beat to win that medal. You might be hard pressed to remember many speed skaters, but how about American star Apollo Ono. Well, yeah, Ono, along with three other skaters, were all in a close pack heading into the last turn on the last lap of the men's one thousand meters short track speed skating finals with Bradbury a huge distance behind, but right at the last corner, one skater tries to overtake Ono on the out and it results in all four wiping out, allowing Bradbury to easily skate past the group and win gold. The American crowd booed, and many coaches, athletes, and fans alike protested that there should have been a replay, with one American fan reportedly telling Bradbury to wipe that grin off your face, buddy, as he headed to the metal ceremony. Regardless of the appeals in protests, Bradbury's win stood, turning him into a national hero in Australia, and I have to confess his achievement wasn't fully accidental. Bradbury did get lucky after advancing to the semi finals due to a disqualification to Canada's defending world champion. However, he and his coach devised a plan to stay passive and further behind the packs in the semis and finals, knowing how aggressive and quick the remaining competitors were. The devil's advocate might argue, that's exactly what you would say if you were getting dusted or I guess iced, I don't know the right terminology for this, and then one after everyone wiped out. What's not arguable, however, is that he won gold. Luck did play a big factor and he was still an amazing athlete compared to the rest of us mortals. Here's Australian Olympic Committee President Ian Chesterman speaking about a recent award that Bradbury won nearly twenty years after the event. The fact that Stephen acted quickly, calmly and with such courage is so impressive. He richly deserves this recognition. Now you might be thinking that's a bit odd to talk about courage, right, Well, that's because I purposely left out the rest of what he said and the context that the award was a bravery award presented to Bradbury by the Queensland and Eight Governor for saving four teenage girls from potentially drowning in rough waters. Yeah, that's right. I had to point out that there's an eerie similarity between Bradbury finding himself in a freak scenario with four people struggling to stay up two different times, and in both cases twenty years apart, remaining calm acting quickly and ending with the best possible outcome. I mean, talk about setting a gold standard. There are thousands of other stories from the Olympics. I mean I had to cut a few just to shorten this episode, and the ongoing Paris competition will undoubtedly spawn thousands more. My personal favorites are not the stories of proteges dominating the competition, but rather the stories of the people who never give up, who have a late career switch and take up a sport of failing and returning again to the trials years later, risking the chance of failure again and again, just for one chance to make it. And with that, I'll end on a quote from Stephen Bradberry, and I'll spare you my attempt at an Australian accent. Might I'll accept this gold medal, but not for the ninety seconds of the race. I'm going to take it for the fourteen years of hard work. Now, that is a good quote. Thank you all so much for listening to the special episode. I want to give a special shout out to Greg Duncan, who's competing in the Paris Olympics for the United States after not qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics, a setback that would be the final chapter on most divers Olympic careers. You know, I did go to high school with him, not to flex, but even back then, he knew what he wanted to achieve and regardless of how he performs Friday at five am Eastern, for those who are interested, there's nothing cooler than seeing someone accomplish their dreams. You can of course follow now on your favorite podcast platform. And I do have to add that I was better than him at soccer, so you know, all right, have a good one. Then thanks again for listening, and please follow if you're not