Reason No. 786 to detest the Olympics
I hate the Olympics. (This just in, I know.) But I’m not just a sourpuss; I also detest the typical knee-jerk backlash surrounding each games – which makes my cantankerous whining paradoxical in itself, I suppose.
But I don’t really have a problem the Olympics, and I have no issue with niche sports earning an occasional share of the limelight (Why do they always start with wall-to-wall hours of swimming? Snore.). I certainly don’t begrudge the legions of athletes yearning for a small piece of glory, after years of toiling in sports nobody could possibly care about. Lord knows if the Olympics ever add N64 MarioKart or Pithy Email Composition as events, then I’m totally snagging glory for myself.
My problem with the Olympics is, no doubt, NBC’s horrific, continual, “plausibly-live” coverage of the games. One would think a virtual, round-the-clock sporting cycle would actually add to the coverage of the nonstop sports within any Olympics. Sadly, it doesn’t. Instead, NBC prefers to serve as gatekeeper of all events, messages, and profiles – convinced the Olympics are compelling television only if packaged, borrowed, bought, and sold as quaint, homespun summaries of a day’s events delivered to families ’round the old TV set.
For example, this morning, I rose, got ready for work, knowing the U.S. Basketball team was scheduled to play Angola at 7 a.m. central time. Turned on NBC. No game, women’s soccer. CNBC. Actual news. USA Network. Water polo. (Kill me.) Universal HD. Swimming. ESPN. Live score updates of the U.S. v. Angola. The hell?
Ridiculous. I realize with any time difference some recorded events will re-air later in prime time, maybe even spliced to highlight the action. And that’s fine – but NBC seems to think no one will learn the results or experience the drama if NBC doesn’t air the heretofore unseen footage itself – and that’s untrue. Phil Mushnick cries foul, accusing NBC of tailoring voice-overs in time with taped action, inflection to match dramatics. Richard Sandomir shakes his head at the network’s murky disclosure of taped and live and the toggle between.
Insulting and ridiculous. When ESPN or ABC have the rights to the freaking World Cup, they slap on the American matches live, at five in the morning. You watch it then, or you watch the re-air knowing the outcome. And that’s the proper course of action. Sporting events should fully be consumed live, whenever possible, almost no ifs ands or buts. And with round-the-clock sports media and coverage and web access – sporting events must be delivered live as well. With exclusive access to the Olympics, and five networks covering everything around-the-clock, this should be no problem for NBC. The network then has a chance to re-air stunning or important moments later in the day. Everything committed to tape, nothing reworked, re-recorded, opened up or canned. In global sports, time zones are but a small obstacle. Fans and the general public deal with it.
For example, with U.S. Men’s basketball – only diehard basketball fans would tune in to watch a one-sided match like U.S.-Angola live. But tonight, NBC Main will no doubt devote a primetime slot to re-airing the full game. Seriously. The people who would have watched the entire monotonous display in the first place won’t tune in – for they are the same folks who just-had-to-see-it-live. Tonight’s audience, presumably, just wants the usual Olympic stuff. Instead, however, NBC eagerly compromise everyone’s fandom and interest, also compromising itself, and fully compromising the event’s integrity. Just to supposedly ratchet up the drama for nighttime hours. Don’t worry about actually following sports, they seem to say, we’ll re-invent the dramatics for you, even though you already know what happened. Bob Costas will contextualize the entire day.
Because NBC shelled out gazillions of dollars for the rights to coverage, they want to make darn sure the advertisers they charge an arm-and-a-leg receive exactly the sports they prefer, and that NBC’s promised schedule is as predictable as delivered, predicated not on the day’s events, but on the shiny NBC roadmap presented to national, regional and local advertisers. That’s the Olympics – the entire essence of competition boiled down and sold to corporations in line with their whims. Not quite the pinnacle of competition envisioned in Athens.
NBC’s wretched plausibly-live gymnastics (the network’s hoop-jumping, not the mind-numbing sport) frustrate the entire games. Once lampooned in Seoul ’88, and continually decried in Australia, NBC could argue plausibly live was once plausibly necessary. With the advent of the Internet, satellite TV, multiple network outlets, and full-time global sports networks, its time has passed and a sports culture demands more. Until the coverage changes, the games won’t just be ‘plausibly live’ – they’ll be ‘probably insulting.’
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Arguably the most interminable thing about the explosion in the number of sports blogs since the Athens Games is the number of posts I’ve had to see that start out “I hate the Olympics.” Although, to your credit, you have slightly differentiated yourself from those sports fans whose primary beef with the Olympic Games is that they prefer their athletes to have more robust gun possession, drunk driving, and anal rape records.
You’ll get no argument from just about anybody that Bob Costas is a self-serving ass, but NBC’s Beijing Olympic coverage is miles above what its ever been, and the online viewing options are astounding. I realize that you probably don’t have time to run to your computer to watch The Preen Team (or whatever the fuck) smack Angola around while you’re trying to get ready for work, but–honestly–the Olympics aren’t really about basketball (and are even less about baseball, a fact the IOC has conceded by bagging that sport for at least the London Games).
Look, it bothers me a little bit that I’m going to know who won Friday’s 10,000 meter final (that’s a track event, BTW) 12 hours before I can watch it on NBC. But at least I get to watch it on NBC. That’s something that I, as a sports fan, only get to do every four years. For fans of track & field (athletics to the rest of the world), swimming, triathlons, gymnastics, and a dozen other sports, it’s not uncommon to get televised coverage of an event days or weeks after it happened. Believe it or not, live telecasts of sporting events are a luxury often only afforded to fans of basketball, football, baseball, soccer, tennis, and bowling. Once you’ve watched a swim meet that you know happened a month ago, 12 hours seems like nothing.
For most people–sports fans or otherwise–the Olympics are an opportunity to be exposed to “other” sports and “other” athletes. Are “real” sports fans threatened by the fact that the Olympics is an opportunity for someone like a Michael Phelps or a Tyson Gay–for at least a few moments–to be a bigger star and a bigger story than Kobe or Lebron? Basketball HAS its moment, from October through June every single year. Baseball HAS its season–it runs from April to November and is boring until mid-September, last I checked. Even for soccer, the Olympics is not the Holy Grail that another quadrennial event–the World Cup–is. Do those sports really need to be the center of attention for three more weeks every fourth year?
I’m actually just thrilled to have a commenter, whether because of, or limited to, a rant striking a nerve.
Fair points all, and it’s also fairly hypocritical by me to condemn the Olympics for being so commercialized while I follow sports rife with advertising-fueled hyperbole like the Super Bowl or World Series.
However, there is something unseemly about the way Olympic coverage is tailored and scheduled down to the minute in time slots irrespective of unforeseen athletic events occurring throughout a day, and sold in piecemeal.
And it would have made more sense for me to condemn the scheduling of basketball in Primetime, juxtaposing it with my whine about the live game not being on one of five channels. Both scheduling snafus seem counterintuitive.
I have problems with nearly all sports media, but almost always, I feel it’s best to air everything live when possible. If a revamp or re-air in PrimeTime is needed, then say so. That’s probably fair. NBC is always heavy on schmaltz; any time they cover the US Open they begin Tiger’s victory lap/slurpfest shortly into the second round.
And for crying out loud, why must swimming lead off the hours of coverage? Just when I’m convincing myself the Olympics might be worthwhile, I’m faced with a deluge of swimming, a sport so TV-unfriendly, I may well be watching soccer. (Rolls eyes. _Now, don’t you start._)