Sports fans looking for their Olympics fix won’t have to look very hard, given the broad range of ways the CBC plans to deliver its coverage of this month’s Winter Games (Feb. 10-26).

The pubcaster has unveiled its ambitious Olympics coverage for Torino 2006, with plans that include feature stories, profiles, updates and live coverage of events on the main network, as well as on Newsworld, its HD channel, digi CBC Country Canada, CBC Radio and CBC.ca.

As well, CBC, in partnership with Bell Mobility Service, is offering Olympics coverage through mobile phones, while Rogers cable subscribers will be able to get Olympics via video-on-demand. CBC will also be feeding content to TSN, which will also broadcast highlights, while Radio-Canada and RDS will provide French-language coverage. In total, the pubcaster is planning more than 1,000 hours of coverage over these various platforms.

Terry Ludwick, the CBC executive producer overseeing the Winter Games coverage, says he is confident about what he and his team have arranged.

‘Canadians will be measuring our success as a broadcaster by how well we cover these Games,’ he says. ‘And we are going to deliver.’

This year’s coverage will be more complicated than the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games because of the time-zone difference. Turin is six hours ahead of EST, meaning a live primetime show is out of the question. But the CBC production team, which also includes exec director of CBC Sports Nancy Lee, expresses optimism about audience numbers for Turin, given that ours is a nation of ice and snow, and the considerable buzz surrounding Canadian athletes’ prospects this time round.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that NHL players will once again participate in the Olympic hockey tourney. The gold medal game in 2002, which featured Canada vs. the U.S.A., delivered a record 10.5 million viewership for the Ceeb.

CBC’s coverage will be a combination of live and taped broadcasts. Live coverage begins at 1 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 10, when veteran sportscaster Brian Williams and The National’s Peter Mansbridge will host the opening ceremonies, which take place in Turin’s Olympic Stadium. Some live events will be rebroadcast – sometimes twice nightly – in an effort to maximize audience potential.

Approximately two-thirds of the CBC Olympics crew will remain in Toronto – that’s about 150 staff, which will save the CBC a reported $1 million. This decision also makes sense given the time difference. Williams will host the primetime coverage, while Terry Leibel will host the morning events, but both will do so from Toronto. TSN will be offering 125 hours of coverage, to be hosted by Vic Rauter and Dave Randorf, their primary focus being curling. A daily four-hour show led by Randorf will recap the main events, while Rauter will be anchoring throughout the day. Both will be in TSN’s Toronto studio.

CBC says it has secured 15 official sponsors, including Visa and McDonald’s, up from 12 at Salt Lake City. Rene Bertrand, CBC exec director of media sales, calls this ‘a record number of sponsors,’ adding, ‘these are the most successful Games ever for us.’

Nevertheless, the recent Olympic news hasn’t been all good for the net. The highly coveted Vancouver 2010 Games has been locked by rival CTV, and it’s no secret that the Athens Games didn’t perform as well as the CBC had hoped – in fact, it lost $15 million on its coverage.

On the Athens matter, Ludwick responds, ‘I’ve been [working on] the Olympic Games long enough to know one thing: we can do the best job possible in producing these Games, we can pull every rabbit out of the hat, we can form every great production story, every great lineup we can muster, but in the end it’s the performance of the Canadian team that drives people to the screen.’

And that, in turn, has Ludwick bullish about the numbers for Turin.

‘When you have a team with a lot of medal potential and a lot of chances to do fantastically in Turin, then you have a lot of energy going towards broadcasting,’ he says.

But is it possibly too much energy? Given the CBC’s plans for wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast-to-coast, multi-platform coverage, Ludwick says he isn’t concerned that the net is dedicating too much of its resources to the Games. In fact, it might be just what CBC needs after last year’s lockout, as a point of focus for staff and a chance for some strong ratings.

‘There’s a huge [viewer] appetite for victory in these sports,’ he says. ‘These are sports [Canadians] know and sports they love. The Olympic Winter Games will be teeming with great stories, and many of those stories will be about Canadians.’

www.cbc.ca/olympics