On watching the Olympics

I love the Winter Olympics. I may love them even more than the Summer Olympics, since I don't care much about most running events. What I have noticed about the Winter sports, though, is that they are WAY more dangerous than the summer events. I mean, obviously we all know that the luge is not safe. But also, what about speed skating? Those blades? And even just regular figure skating can lead to injury, especially when skiing in pairs. And ski jumping? I don't know how much that helmet can help if you mistime a jump and land on your head, you know?

Of course, this makes sense. Summer weather lends itself to basically doing whatever you want, mostly on your own two feet. Winter weather and the attendant snow and ice require all sorts of funky contraptions and strange adaptations. Plus, snow and ice are slippery. So of course Winter events are more dangerous. Still, I love the Winter Olympics and have really been looking forward to watching them.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter (and haven't un-followed me after my 20-30 tweets of rage on Friday night) probably know during the opening ceremonies, I was a little upset at NBC's decision to air the ceremonies on a delay for those of us not on EST. I feel worse for West Coasters, though--they had a much longer delay than we did.

Coverage seems to have aligned since then, at least a bit--I'm not sure if we're still on a delay or not. I am really enjoying NBC's commentators, all of whom seem to really care about and have experience in the sport in question. (For example: during the biathlon, someone asked if the course was too easy, and one of the commentators had actually just skied it himself the other day, and was able to respond with great knowledge and insight that someone like, say, Tom Brokaw could never have attained.)

HOWEVER. NBC's coverage, as a network? Blows. I don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to experience other countries' televised Olympic coverage, but it blows ours out of the water. I was living in France during the 2002 Olympics, and the way it worked was fabulous. Channels had selectable thumbnails of all the events going on simultaneously, and you could pick which sport you wanted to watch in full screen. Events were re-aired later in case you wanted to see something you missed the first time. There are very few, if any, commercials. You see all the competitors and watch the competition unfold in a logical manner. Torsten says German coverage is similar.

Let's compare this to NBC, shall we? They show a few things on their other networks, but we don't get USA, CNBC, or MSNBC in HD, so that's very frustrating for us. In any case, the program you watch gives you no choice about which events you'll see and in what order. They deliberately hold the good events until prime time, and the most popular events are used as leverage. The figure skating (which I assume is the most popular) gets interspersed throughout the entire evening's telecast, basically forcing people who want to see it to watch the full program to make sure they don't miss anything.

They show only a handful of the athletes, and a disproportionate number of American competitors, including those who have no shot at a medal. With the men's mogul qualifying round, they didn't even show the top-scoring guy's run. And they showed a figure skating pair's performance but not their scores.

Plus, they seem to have a new set of commercials every three minutes.

Basically, NBC is driving me crazy. A delay plus insane jumping back and forth plus very limited coverage plus American-heavy coverage plus tons of commercials? Basically, what it comes down to is that their coverage of the Olympic Games isn't about an optimal viewing experience for those of us who actually want to watch... it's about maximizing ratings and cashing in as much as possible. And that's really sad for those of us who would really like to be able to just watch the Games as they happen.