Time warp

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Posted: Wed February 11, 1998 at 2:36 PM ET

Dave Barry, Miami Herald

NAGANO, Japan (Knight Ridder) -- Did you ever wonder how we newspaper reporters cover a complex event such as the Olympics? No? Well, tough squid, because I'm going to tell you anyway.

The heart of the operation is the Main Press Center, a large building in downtown Nagano where thousands of professional journalists, using computers and advanced investigative techniques, try to get to the bottom of the single biggest issue at these Games: What time is it?

I am dead serious. This is almost all we talk about. The problem is that we want to give you timely coverage, but when it's today over here, it's yesterday back where you are, which means that the stories we write today will be printed on what is currently tomorrow for us, although for you of course it be will today when you read them, which for us, at that point, will be yesterday. (God help us if the Japanese introduce daylight-saving time.)

Once we think we know roughly what time it is, we go to an actual sporting competition, which under Olympic rules must be at least a two-hour bus ride away from the Main Press Center. Also there must be no more than half as many seats on the bus as there are reporters who want to ride it. This means that we must fight with the Germans. For some reason, wherever we American reporters want to go, the German reporters want to go there too, and they will stop at nothing to get on the bus ahead of us. World War II is nowhere NEAR over, as far as the Olympic transportation system is concerned.

When we finally arrive at the site of the competition, we usually find that it has been canceled because of, I swear, snow. It turns out that snow is very bad for a Winter Olympics. Many of us think they should hold the next one in Tahiti.

In the unlikely event that the competition is not canceled, we proceed to the press subcenter, which is a facility that has been scientifically designed so that you cannot, while sitting in it, see any part of the competition. We spend the next few hours engaging in the "meat and potatoes" of sports journalism: trying to hook our laptop computers up to the local phone system. This is tricky because most journalists have zero mechanical aptitude and cannot operate a light switch without risking electrocution.

By the time we have our computers set up, the sporting event, which has been going on somewhere outside the subcenter, is over. (Ray Charles sees more of the Olympics than the average Olympic reporter.) Now it's time for us to go outside and find out exactly what sport it was, so that we can write authoritative stories about it, focusing on the American medal winners. The problem is that, despite the heroic effort that we American journalists have made to be there, most of the time there ARE no American medal winners. Because of a loophole in the rules, other countries have been allowed to compete in the Olympics, and as a result the medals are often awarded to complete foreigners from dirtball little nations with names like "Splatskia."

So we stalk back into the subcenter and angrily disconnect our computers, sometimes wiping out all telephone service for a radius of 50 miles. Then we trudge back to the bus, only to once again encounter the Germans, many of whom, in their ceaseless quest to hog all the seats, never left the bus at all. It is not uncommon for blood to be spilled; both sides have ballpoint pens, and know how to use them.

Then it's a long ride back to Nagano, where we spend more grueling hours researching local cultural issues such as what kind of local beer they have. It is often very late before we fall asleep, sometimes on the sidewalk.

This is the kind of effort that your American press corps makes every single day to provide you, the public, with timely coverage that you can ignore while you watch the Olympics on TV. And you may rest assured that we will get up and do it all over again tomorrow. If we can figure out when that is.

Dave Barry is a humor columnist for the Miami Herald, One Herald Plaza, Miami, Florida 33132

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