Olympics Coverage Really Stinks

I’m a sports nut, but the problem is most of the time when I turn on the Olympics coverage I rarely get to see sports. Went to watch today and endured this long piece about Australia’s participation in World War I. The bizarre thing was seeing all of these historians and the NBC commentator talking about the deaths of many thousands of Australian men in a poorly planned and disastrously executed assault on Turkey as Australia’s coming of age among nations. If that’s what it takes to be a great nation, personally I’d prefer to be part of a minor country.

Finally they got on with the women’s mountain bike competition but they seem to think people don’t want to watch this event because they kept cutting away to commercial and then back to a different part of the race or for out of context comments from the participants (what was with one of the racers being shown on a mountain talking about how peaceful it was there — who cares, I just want to see the darn race!)

This is the real problem with the tape delay — it is very obvious from the way they handle the editing of events that what you’re watching is not even a close approximation of what people at the Olympics saw. For me this reached absurd levels during the diving competiton where NBC in succession quickly showed many women making their dives where it was obvious they had edited out all of the events in between each dive because there was now way they could have dived that quickly.

If they want to do that, fine, but then cover it like ESPN’s excellent SportsCenter covers events rather than trying to make me feel like I’m watching a live event.

Oh, and NBC should fire whoever is writing Bob Costas’ material. Costas is great for live events, but he’s clearly at the mercy of inane NBC writers and is becoming painful to watch.

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