Track and Field on TV - USATF Indoor 2/26/06 3:30 East. ESPN

[souleman]

Russ, (and I'm sure many of you other old fossils like me) can remember back in the good ol' days when Wide World of Sports used to carry all of the track stuff. I will never forget John Pennel having to start his run on one of the curves of the track because the runway wasn't long enough. And, it was in back and white! ABC used to cover pole vaulting back then like car racing is covered today. They devoted a lot of their coverage on the "contest" between vaulters and the jumps. Ah yes, those were the days! There's only one hope for more coverage, one of us has to buy the networks that cover track and field, (Mecham, you can handle that for us can't you?)or we need to grass roots those networks and ask for more coverage. In broadcasting, one viewer letter represents (if I remember right) 10,000 viewers. Later.....Mike

[Mecham]

There's only one hope for more coverage, one of us has to buy the networks that cover track and field, (Mecham, you can handle that for us can't you?)

I'll see if I can pull some strings

[Gchap7]

I'm a broadcasting major and we actually talked about this a lot during my classes, the decline of television. All people care about these days is bogus reality tv. Events like Track and Field pull almost no ratings and no commercial sponsorship. But add in patriotism and the olympics, and you have coverage of almost every event in full because the media conglomerates can make money off of it.

It's sad that the best sport - track and field, and more notebly the 3rd most technical event of all time - the pole vault- , can't be shown regularly

It was a jump from millrose too. Their b roll was from other meets