The 2003 Pan American Games

Would you believe that there is a sporting event that's getting even less attention from the American media than Major League Soccer? And the Americans are dominating it!

The Pan American Games, a quadrennial sports festival for nations of the Western Hemisphere, are held in the year before the Olympics. The 2003 Pan Ams (as I call them) are currently underway in Santo Domingo; they opened on August 1 and continue through August 17. The United States, as of this morning, led the medal count with 121 medals (50 gold, 34 silver, 37 bronze), twenty-five more than runner-up Cuba (46 gold, 24 silver, 26 bronze). The Americans have put together a solid track and field squad, accounting for a good deal of all those medals.

Here's the hitch: you can't find them on television anywhere here! Not even on ESPN or ESPN2. Not even on the Spanish-language networks, Univision or Telemundo, which seems odd given the fact that most countries in the Americas are Spanish-speaking and you'd expect that many Hispanics would take an interest in the teams of their ancestral homelands. Even though Santo Domingo is only an hour ahead of New York, which makes the Pan Ams more schedule-friendly to American television broadcasters than the 2000 Sydney Olympics could ever have been for NBC, no one is broadcasting them at all. As far as I know, the Pan Ams might not even be on satellite television. Apparently, no one cares. (ESPN is airing poker - poker! - later this week, which seems to matter more than today's U.S. Pan Am champions - who could be our Olympic champions next year in Athens.)

Why not? I could offer the theory that Americans don't care about a regional olympiad unless it's being held here, but given the lack of interest in the Pan Ams the last time they were held here (Indianapolis, 1987), that can't be it. Maybe it's because Americans don't take enough interest in track or swimming outside of leap (read Olympic) years, but the Pan Ams also feature basketball, which never fails to attract an audience. All I can guess is that the Pan Ams, while a big event, are simply not the Olympics. The Olympics offer the best athletes from all over the world; the Pan Ams offer only athletes from half of it. The Olympics are like a big Broadway musical; the Pan Ams are more like just a curious offbeat production in Soho. Being a funky attraction off the beaten path may stir some trivial interest, but it doesn't bring in the big money.

Oh,well. At least I can still watch Major League Soccer. (Go MetroStars!)