I’ll be curious to see how the Australian media deals with our swim team. They have always been our largest medal winning group and the coverage of Olympic swimming verges on the ridiculous here (I’m not really sure we need to see every single heat of every single swimming event while there are finals of other sports on).
After the poor performance of the swim team in London I’m hoping for at least some more varied coverage of other sports.
Not really, except in the poor living conditions disease stuff. And how this may fuck over Brazil’s economy, which was coming into its own on the international stage.
I’ve only ever really been interested in the gymnastic stuff (or skating in the Winter games), and not to the point of actually following anyone–just kinda like watching a game show and trying to predict who will win.
I’ve never found watching sports entertaining, including the Olympics. Also, the Olympics creep me out with the way so many Olympic athletes are apparently basically nearly raised from birth just to be competitors with almost no life outside that; it strikes me as child abuse.
I am relishing the Rugby Sevens - and you Americans should be watching for Carlin Isles!
I certainly am. This will be the first time in 8 years I’ll be able to pay a lot of attention to the summer games, I was moving in 2008 and working overnight shift in 2012. Plus, I can’t wait for the first Doper to recycle a tired rant from 1996 about television coverage showing only up close and personals and not showing enough of the events
I pay almost no attention to the winter Olympics, but I like the summer version, to some degree.
Unfortunately, TV’s usual motto of “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” means I get sick of the constant women’s gymnastics, beach volleyball (look! Skinny women in bikinis jumping!) and I don’t need to see all the qualifying heats for the 50 meters, 100 meters, 200 meters, 400 meters, 1500 meters, backstroke/breaststroke/butterfly/freestyle/men’s/women’s/relay.
The Russian judo team is going, and they are always strong, so I am hoping to see at least a little of the Japanese attempt to regain their traditional positions atop the medal stands. The Olympic lifting is going to be gutted. Rowing and fencing and kayaking - meh.
I suspect the next wave of athletic scandals to be the Chinese team. I wonder if there are new doping tests that nobody is prepared for.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m so busy with (the last part) of my studies that I won’t pay attention to all this. But considering how very unprepared Rio is, this should be an interesting Olympics. Best case everything goes well right to the end. Worse case- there’s a hundred things that could go wrong. What the hell was Richard M. Daley thinking about trying to get my hometown, Chicago to host these games? You’d think we’d get a subsidy for these games? I’m now glad Rio was picked.
At the risk of sounding like an “old fart”, I really miss the spectacle event nature of the Olympics on TV from my youth.
Back then it was a BIG DEAL. But now with multiple 24 hours cable sports channels, the internet, and frankly poor programming decisions by the broadcasters (USA only, all the time, only the glamour events, etc.) the Olympics has lost all of it’s cache as a BIG DEAL spectacle of a TV broadcast. Pity that is.
I’d really enjoy the opening and closing ceremonies if they didn’t have play by play announcers. I’d pay a small amount of money for a feed that didn’t have them.
No wonder you didn’t enjoy the 1984 summer Olympics - they were on ABC. (NBC would have shown 1980 had it not been for the boycott.)
And I see you’re in Colorado; were you somewhere out west back in 1984 as well? ABC aired everything live, which meant that the primetime coverage started at about 6:00 Mountain time, and the 9:30-11:00 Mountain segment was almost always either USA volleyball or USA water polo, as somebody was under the impression that most of the people watching at that time lived in Los Angeles?
But if you want to talk about coverage (which can probably take up its own thread), look at NBC in 1996 - of the 45 or so gold medals that USA won, all but three had their events and their medal ceremonies aired…and one of the three that didn’t was a shooting event (probably because “guns are bad, mmkay?”); meanwhile, only four non-USA medal ceremonies aired, and one of those was during the closing ceremonies, although NBC managed to skip the medal ceremonies during the closing ceremonies in 2012 just fine. IMO, the worst example was the women’s basketball ceremony - NBC showed each Team USA member being introduced and receiving her gold medal, but just before the other two countries would receive theirs, the commentator said, “We’ll be back with the National Anthem in a moment,” and NBC cut to a commercial. (Note that NBC did show all three men’s basketball medalists being introduced, but this was because silver medalists Yugoslavia included Vlade Divac, and bronze medalists Lithuania included Sarunas Marciulionis and Arvydas Sabonis.)
I guess they’re not fans of NCAA beach volleyball, with its “the player’s top must cover the entire body down to the lower part of the uniform” rule.
Guess I should have put a paragraph break in there. I didn’t say I didn’t like the 84’ games. Those are last games I made a point to watch. Since then, not so much. NBC has the rights now, and I think has them out to the 2030’s.
I’m a lot less interested than I was in 2012. All the complaining about Russian dopers and Brazil’s dirty water, while perhaps all legit, is a turn off for me. I’m sure I’ll watch periodically when it’s on, so I’m at least mildly interested. But certainly not excited about it.
I enjoy the Olymics, but it is not a “must see” (much less something I record).
More likely it will be something I have on while doing other stuff (surfing the net, house chores, etc)
Brian
I always enjoy watching the Olympics. My favorite sport to watch is Women’s Soccer, but I also enjoy the chance to watch a bunch of sports that rarely get air time here in the US, including (indoor) volleyball, table tennis, and badminton.
I also love the opening ceremonies, both for the spectacle, and for the world-coming-together aspect.
Yes, I’ll watch all I can.
Do they stream all of it free in the US? Does NBC allow everyone to see whatever they want?
The NBC website will be streaming all the events but only if you log in through your cable provider. If you don’t have that, you’ll have to find a workaround.
I’ll be watching diving, gymnastics, and probably swimming (the kind in the nice chlorinated pool). And following stories of everything going wrong and hoping there’s not some mass pandemic or terrorist attack or spate of athletes getting robbed and/or murdered. They managed World Cup security OK but their technique seemed to be surrounding the teams in a bubble of soldiers and cops at all times. Easier to do with 700 athletes than 10,000.
My level of interest in watching the olympics is …
Something I will we right back with, but first lets explore the amazing and inspiration story of the remote control I will be using. It came from a sweat shop in China where the only attention it ever received was from Inspector # 12, but despite that it had big dreams…
Nah.
I’d like to be able to muster up some interest, but this spectacle just has too many damn strikes against it. Long, storied history of corruption. Absolute, brazen lack of justice replaced with haphazard, slapdash, roll-the-dice justice. NBC (look at the jingoistic hash they made of American Ninja Warrior USA vs. The World and multiply it by about fifty; that’s what we have to look forward to). One political nightmare after another. “Yoo-ess-ay”, which at first I found boorish, then from '94 on pointless, and now just unbearably freaking tiresome. Out of control doping, and its complement, out of control stories about doping. And guess what, now the IOC has completely discredited medal counts, pretty much the only reason left to have this stupid thing.
I hope Simone Biles does well, I’d like Michael Phelps to go out with the bang, and I’m intrigued by that Jamaican gymnast. Other than that, wake me if you see something interesting.
Oh, and more stories about the public workers, police, and ordinary folk who are suffering because of this. Their voices need to be heard, dammit.
Sure, I’ll probably watch quite a bit of it. I have a lot of other stuff to do, though, so I won’t be glued to the TV.