RETROspective: Olympic Busts – Dan and Dave

A fat plumber against a supersonic hedgehog. That seems fair.

If you were being a good American, you spent the weekend watching hours and hours of an unprecedented amount of Olympic coverage. Because there is a massive amount of airtime to fill, the broadcasters try to set up a bunch of compelling stories for us to watch. And a lot of times they get it right. Did you know there is a female table tennis player without a hand? That’s amazing! Sure makes you feel like crap, doesn’t it? This girl doesn’t have a hand, and she’s playing table tennis in the Olympics, you complain you had to park too far away in the parking lot at the mall and had to walk too far. But often times the stories they setup to be amazing fail to materialize, like Jordyn Wieber, the defending World All-Around Champion failing to even qualify, or the Michael Phelps/Ryan Lochte rivalry, with Phelps barely even qualifying for the 400 meter Individual Medley, then squarely getting his ass handed to him by Lochte, and coming in fourth, the first time he’s missed the medal stand at the Olympics since 2000. But this isn’t confined to just these most recent Olympics. One of the worst examples of this ever occurred at the 1992 Barcelona games, with Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson.

Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson were both American decathletes (For those who don’t know, the decathlon is composed of the 100 meter, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 meter, 110 meter hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, and the 1500 meter). For months leading up to the 1992 Summer Games, they were featured in an ad campaign for Reebok, posited to show “Who is the world’s greatest athlete? Dan or Dave?”. They were both fairly unknown outside of the Track & Field world, and this leading question lead to a great deal of interest in them both. They were both favorites to win the gold, and were pretty evenly matched against one another, with O’Brien holding a three-to-two lead over Johnson in direct competition, but O’Brien boasting a higher best score in the event. The idea was that it would all be settled at the Barcelona Games. Reebok was losing a huge amount of market share to Nike, and was hoping this massive 8-month campaign would help them close the gap. It didn’t turn out that way.

At the Olympic trials 5 weeks before the event, O’Brien (the 1991 World champion) failed to even qualify for the decathlon. After passing on the four lower heights in the 8th event, the pole vault, he attempted to go over the bar at 15 feet 9 inches, and failed to make it on all three tries. This lead to him moving from 1st place down to 12th, and he couldn’t recover, and failed to make the team. Reebok then had to spend $30 million to revamp the campaign to instead feature O’Brien cheering Johnson on. But even that didn’t work out. With O’Brien out, Johnson was considered a lock for the gold. However, he managed to get a stress fracture in his left foot on the first day of events. He put on a shoe two sizes larger, laced it up tight, and competed anyway, but only managed to win bronze. The whole debacle is considered on of the worst errors in marketing history, right behind new Coke. But the whole ordeal wasn’t entirely terrible. Though O’Brien failed to qualify for the 1992 games, he eventually went on to the 1996 games and even managed to win the gold. Still, it was an all around miss and pretty embarrassing for everyone involved. And for embarrassing, check out these “Dan & Dave” commercials. What were we thinking back then, that stuff like that was stylish?

So while you can never really predict what exactly is going to happen at the Olympics, one thing you can know for sure is that things will never go as you expect them to, no matter how much you spend on marketing trying to make it go your way. In the immortal words of one Benjamin Sisko discussing sports, in particular, baseball:

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook