CBC Olympic broadcasts

The Olympics on CBC is a sports telecast that aired on CBC Sports. The last airing of the telecast was for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, but will return for the 2014 and 2016 Olympics.

History

The first telecast of the Olympics on Canadian television was CBC's broadcast of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. CBC aired black-and-white highlights of the previous day's events and aired the Canada vs. Soviet Union hockey game live by leasing a standby circuit from CBS and making CBC's 1st winter Olympics in the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squad Valley, USA. Critics compared CBC's overall Olympic coverage unfavourably to that of ABC, which broadcast same-day colour highlights throughout the Games. For the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy, CBC produced a total of 17 hours of radio and TV coverage for the 1960 Summer Olympics. CBC Television broadcast same-day highlights each night. The half-hour package featured was provided by CBS Sports, which had the broadcast rights in the United States. CBS sportscasters Bud Palmer, Gil Stratton, and Bob Richards provided commentary. CBS sent videotapes of each day's events by jet to Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International Airport) in New York City where a mobile transmission unit there beamed the pictures to the CBC and CBS networks. On radio Ward Cornell and Thom Benson gave listeners 15-minute reports every evening except Sunday on the CBC's Trans-Canada Network and Doug Smith gave half-hour evening wrap-ups on CBC's Dominion Network.

CBC lost their Winter Olympic broadcasting rights to CTV following the 1960 Olympics, but retained their rights to the Summer Olympics. The CBC Television broadcasters for the 1964 Summer games were Ted Reynolds, Dave Cruikshank, Bob McDevitt, Steve Douglas, and Lloyd Robertson. Ward Cornell, Al Hamel, Bob Moir, Don Goodwin, and Bill Good were the broadcasters for CBC Radio. For the Tokyo Olympics, CBC Television used the same satellite as NBC, the recently launched Syncom 3, to transmit late-night highlight packages of events from that day.

The CBC provided its first colour pictures of Olympic competition during the 1968 Summer Olympics from Mexico City. CBC Radio broadcast five-minute hourly updates and occasional live reports. CBC Olympic host Lloyd Robertson was praised by Globe and Mail writer Leslie Millin for his cool demeanour in the face of many technical glitches including "strange breaks, noises, lapses and unscheduled fade-outs." Millin applauded Robertson, normally a newscaster, for "working with the grace and agility of a man hired to stamp grapes in a Sicilian winery."

The CBC almost canceled their plans for coverage of the 1980 Summer Olympics after Canada took part in the boycott, but decided not to and was represented by nine accreditation cards.

Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, a joint venture between CTVglobemedia (now Bell Media) and Rogers Media, acquired the rights to broadcast the Vancouver-hosted 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. The move was met with displeasure from Americans close to the border, because they cannot access CTV like they can the CBC and prefer Canada's Olympics coverage over that of U.S. broadcaster NBC.

On August 1, 2012, the CBC announced that it had acquired the Canadian broadcast rights to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, returning the Games to the broadcaster for the first time since 2008. While financial details were not announced, the CBC did state that it was a "financially and fiscally responsible bid", which would carry on the organization's 60 year history of Olympic broadcasting. The CBC will sub-license coverage to other broadcasters: on February 7, 2013, TSN and Sportsnet (who also aired coverage through the CTV/Rogers consortium for 2010 and 2012) announced that they had reached a deal to become CBC's cable partners for the 2014 games. Sportsnet will air 200 hours of coverage. In May 2013, CBC reached a similar deal with TVA Sports for French-language coverage.

Hours of coverage

Year	Host	Hours of Coverage
1956 Summer	Melbourne, Australia
1960 Winter	Squaw Valley, USA
1960 Summer	Rome, Italy	17
1964 Summer	Tokyo, Japan
1968 Summer	Mexico City, Mexico	30
1972 Summer	Munich, West Germany
1976 Summer	Montreal, Canada
1980 Summer	Moscow, USSR
1984 Winter	Sarajevo, Yugoslavia
1984 Summer	Los Angeles, USA
1988 Winter	Calgary, Alberta, Canada
1988 Summer	Seoul, South Korea
1992 Winter	Albertville, France
1996 Summer	Atlanta, USA	242
1998 Winter	Nagano, Japan	359
2000 Summer	Sydney, Australia	275
2002 Winter	Salt Lake City, USA	262
2004 Summer	Athens, Greece	282
2006 Winter	Turin, Italy	260
2008 Summer	Beijing, China	281
2014 Winter	Sochi, Russia
2016 Summer	Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Commentators

Main article: Olympics on CBC commentators

See also

• CBC Sports