So I’m watching the Olympics for the first time the other night. What lousy, lousy coverage. In some boat racing event (damned if I know the exact name), they absolutely refused to use a camera angle that shows the status of the race.
That, however, is only annoying, compared to their commentary during the Beach volleyball quarterfinals between the U.S. and Brazil. I don’t think I saw it all the way to the end. Brazil was up 14-13 last I remember. It was a pretty evenly matched game. The commentary was irritating in that whenever the Brazilians scored, it was because the Americans “made a mistake.” The Americans “have to be careful not to give the Brazilians any easy points.” The commentators constantly gave little summaries of the match such as, “The Americans have been up by two points once this match, the Brazilians have only been up by one.” Never mind that the Brazilians are currently ahead. The commentators are only interested in painting a picture favorable to the Americans.
I also suspect that, because of tape delay, the networks are choosing events that include exciting come-from-behind wins for the Americans.
Also, when an American wins a silver or bronze, we have to hear some crap like, “Americans here showing that winning the gold isn’t everything.” As if, as Americans, they are entitled to the gold medal, and if they don’t win it, it’s disappointing, but shows the great sportsmanship of the Americans. C’mon people, this is the Olympics. A silver medal is okay.
It is all in the political crap of the games. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the olympics are great, but it is the most political load of crap at the same time.
I love how when other teams do really well they minimize it. I hate to break to the TV guys, but there are many other competent countries around.
Last night Inge de Bruijn won the 50-meter freestyle and the first thing an NBC reporter asked her was if she’d like to respond to accusations that she was taking performance-enhancing drugs. A little later, the US women won the 400-meter IM and broke the world record by 3 seconds. One of the team members, Dara Torres, is 33 years old, which is positively ancient for an Olympic swimmer. Naturally, that was a stunning triumph and a fitting reward for years of dedication. :rolleyes:
I did see the end of the beach volleyball game between US and BRAZIL. brazil won, they played a vey good game.
that announcer was a putz, he was trying to make it seem that it would be the end of the world if USA did not take a medal in beach volleyball.
USA played a good game too, and i like beach volleyball,
brazil just played harder and they deserved thier win.
can’t say that I watched much of the olypics, being stationed in Saudi and all. AFN delays programing from the states so it can be aired in our prime time, so it might be 24 hours after the event took place before we can see it, or we have to watch it on the station from Bahrain. this is no to bad, it is closer to live and there are no comercials. one drawback is that it is broadcast in aribic. guess you can’t have it all.
could someone back there tell NBC to stop with all the comercials durring the games.
What do I think of Olympic coverage? I was outraged that NBC pre-empted ‘West Wing’ and ‘Law and Order’ reruns to show it. Hey, most of these sports I couldn’t give a shit about. (I’d watch Olympic baseball, but they never show that.)
I mean, really, trampolining? Gymnastics? Swimming? Who cares?
Well, maybe it’s just me, and the fact that I’m not in a swimming loop or something, but I’d be suspiciouse of anyone that came out and broke 11 world records in…what, 7 months? As for Torres, as least she has a history of performing and being in the international scene. During the coverage that I saw, they didn’t say much about Inge’s previouse accomplishments. So, yeah, I can understand about the accusations.
I think that everyone has missed one thing. It seams as if every athlete in any competition seams to be overcoming some insurmountable obstacle in their life. I.E Passing of a family, injury that should have left them unable to walk again, dead pet, hang nail, ect. ect… Can’t someone just win an event and have come from rich parents and lead an easy life. I don’t think that we will ever hear an announcer say that xxxx has won the 110m hurdles despite over coming a perfect existence.
As for the commentators putting a pro American spin on thing. What do you expect? Most of us are watching the coverage in the United States. If I was in Italy, I’m sure that everything would have a heavy pro-Italy theme to it. Do you really expect the announcers to say that the Americans were lucky to win that event, because quite frankly, we really suck. I don’t either. The only real gripe that I have about the coverage is the fact that there is a commercial break every 2 minutes. Despite all complaints, the coverage is much better then it was during the games in Atlanta in '96.
It’s better then watching soap operas, so I can’t complain.
I don’t expect anything better, but it might be nice to be able to focus on the sports and the spirit of competition, rather than having a TV station trying to lull me into a state of patriotic semi-consciousness so I will watch more Olympics.
I agree, D_Nice, that there are way too much commercials. I still think that NBC’s coverage of the games sucks, though.
So, I’ve boycotted NBC. I refuse to watch any NBC programming until the Olympics are over.
Uhhh… Michael Johnson won the 400m… again. Everyone knew he was going to - he is widely reputed to be the fastest runner in the history of the world. He is the only man in the history of the Olympic Games to win back-to-back Gold medals in the 400m and is also the oldest man in the history of the Games to win a gold in the 400m.
The obvious comparison to Inge is Michelle Smith, the Irish swimmer who won three golds in Atlanta coming from nowhere and was later found to be a colossal cheat. She’s banned now.
But, no offense, why is it that it’s always the non-Americans who get questioned? Florence Griffith-Joyner was to track as Smith was to swimming, a woman who suddenly developed forty pounds of muscle in a year and whose sudden jump in performance is as suspicious as an eight-dollar bill, and nobody said a word about it until she dropped dead of heart failure. Now we have word that some U.S. athletes blew doping tests prior to 1988 and it was covered up. What if Griffith-Joyner’s name comes up?
I don’t mind NBC being pro-American. They should be, they’re catering to a U.S. audience. But the ambush interview of Inge was extraordinarily classless. I’ll be interested to see how NBC handles the sudden dope controversies swirling around the U.S. team tonight.
The thing that pisses me off about the coverage is that they only air events in which us dandy Americans have an opportunity to win. When was Olympic Judo televised? Oh, I forgot, no Americans stood a chance for the gold. Who cares about the event if an American can’t win it.
And tonight they’re doing some stupid gymnastics “gala!” I’m sick of gymnastics. The whole gymnastics competition sucked and now they’re showing some inconsequential non-event. Could they please show some medal events? I don’t care if Americans are involved or not.
NBC equates American medals to ratings. That must be the reason why ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ has been beating the olympic coverage so greatly. With the delay of time between the US and Australia, I would expect NBC to have much better coverage. That delay gives them the chance to only pick the exciting events to show, but alas I find myself watching the US get blown away in a preliminary Water Polo match. I wonder if the people who have satalite TV get the chance to pick the events that they want to watch. If anyone has Satalite tv let me know about this.
You’re right, I think that if American’s are caught cheating, the same emphsis should be placed on them. I didn’t watch the 88 competition, so I don’t really remember the Track Events, but if I had seen the events, and known about the sudden improvement, yeah, I’d have been suspiciouse of her too. I could care less if the competitor is an American or not, I just expressed my opinion that anyone that is blowing away 11 world records in that short a time period is suspiciouse in my mind.
D_Nice–
I have DirectTV, and I couldn’t find any other coverage on the Olympics. I don’t have all the sports options, but I didn’t see anything on the regular channels.