(PresidentialInsider.com)- Team USA returns home from Tokyo having won the most overall medals at the Summer Olympic games – 41 silver, 39 gold, and 33 bronze – making it the second most successful Olympics for Team USA since the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The US team edged ahead of China in total gold medals 39 to 38. Overall, the US netted more total medals than China by 25.
Unfortunately for Team USA, their overall success in Tokyo was marred by the intrusion of “woke” politics among US athletes. So distasteful was the “activist athlete” vibe, most Americans tuned out.
Ratings for the Tokyo Olympic games plummeted to historic lows.
NBC Universal, which aired the games, faced record-low ratings throughout. In the end NBC was forced to give the advertisers who paid premium-pricing to run commercials during the Olympic Games extra airtime to make up for the loss.
Viewership for the Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony was only a fraction of the audience that tuned in for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, and it never got better. Viewership remained low throughout the seventeen days of competition.
Sunday’s NBC primetime audience was down 51 percent from the Rio Games. Even the first week of competition, which is usually the most-watched, was down nearly 60 percent.
Now NBC is scrambling to schedule “make goods” or extra commercial time for understandably frustrated advertisers who bought big on what typically is a massively-viewed sporting event and got shafted.
A late July poll from Monmouth University was the red flag that this year’s Olympics would be a ratings dud. A stunning 41 percent of respondents said they had no interest in watching the Tokyo Games at all. Only sixteen percent said they had a lot of interest. Thirty-six percent believed it was a bad idea to hold the Games in the middle of a pandemic.
Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth’s polling, pointed to a number of reasons for viewer disinterest – citing the time delay and the lack of a live audience at the games themselves. But Murray also adds that one primary motivator for tuning out, especially among Republicans, was the injection of Far-Left, Anti-American “woke activism” by some Team USA athletes.
