We have watched entirely too much Olympics coverage this year. I blame it on not having a TV during the Tour de France, which usually has us glued to the screen for so long that we are sick of televised sports for another year when it's over. Luckily or unluckily the Olympics were there to fill this gaping hole in our lives.European Olympic coverage in Sweden was entirely different than in the U.S. On the plus side, there was no Bob Costas and no tear-jerker biographic sketches of athletes popping up after 5 minutes of actual sporting event coverage. And there was coverage of all sorts of crazy sports like hand ball, air rifle, and trampolining that I never knew existed. I mean, trampolining?! It's like having Olympic jump-roping or dodge ball.
On the other hand, there were almost no interviews with big-name athletes and certainly none with their families (I mean if you were Michael Phelps' mom, would YOU be chatting with someone from Eurosport?). Also, the graphics on Eurosport were horrendous, and there were many, MANY times when it was unclear who the medal-winners were because they never actually put up the names on screen. Bad Eurosport. Oh, and it was all in Swedish.
And here's a random, funny tidbit: In Europe, the medal tally was sorted by gold medal winners, which meant China topped the list from day one. In the U.S. the tally was sorted by total medals which put you-know-who at the top.
Posts
4 comments:
In the good old days of the Cold War, when the USSR was winning more medals than the US, but the US was winning more Golds, the US persuaded everybody that sorting on the basis of # of Golds was a grand idea. Everybody else has since stuck with this approach, except the US ... who now want to be more socialist about it.
Besides, it was an American (Harry Parker, Harvard coach) who said that "winning isn't the most important thing; it's the only thing."
On that basis, those funky Europeans carry the day.
Don't mock trampolining. Coming from the nation that inflicted softball on us ... jeez louise, that's like having beach bats or basketball as an Olympic sport.
What!? Basketball is an Olympic sport. Aaaarrrghhhhh.....
I couldn't bring myself to watch any of the Olympics here in the States - it just didn't seem right that I would be able to understand what they were saying!
NBC managed to reduce our Olympic viewing significantly. In addition to their US-centric, feature-infested programming (and Bob Costas' awful dye job), they tape-delayed everything to the Pacific Time Zone but the men's basketball final. So while significant finals were happening in West Coast prime time, we were reduced to hitting the refresh button on a browser to find out what was happening. On the plus-side, once it was tape-delayed it was easy to wait until the next day to review on Tivo and skip all the commercials. -EM
Post a Comment