5/17/2023 0 Comments Kid snippets olympicsMaybe things were a little better in earlier Olympics - I think they were, but I could be wrong. This isn't just NBC's problem, it's a perennial problem. But I saw it only because I happened to still be awake at 12:30 a.m.įinally, speaking of U.S.-centrism: It really needs to be dialed back. ![]() Huh? This is the metric mile, one of the most important races in the Olympics. NBC has done a good job with most of the track events, but unless I missed it, the 1,500-meter final was not in prime time. Why was the women's soccer final not on prime time? Even if you're making all your programming decisions based on demography and numbers, wouldn't the most popular women's sport in the country rate an hour and a half? All the more, from NBC's egregiously U.S.-centric perspective, because the U.S. Would it kill NBC to show one less hour of beach volleyball or synchronized diving, and give us just a little taste of the dazzling variety of athletic activities that the Olympics offer?Īnd then, there have simply been inexplicable omissions. These aren't in the same category as track and field, but they, too, are part of the Olympics. My other gripe is that we don't see enough "minor" sports like table tennis, badminton and shooting. But NBC needs to devote more time to the basics. ![]() I'm not dissing judged sports - I think gymnasts may be the greatest athletes at the Olympics. Whether you win or lose is not dependent on the whim of some dude from Austria. Partly that's because they are elemental: What's simpler than who can jump the highest? And unlike subjective sports such as diving or gymnastics, they're not judged - either you clear the bar or you don't. (Watching the dramatic battles for silver and bronze is one of the great joys of the Olympics - but those battles rarely appear on gold-obsessed TV.) In any case, I think people would watch these events if NBC covered them. You keep setting the bar higher and higher, and lesser competitors fall away. Of course, it's not easy to televise events like the high jump and the pole vault. But it's not in the same class as the high jump! It's a great event - and one with far more Olympic history than beach volleyball. But I would far rather have seen less of it, and more in-depth coverage of the pole vault or the long jump, during prime time. I'm an unapologetic fan of beach volleyball - men's and women's. But the Olympics patient has died in the waiting room. I know, with only four hours in the prime-time slot, it's all about triage. ![]() But what they're watching is not really the Olympics. Lots of people are watching, and that's good. It's aiming to get the maximum number of viewers, and it has succeeded. It's obvious why NBC has covered the games the way it has: Money. A young kid watching the Olympics for the first time on TV would really not understand what the games are all about. By all but ignoring the events that make the Olympics special, NBC is doing its viewers a great disservice. The Olympic record book isn't just a set of statistics - it's a vast encyclopedia of memories. Even more than baseball, the Olympics are all about tradition and continuity. They connect us with great memories of past Olympics, of Al Oerter and Sergei Bubka and Rafer Johnson and Dick Fosbury. They are the central stitches in its vast historic tapestry. They're the heart and soul of the Olympics. Yeah, it'll toss in a minute or two of coverage of the winning jump or the last decathlon event, but that's kind of like tearing out the last page of "War and Peace" and saying you read it. It's simply not showing us the classic Olympic events, like the decathlon, discus, hammer throw, javelin, high jump, long jump or pole vault. I'm an Olympics dog, and I happily lap up whatever the NBC producers decide to put in my dish.īut with only a day-plus of these marvelous games to go, I have to say that NBC has really blown it with its prime-time coverage, especially of the second week. As anyone who has read any of my hyperbolic ravings about sporting events I watch only every four years knows, I don't have a shortage of enthusiasm. ![]() (the consequence of living in that despised province known as West Coastia) feeling emotionally satiated and thoroughly wrung out. It helps to avoid all contact with the outside world.) I thoroughly enjoyed just about all of the events I watched - in fact, I usually turned off my TV at 12:30 or 1 a.m. (I was surprisingly successful: I think the first prime-time result that I learned about before NBC showed it was Shawn Johnson's gold medal on the balance beam. I became a dutiful info-ostrich, trying to avoid finding out what happened in the events before the broadcasts. I've watched just about every second of every one of its prime-time shows (OK, I may have fast-forwarded through an hour or two of synchronized diving).
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