2004 Olympics: Barry Horn

08:32 PM CDT on Wednesday, August 25, 2004

What do you do when you bill yourself as "the worldwide leader in sports" but you are virtually shut out from covering the world's leading sporting event?

"Our job is to be inventive and creative for our viewers," says Norby Williamson, an ESPN senior vice president and managing editor of SportsCenter.

NBC's $793 million contribution to the coffers of the International Olympic Committee for rights to the Athens Olympics comes at a steep price for the other U.S. television networks. Basically, they are shut out.

Here are some of the rules ESPN, ABC, CBS, CNN, et al. must live with:

• They cannot broadcast highlight video until 2 a.m. the next day.

• When the time finally comes when they can broadcast highlights, they can't air more than a total of two minutes.

• They can't have cameras inside venues to interview athletes. No interviews allowed on any Olympic hallowed ground.

Understand this: No video usually means no time on the nightly news in the TV business.

But the Olympics are the Olympics, and ESPN simply can't avoid the Summer Games. Nor does it want to.

SportsCenter and ESPNEWS aggressively get results on the screen. When something newsworthy happens, such as Rulon Gardner's wrestling loss on Wednesday morning, ESPN almost immediately puts the information in a crawl on the bottom of the screen. Minutes later, the news was being read on SportsCenter.

But the closest ESPN could have gotten to showing Gardner's defeat would have been a Ric Flair highlight reel.

Wisely, ESPN didn't go down that road.

"We take pride in our highlight presentation," said Williamson, who has been battling Olympic restrictions since 1992. "Storytelling is a big part of our news culture. When that aspect goes away, there is a big void."

Given its stature, ESPN is not used to scurrying around like some lowly local cable access channel to get video. At events such as the World Series, Super Bowl and Final Four, for example, ESPN always has more manpower at its disposal than the network broadcasting the game.

In Athens, the network has three full-time on-air broadcasters. That's the same number they send to the Little League World Series.

To the network's credit, ESPNers in Athens have combed parking lots to interview men's basketball players and set up interviews in non-Olympic settings. They've covered the U.S. men's basketball woes, Michael Phelps' swimming triumphs and Paul Hamm's nagging gymnastics controversy.

"We can't use the lack of video, the lack of sound and the lack of access as a crutch," Williamson said. "There is a high demand for Olympics news. We've been aggressive. The results have been very gratifying."

But not picture perfect.

E-mail bhorn@dallasnews.com