
All right, so I know you don’t read this blog for Olympic commentary, just as you’re not going to fire up ESPN.com to find quotes from Demetruce McNeal’s high school coach. But when writing is as much of a habit as it is for your humble Auburn Blogger, and he spends more time over a two week period watching one particular sporting event than he does sleeping, eventually push comes to shove … and thoughts have to put down on cyberpaper.
So you’re getting a collection of mostly random Olympic observations this afternoon, and you’ll just have to deal. Sorry. But here we go:
Dude, you ask me, the Winter Olympics are just better than they used to be. They’ve always been fun. But it feels like they’ve never been quite this all-consumingly kick-ass, and there’s two primary reasons:
1. There’s more to watch. A lot of the traditional Winter Games events–the alpine downhills, hockey tournament, even biathlon now that NBC’s actually deigning to show it to us–are as much fun to watch as ever. But a lot of those traditional events are also of the repetitive, time-trial variety, and just aren’t that interesting past the first few attempts. The final two or three luge runs or ski jumps can have an awful lot of drama to them, but the 20 prior … not so much.
But look at the events introduced since, say, the ’88 Calgary games: the moguls, which combine the danger and speed of alpine skiing with the acrobatics of freestyle; snowboard- and ski-cross, which, I mean, why did we not have four people racing side-by-side years ago?; the men’s halfpipe, the best three or four practitioners of which are just eye-popping; curling, more on which in a second; and short track speed skating, which puts a knot in my stomach every single time there’s an American on the ice and has resulted in an unnatural hatred for the nation of South Korea.
I love the long-track version as much as the next guy (more, probably), but yes, 30 minutes of long track and 30 minutes of, say, snowboard cross elimination rounds is a better hour of television than 60 minutes of skating.
2. The Americans are better. This is probably a negative for the rest of the world, but screw those guys, I want to watch Americans and I want to watch Americans who have medal chances, and not the kind of “well, if the first 26 guys all came down with food poisoning last night, the American will have a shot at bronze” chances we used to see in cross-country, biathlon, the sliding events, etc. It would be one thing if the U.S. was topping the medal count solely on halfpipe sweeps and the Bode-Vonn alpine tag team, but ye gods, the U.S. has two silver medals in Nordic combined, both of them won after heart-stopping last-second dashes for gold. (The other teams won the gold, unfortunately, but still: if you were bored by either one of those finishes, why were you watching in the first place?) Tim Burke was in medal position halfway through one of the biathlon events before badly misfiring at one of his shooting stations. The hockey team’s good again. Ice dancing. Moguls. Good old men’s speed skating.
These days it almost doesn’t matter what you’re watching; you’re going to have the chance to watch and root for an American. And that does matter.
Everyone take a moment to thank NBC for their coverage. Now take a moment to beat them with sticks. On the one hand, is there any arguing with the notion that overall Olympic coverage is the best it’s ever been? Every hockey match has been televised. Ditto every American curling match, start to finish. Entire biathlon and cross country races have been aired, something I’m 99 percent certain is a first. Save Mary Carillo and Jimmy Roberts’ cheeseball human-interest segments, the broadcasting talent has never been stronger, in my opinion; everyone from Bob Costas and Bob Costas’s hair dye right on down through to old pros like Tom Hammond and Al Trautwig and ski jumping color man Jeff Hastings–who can somehow point out something different and useful for every jump in a series of 30–has been rock solid. And it’s nearly all in HD. Compare this smorgasbord to, say, CBS’s butchery of the ’94 and ’98 Games, and we’re talking about light years of improvement.
But there’s still light years to go, thanks to NBC’s absolutely infuriating insistence on tape-delaying and squishing into primetime anything they think Joe the Plumber might be remotely interested in watching. Nevermind that the USA/CNBC/MSNBC block of networks give them a perfect opportunity to air the men’s downhill or the U.S. Nordic combined team’s run to silver, to name two events they eviscerated in the name of squeezing them into tiny blocks between figure skating coverage. There’s one person out there who wouldn’t watch the primetime broadcast without the afternoon event in question but will keep themselves unspoiled to watch it later, and NBC’s going to make absolutely sure that one person watches in prime time. A nation of sports fans can just go screw themselves.
There’s always griping about the human interest garbage and the avalanche of figure skating, but I can’t really blame NBC for giving their primetime broadcast the broadest appeal possible; that’s where their financial bread is buttered. And you have to give them some level of credit–more than they’ve gotten from most bloggers–for the advancements they’ve made since the ’98 nadir. But it costs them nothing to just air daytime events in the daytime and recap them later. The diehards are happy, the figure skating-lovin’ casuals are happy, everyone’s happy. Until they wake up, NBC can go bite rocks no matter how many curling matches they air. Speaking of which …
Curling = addiction. I know just typing those two words with an equal sign between them will probably get me stopped at the Alabama border and deported to Bemidji next time I try to come home, but it’s true. Brian Cook explains many of the reasons why–the multitude of strategy decisions, the hilariously incoherent screaming, Eve Muirhead and the like–but I’ll add a few more:
— The drama. 10 or 11 ends and up to three hours of competition can come down to one throw of the rock. Make it, you win. Miss it, you lose. If it’s a particularly tough shot, the slide of the rock down the ice is no different from the hang of a basketball in the air when the buzzer’s already sounded.
— Again, NBC put together a crackerjack announcing team. They stole Don Duguid and Colleen Jones from the CBC to do color, and both are perfect: respectful of the curlers on the ice but mincing no words when they screwed up (as the Americans did so, so often), never talking down to the curling-n00b audience but only rarely lapsing into obscurity, both delightfully Canadian. Play-by-play guy Andrew Catalon has hammered some of the same notes a little too often if (like me) you’ve watched match after match after match, but overall he’s done a fine job of welcoming new viewers and then getting the hell out of Duguid’s and Jones’ way.
— The shots. You didn’t see them very often watching the U.S., but occasionally the Canadians or the Brits would uncork a shot that seemed to defy the laws of physics as they would pertain to stones and 80 feet of ice and inertia. The best of them involved banging one stone into another into another into another, like something from those billiards trick-shot competitions you see on ESPN, only in the Olympics … on ice … from 80 feet away … with 42-pound stones.
For all of that, some of the off-ice hubbub was almost as interesting, especially where the hapless Americans were concerned. Poor John Shuster missed four potential game-winners over the course of three matches, then got benched–despite the fact that he was the guy who put the team together and won the Olympic trials in the first place–and complained to NBC’s interviewers about getting blasted on Twitter.A U.S. Curling official later griped about osme of the negative press that greeted his team’s rock-bottom performance. (Seriously: the U.S. finished dead last in both the men’s and women’s standings, 10th out of 10.)
No doubt some of the press and some of the comments about Shuster–a bartender by trade–were unnecessarily cruel (perhaps even mine), but … dude, isn’t this progress? Since when has anyone even begun to care about how well the Americans have done at curling? Anger and disappointment’s better than ambivalence, right? Besides, Mr. Shuster: you put on a uniform emblazoned with the Olympic logo and the initials “U.S.A.,” and you’d better perform your best. You don’t have to win, but you have to be your best or we’re going to be unhappy with how you’re representing your country. And by your own admission: that was not your best.
Other assorted thoughts: By this point, I’m not really rooting for Apolo Ohno–overhyped and maybe a little more pleased with himself than he should be–than I am rooting against the machine-like Koreans. If Ohno gets demerits for not really living up to his billing, I will give him credit for being just about the only guy over the last three Olympics who’s stood up to the Korean onslaught … I’m serious about biathlon. Three or four skiers pull into the shooting station, and whoever shoots best wins the gold; it’s riveting stuff … The best thing about the U.S.-Canada hockey match? (well, besides it being maybe the most exciting game of hockey I’ve ever seen?) Being able to hate the Canadians. Those chances are few and far between.
Photo via this well-done LA Times story on the Nordic combined team silver.
Hi, my name is mark and I have become a curlaholic.
I don’t understand why, but I am fascinated by Curling as well. Honestly I think that it’s because A) I really believe that if I had access to ice in my backyard in SE Alabama, I could practice enough to make the Olympic team at 45 and B) Curling likes like something you could do while drinking beer.
Curling is the greatest Olympic sport EVER.
I read on Yahoo, biathlon is the most watched W/Olympic sport in Europe.
Screw thanking NBC for their coverage. I don’t care if they’ve shown more on different channels, their coverage still SUCKS. Seriously, figure skating and/or ice dancing (is there a difference?) on prime time on NBC every night?!? Their argument is because they get the most ratings. Well hell, throw anything on during primetime on your network channel and it will get the best ratings. Most of the other events they show on NBC are judged…not won (do this in the summer Olympics with gymnastics and diving). Most of the hockey games have been on CNBC, which isn’t in HD on a lot of carriers. Curling is addictive, but does it need to be in HD? And the commercial breaks are too many, too often, and too long. Seriously, I counted several times the other night where they would show 30 seconds of action before cutting to 3 minutes of commercials! NBC cares nothing about the spirit of the games. They only care about making a quick buck, quality be damned. I’m sorry, they will only get jeers from me.
Well the reason NBC’s doing so horribly is because, from what I read somewhere, they lose tons of money on the Winter Olympics — the cost of covering all of it, plus putting regular programming on like four different channels on hold for three weeks — but the summer Olympics make so much money that it makes up for it, and apparently the two come in a package deal type thing. So they’re desperate to make the Winter Olympics as efficient as possible, and apparently the big wigs over there think that the only way to do that is to just mess with everything until something works.
So, yeah, I’m tired of figure skating, I’m tired of the delays, and tired of watching the hockey on MSNBC and not on NBC in HD.
But I’ve enjoyed it so far. I don’t have the same curling infatuation as some of you guys, and I’ve entirely lost speed skating altogether (Is it over? I have no idea.), but I’ve watched a lot of stuff and enjoyed it. The hockey has been cool, Shaun White was cool, and a lot of stuff like the 4-person snowboard races that I didn’t even know about before now have caught my attention.
But I’m starting to get real pumped about hockey. I’m not sure when our semifinal game is, but I’ll be sure to look it up and watch it. A USA/Canada rematch final would be unbelievable. I hope it gets to be in prime time, and I hope it gets all the hype it deserves. It has the potential to be just as monumental as the World Cup opener against England in June.
I don’t even understand hockey, but I would get fired up for that, and I can understand the spectacle of it. Could you imagine being a big time hockey fan and seeing USA/Canada gold medal hockey? It’s basically all the NHL all-stars, take away a few Russians. It would be like watching the Pro Bowl, if the Pro Bowl mattered more than the Super Bowl.
I’ve always wondered why they don’t have a summer olympics biathlon.
Picture those skinny Nigerian dudes running with a firearm. What could be better?
Joe, eh, can’t argue with most of that. (Though curling is on CNBC, too … it’s MSNBC that I think is only rarely in HD.) But things are better than they used to be. That counts for something–not a ton, but something–in my book.
The rest of you: when Atlanta builds a rink, I’m coming home and we’re going to the Olympics. Who’s the skip?
Jerry,
You are a total fucking badass.
Love,
Brandon
If you know anything about Finnish history, the biathalon is tantamount to a national endeavor. In the Winter War (1939-40), Finnish ski teams fought Russian armored columns and had a 15-1 kill ratio. They lost and sued for peace, but a Russian General was quoted as saying “We have won just enough territory to bury our dead.”
Sisu!
Sullivan013 (Father Irish/Mother Finnish)
Brandon, thanks.
Sully, the Dutch are always nation No. 2 when it comes to my national sporting allegiances–grandparents on Dad’s side immigrated in the ’60s–but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Finns. Think it’s mostly the sweet blue-and-white color scheme, but I’ve also always appreciated that they always go toe-to-toe with the Swedes and Norwegians even though they seem to be Olympic afterthoughts.
JH, are you so bored that you have convinced yourself that curling is interesting? The health care summit had more action.
I blame our poor curling performance on the uniforms. Instead of Olympians, we looked like Blockbuster employees. Sad.
The women downhill skiers all have very nice bottoms.
On women’s curling, two words: Cheryl. Bernard. Did you see where Bill Simmons labeled her ‘The Curlgar’? Brilliant!!
Everything about Europe with the possible exception of Swiss women is overrated.
Re: “Everything about Europe with the possible exception of Swiss women is overrated.”
Spend an hour or two in an Irish bar in Dublin listening to the local musicians and sipping on your Guinness fresh from the tap. Listen to a children’s choir singing traditional carols on Christmas Eve in the central Christkindlemarkt in Salzburg or tramp the deep woods on the slopes of the Taunus Mountains north of Frankfurt. Walk the beach in Barcelona on an early summer day when the local girls are catching the morning rays, or sit in a streetside cafe in Florence with a friend over a bottle of wine.
I’ve done these and a thousand more over the course of two tours (seven years) courtesy of the US Army. You cannot know until you’ve actually been there.
Sullivan013
AE, they were a little bit plain, but I’ll take those over, say, the Canadian men’s roller-derby laser-light show shirts or the Brits’ bizarre union-jack sleeve jackets. Norway had it right: insane pants, tasteful shirts.
TigerEyez: I told the Mrs. WBE the other day, it’s really kind of unfair for Vonn to be both insanely talented AND as good-looking as she is. The rules of life ought to state that you can be one or the other, but not both. She didn’t just win the genetic lottery–she won the freaking $300 million 12-state Powerball of genetics.
Mark: That’s been the nice thing about the women’s curling … as my buddy MGoBrian told me, “even the moms are hot for moms.”
I believe MSNBC is in HD in more markets than CNBC. Most of the hockey games have been on CNBC (have seen one on NBC in the afternoon and none on MSNBC). The US/Canada game was on CNBC while womens curling was on MSNBC.