Olympics wrap-up, part one
Aug. 12th, 2012 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessOk, yes, the Olympics are over. But not necessarily my ranting! (And for those of you freaking out, no worries – this blog will be returning very shortly to its usual habits of completely ignoring sports.)
As I noted, my previous experience with NBC had not left me with high hopes for their Olympics coverage. However, NBC had had moments here and there – particularly last weekend, when, gasp, they decided to show some live sporting events, sending many of us into shock – and I had some hopes that they had taken criticism to heart and would spend their last weekend of coverage – the last weekend of Summer Olympics for four years – on, and I know this is a radical thought – sports.
I have sometimes been accused of being overly optimistic.
Friday night, with the option of showing several exciting races, pole vaulting, javelin throwing, diving and more, NBC instead cheerfully decided to let us all know the results of the U.S. basketball team – the one in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, a.k.a. "The Dream Team." Which was good, because, you know, I'd been waiting 20 years for those results. At least the Dream Team bit was about sports. This was later followed by NBC showing us, not kidding, footage from Downton Abbey and snippets from perhaps the most pointless interview the Duke of Marlborough has ever given in his life, and bits about Elton John's coat of arms. In a sporting event.
Saturday night's coverage started with an hour long documentary about – wait for it – World War II. It was very exciting; until Japan jumped in, I had no idea who would win, Churchill or the Nazis. Spoiler: World War II ends with platform diving. (Which, interestingly enough, did not feature – on NBC – either German or Japanese divers.) And now you know.
This was immediately followed by a commercial for NBC's reality TV show – about war.
Sunday morning, as the women's group rhythmic gymnastics, women's modern pentathlon and men's mountain bike were going on, three events seemingly tailor made for television (especially the pentathlon, which has a running race with laser pistols and a bit where the athletes have to jump on strange horses and try to get the get the horses to jump over things, which leads to spectacular moments of falling off the horse, running after the horse to get back on the horse, the horse saying, uh, dude, do I KNOW you? No WAY am I jumping over THIS. Now THAT'S SPORT. Anyway...). NBC decided to show us athlete interviews, a clip about Stonehenge, and a commercial about the awesomeness of their news coverage before going on to Meet the Press.
True, Americans weren't particularly competitive in any of these events, and didn't even field a rhythmic gymnastics team, several of the rhythmic gymnasts work for Disney when not competing and live right here in Florida, and yes, Americans were competing in the other events.
I can sorta understand the Meet the Press bit, given Romney's announcement over the weekend, but I'll just note that NBC had (correctly) preempted Meet the Press the week before. We are all going to be hearing far, far, far more than even the most devoted political junkie wants to about Romney and Ryan in the upcoming months, and the Olympics come only once every four years.
#
NBC's primetime coverage was almost as bad when it was focused on sports. Focused on far too few events, and deeply American centered, thus missing many of the best sports stories of the games (well covered by the BBC and the Guardian) it also continually featured atrocious and condescending interviews with athletes, especially the losing ones (er, to be clear, by atrocious and condescending I mean the reporters; the athletes were all gracious and mature about everything.) I had to laugh when a couple of the athletes broke from the script NBC wanted to hear, cheerfully telling NBC, "No, it's ok, Jesus is still with me, and he's so proud that I just managed to finish/of my silver." Silver medalists for Jesus!
And far too often the commentators seemed to have no idea what they were talking about, with the notable exception of one of the diving commentators and one of the three gymnastics people. This was especially true in swimming ("If he's going to win this, he needs to start racing!" ) but happened elsewhere as well.
The problem was that NBC wanted to shape a narrative, rather than letting it play out on the screen, and sports doesn't always fit those narratives. The second problem was that some athletes objected to NBC's narrative; one of the Kenyan runners, after NBC aired a little documentary attempting to portray him as a primitive tribesman from the Masai, a tribe which has (according to NBC) apparently never achieved anything ever, and trying to play up the differences between Kenyan tribes, politely informed the interviewer that he was, in fact, the son of an Olympics silver medal winner and was incredibly proud to be Kenyan.
#
I did manage to catch a bit of the live streaming coverage, which improved my opinion of the Olympics, not NBC. In theory, the live streaming was restricted to paid TV customers to help cover the costs of covering the event (four years ago, the live streaming was offered for free.) Which was all nice, except that the live streaming generally either featured the BBC commentators (presumably not paid by NBC) or no commentary at all (these were all well done.) Since the live streaming also featured frequent ads, I fear the only real reason that live streaming was restricted to paid customers was because NBC is now partly owned by Comcast, which survives on paid internet and cable restrictions.
Note to Comcast: more people would buy your services or upgrade to better broadband if they had more good stuff to watch on their computer and TV screens. But I digress.
#
The saddest thing about this was, from time to time, NBC's coverage was actually – dare I say this – excellent. These times were almost always in the morning, with live events, generally races, but also included the gold medal tennis match (correctly shown live), the gold medal basketball match; some of the diving; and some of the BMX.
I say sad, because it showed that NBC could have had a marvelous Olympics.
#
Part of the deal with the Olympics is that this is the one time every four years that the world comes together and says, hey, let's try being awesome for a moment. (It sorta happens at the Winter Olympics, but those involve fewer athletes.) It includes moments where Americans and Iranians have their arms around one another's shoulders; where the world could mourn with a South Korean woman who lost her gold medal because of a young volunteer not knowing how to use the clock properly (she got a team gold later); where everyone outside the U.S. could cheer on the rowing athlete who had just gotten into a boat.
It's great stuff. It deserves to be celebrated, not sneered at, not preempted. Those athletes all worked damn hard to get there, and we should have been able to see them.
Try harder in Rio, NBC, though I know you probably won't.
As I noted, my previous experience with NBC had not left me with high hopes for their Olympics coverage. However, NBC had had moments here and there – particularly last weekend, when, gasp, they decided to show some live sporting events, sending many of us into shock – and I had some hopes that they had taken criticism to heart and would spend their last weekend of coverage – the last weekend of Summer Olympics for four years – on, and I know this is a radical thought – sports.
I have sometimes been accused of being overly optimistic.
Friday night, with the option of showing several exciting races, pole vaulting, javelin throwing, diving and more, NBC instead cheerfully decided to let us all know the results of the U.S. basketball team – the one in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, a.k.a. "The Dream Team." Which was good, because, you know, I'd been waiting 20 years for those results. At least the Dream Team bit was about sports. This was later followed by NBC showing us, not kidding, footage from Downton Abbey and snippets from perhaps the most pointless interview the Duke of Marlborough has ever given in his life, and bits about Elton John's coat of arms. In a sporting event.
Saturday night's coverage started with an hour long documentary about – wait for it – World War II. It was very exciting; until Japan jumped in, I had no idea who would win, Churchill or the Nazis. Spoiler: World War II ends with platform diving. (Which, interestingly enough, did not feature – on NBC – either German or Japanese divers.) And now you know.
This was immediately followed by a commercial for NBC's reality TV show – about war.
Sunday morning, as the women's group rhythmic gymnastics, women's modern pentathlon and men's mountain bike were going on, three events seemingly tailor made for television (especially the pentathlon, which has a running race with laser pistols and a bit where the athletes have to jump on strange horses and try to get the get the horses to jump over things, which leads to spectacular moments of falling off the horse, running after the horse to get back on the horse, the horse saying, uh, dude, do I KNOW you? No WAY am I jumping over THIS. Now THAT'S SPORT. Anyway...). NBC decided to show us athlete interviews, a clip about Stonehenge, and a commercial about the awesomeness of their news coverage before going on to Meet the Press.
True, Americans weren't particularly competitive in any of these events, and didn't even field a rhythmic gymnastics team, several of the rhythmic gymnasts work for Disney when not competing and live right here in Florida, and yes, Americans were competing in the other events.
I can sorta understand the Meet the Press bit, given Romney's announcement over the weekend, but I'll just note that NBC had (correctly) preempted Meet the Press the week before. We are all going to be hearing far, far, far more than even the most devoted political junkie wants to about Romney and Ryan in the upcoming months, and the Olympics come only once every four years.
#
NBC's primetime coverage was almost as bad when it was focused on sports. Focused on far too few events, and deeply American centered, thus missing many of the best sports stories of the games (well covered by the BBC and the Guardian) it also continually featured atrocious and condescending interviews with athletes, especially the losing ones (er, to be clear, by atrocious and condescending I mean the reporters; the athletes were all gracious and mature about everything.) I had to laugh when a couple of the athletes broke from the script NBC wanted to hear, cheerfully telling NBC, "No, it's ok, Jesus is still with me, and he's so proud that I just managed to finish/of my silver." Silver medalists for Jesus!
And far too often the commentators seemed to have no idea what they were talking about, with the notable exception of one of the diving commentators and one of the three gymnastics people. This was especially true in swimming ("If he's going to win this, he needs to start racing!" ) but happened elsewhere as well.
The problem was that NBC wanted to shape a narrative, rather than letting it play out on the screen, and sports doesn't always fit those narratives. The second problem was that some athletes objected to NBC's narrative; one of the Kenyan runners, after NBC aired a little documentary attempting to portray him as a primitive tribesman from the Masai, a tribe which has (according to NBC) apparently never achieved anything ever, and trying to play up the differences between Kenyan tribes, politely informed the interviewer that he was, in fact, the son of an Olympics silver medal winner and was incredibly proud to be Kenyan.
#
I did manage to catch a bit of the live streaming coverage, which improved my opinion of the Olympics, not NBC. In theory, the live streaming was restricted to paid TV customers to help cover the costs of covering the event (four years ago, the live streaming was offered for free.) Which was all nice, except that the live streaming generally either featured the BBC commentators (presumably not paid by NBC) or no commentary at all (these were all well done.) Since the live streaming also featured frequent ads, I fear the only real reason that live streaming was restricted to paid customers was because NBC is now partly owned by Comcast, which survives on paid internet and cable restrictions.
Note to Comcast: more people would buy your services or upgrade to better broadband if they had more good stuff to watch on their computer and TV screens. But I digress.
#
The saddest thing about this was, from time to time, NBC's coverage was actually – dare I say this – excellent. These times were almost always in the morning, with live events, generally races, but also included the gold medal tennis match (correctly shown live), the gold medal basketball match; some of the diving; and some of the BMX.
I say sad, because it showed that NBC could have had a marvelous Olympics.
#
Part of the deal with the Olympics is that this is the one time every four years that the world comes together and says, hey, let's try being awesome for a moment. (It sorta happens at the Winter Olympics, but those involve fewer athletes.) It includes moments where Americans and Iranians have their arms around one another's shoulders; where the world could mourn with a South Korean woman who lost her gold medal because of a young volunteer not knowing how to use the clock properly (she got a team gold later); where everyone outside the U.S. could cheer on the rowing athlete who had just gotten into a boat.
It's great stuff. It deserves to be celebrated, not sneered at, not preempted. Those athletes all worked damn hard to get there, and we should have been able to see them.
Try harder in Rio, NBC, though I know you probably won't.