I’ve really enjoyed the unprofessionalism of the snowboarding commentary. A major problem with a lot of the non-football sports coverage is the commentating is so bloody dull; even when they get excited it’s all seems very safe. When someone can make people flying down a snow covered hill at 100mp/h on waxed planks sound boring, they’re doing something wrong.
But then it wouldn’t be the BBC if it wasn’t sanitised for the upper-middle class’s snooty dispositions.
You know who has awesome coverage of the Olympics? NBC. On Sunday morning I decided to flip away from CBC’s coverage of whatever was live and see what NBC had on. What they were covering was…an infomercial. There were at least 3 hours of infomercials on NBC.
I just checked and NBC isn’t covering the Olympics until 3pm EST. CBC has Canada vs USA in women’s hockey.
I haven’t even bothered with the Olympics this year.
NBC were worthless on the summer games I caught here in 2008 and 2012, and then I saw that the opening ceremony was time shifted again.
So I haven’t even bothered trying to watch anything. I assume their coverage is 99% interviews with USA competitors, and 1% actual sports, all of which will be of US athletes.
I caught some of NBC’s coverage of the games last night and was a little surprised at what seemed to be the now-standard Olympic advertisement process: Visa-ad with Boneylegs Magillicutty (a top Super-G skier), then, a P&G ad featuring…Boneylegs Magillicutty followed by the third [insert car company] advert focused on who else but Boneylegs Magillicutty. I’ve come to realize that big advertisement contracts are the real win for Olympic competitors, but it seemed so sad to me.
I was watching the Snowboarding semi-finals with my brother, who’d also been watching the coverage that morning and had already told me that Shawn whats-his-face had failed to win gold. What I figured out shortly thereafter was that NBC just happened to show the bio coverage of the Swiss guy who did win the gold. It’s Olympic coverage tuned to eke out maximum joy because gosh, we just saw that guy’s family and he looked so nice and now he won! So much for the joy of victory, the agony of defeat…
Haters gonna hate.
[Wow. Such Haters. So hate.]
I think NBC should show a lot fewer commercials and essentially air the games non-stop, based on their exclusive contract, but my wife is a big fan and has had it on; it’s honestly been pretty good. I’ve seen lots of speedskating, women’s biathlon, the men’s skiathlon, all of which have essentially no Americans.
For most of these sports, the average person knows nothing about the competitors, and often very little about the sport. I think the commentating has had a good mix of experienced athletes who can talk about the event, the difficulty, and the people with knowledge.
I think the worse part is that to get a video feed on NBC you need to subscribe to a TV service.
I usually go to the CBC website to stream the events - they often don’t have commentary, but I rarely have the sound on so I don’t care. The only event you need sound for is figure skating, and I’d rather open a vein that watch that (sadly my family disagrees).
All the other events tell the story in the actions of the participants. And it is fun, though I tend to feel for the people who don’t win (being a parent it just kills me to see these kids in tears).
the BBC (and all established broadcasters) are trying to put the genie back into the bottle. snowboarding and skateboarding are sports that from the beginning had all of their tricks named and video coverage produced by the practitioners themselves (distributed direct to home video,) and without any central governing body calling the shots (NCAA, NBA, NFL, etc.) The way the BBC’s coverage sounded was still tame, but it was more-or-less how it was supposed to sound.
NBC and most other outlets always sound like they’re Leonard Bernstein commenting on the new Jay-Z single: “another entry by Jay-z, once again utilizing the common 4/4 time-signature so de-reguire for rap music…” when it’s supposed to be Sway or whoever saying “it’s off the chain, baby!”
also, can a Brit help me out?
“riding switch [back-to-front] is like writing left-handed while wearing a chip hat and being attacked by seagulls”.
what the hell is a “chip hat”?
“Chips” are what Britons call french fries*, the traditional food of highly aggressive seagulls since Before Time Began. Imagine a hat made of fries.
*Pomme Frittes if you’re French.
Riding switch is interesting. You’d think it would be no big deal, but apparently it’s considered quite difficult for most boarders. Thus, the hyperbole in describing it. But one of my children is the only right-hander in the family. She’s also the only boarder. As a wee one, she kept trying to do things left-handed because that’s what she saw her mother do. I used to have bizarre conversations with her: it’s OK to be different, sweetie…there’s nothing wrong with being right-handed. There was no one around to show her how to be right handed until she went to preschool. So it turns out she’s much more ambidextrous than most righties. This has translated into her being seen as a “baller” (apparently the latest version of “awesome”) on the board because switching is easy peasy for her.
Basically, she went through what is normal for lefties. There’s a reason lefties are over-represented in sports.
the first time you 180 and keep rolling, it’s fuckin weird. the first time you rock off the coping of a ramp and roll back in, it’s really fuckin weird. but it’s so useful! you can flow so much easier.
also, lefty reporting in :^)
I was already to dismiss these games because of the host country being homophobic, corrupt and just basically morally askew; but then due to circumstances beyond my control (if I had left the room I would have had to given up the card game I was in); suddenly the TV showed snowboarders riding pipes and flipping off ramps and maybe trying to tap a russian doll’s head. I was genuinely amazed.
My guess is a hat made out of french fries – which would explain the seagull attack.
and @Medievalist
I suppose I should have worked that out, but I was laboring under the misconception that he was describing an actual hat that people actually wear, not the equivalent of saying “running through a wolf’s den wearing pants made out of salami.” I mean, I knew they call fries “chips”, but not qualifying that it was an idea that the interlocutor made up in the moment made me think a “chip hat” was… i dunno, like slang for a crown of thorns or something.
also, I’m from inland, so gulls have never attacked my fries.
it seems like a terrible analogy to me, but I’m from Tennessee. We say shit like “I haven’t had that much fun since the hogs ate my brother,” when in fact, hogs never ate my brother. I never even had a brother.
But if you had, it would have been fun.
Are you sure? Perhaps you had a twin… Do family members talk in hushed tones around you whenever the subject of hogs comes up?
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