Thursday, August 21, 2008

Watching Olympics All Night Long

Do you wonder why this blog has been quiet? Too much TV watching, and I blame the Olympics. Every night, there is at least one or two sports that I just have to watch. Here are the results of my Olympic TV watching marathon.

First the bad:

  • I have been exercising patience in order to ignore NBC’s incredible bias in their commentary of almost every event in the Olympics. However, I am losing my patience and will start foaming at the mouth any minute now.

  • And why do NBC reporters want to tell the TV audience the results of what NBC is about to show? For example, I was watching the women’s team gymnastics. “And this is where it all went wrong for the Chinese team,” said the commentator, while the Chinese gymnast took a deep breath preparing to do a vault. Sure enough, she landed on her butt. Later I caught a glimpse of the qualifying rounds for 110 meter men’s hurdles. “You are about to see a false start,” pronounced the commentator about 3 seconds before the gun fired. Why do we, the TV audience, have to be told what we are about to see?
And the good:

  • While everyone seems to be in love with Michael Phelps, I am in love with his dog.

  • Synchronized diving mesmerized me, while other people I know found it absolutely hypnotic. (Maybe I did too.)

  • Women’s marathon: 1) what happened to Deena Kastor, and 2) what happened to the fastest pregnant woman on earth, also known as Paula Radcliffe?

  • Did you know that women’s beach volleyball uniform requirements are specified down to centimeters, and restrict the maximum coverage the uniforms can provide! In other words, these women cannot wear more clothing if they wanted to, not even tight shorts!!!

  • Figure skating should be a part of all Olympics games, because gymnastics, the seemingly equivalent summer sport, is just not the same.

1 comment:

jcnemecek said...

The US Olympic coverage is definitely obsessed with 1) failures/faults and 2) weepy human interest stories.

I listened to an interview with one of the women's volleyball players explaining the reason behind the teensy uniform. She said it is primarily to prevent the accumulation of sand stuck to sweat in unpleasant places.