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…
