How to Cover the Olympics on Television

Yesterday as we congregated at 7 am for our birding outing the mother of one of our younger participants said, bleary-eyed, how hard it was for her to get up because she was hooked on the Olympics. “But it would go much faster if they cut out the advertising,” she said in her sleepy Kiwi accent.

Well, yes, it would. Numenius and I don’t have a TV and regularly deplore American coverage of, say, soccer events where the actual match is interrupted for ads. I don’t think this happens as much as it used to but it’s irritating to the point of madness and we watch Univisión, in Spanish, for soccer, at one of the local Mexican restaurants. (I notice ESPN has at least hired British commentators for soccer, who discuss the match and not which high school the striker’s grandmother attended, a clear improvement.)

Our dinner at Fuzio’s last night was outdoors, but the TV was on inside and featured nonstop non-coverage of the Olympics. This is more or less how it goes:

a) Only ever show events in which Americans are predicted to win a medal. (You don’t want to embarrass those predicted to do less well by showing their failure on primetime. The thought that people might be interested in the sport inherently—gasp—never occurs to the programmers, apparently.)
b) Only ever show the performances of these predicted American medal winners and at most their two closest rivals (you want to be “fair and balanced,” after all). The exception to this is when more than one American is predicted to win a medal, in which case you show their “interaction,” taking pains to elaborate on their team spirit or their rivalry, depending.
c) Only ever allow 15 seconds out of every 15 minutes to show an actual “event” (well, the tiny piece of it featuring the performances as outlined in [b], above). The remainder of the 15-minute chunk is broken down as follows:

• Advertising.

• Fancy Olympics swirling golden graphics that wrap around before and after anything else, such as advertising.

• A talking head, either in the studio (male, in a somber suit) surrounded by golden swirling graphics, or in the sweltering Beijing smog (female, in a pretty printed suit), giving their no doubt finest insights into the event that has just been or is just about to be shown for 15 seconds.

• The sob story. The athlete, the athlete’s grandmother’s corns that prevented her from getting gold in 1948, the fact that the athlete was dropped on the head as a small child. The sob story can last way beyond 15 seconds: some last even 5 minutes, an apparent lifetime in TV. The sob story can be repeated many times over the course of a day’s Olympic “coverage.” It is of far greater importance than the event itself, even when the gold medal is won by an American, who is then shown welling up as the stars and stripes are raised (with the voiceover repeating the sob story). (The sob story can be extended to any athlete of any nationality who doesn’t win his or her event and can be captured on camera crying, whether or not they had a difficult childhood. Since most athletes don’t, in fact, win, the number of sob stories available increases exponentially over the course of two weeks, leading to a scheduling crisis and the emergency hiring of a sob-story über-editor who overdoses on pizza and Red Bull and who needs, and gets, some quiet time at the end of August.)

• The raising of the aforementioned stars and stripes.

• More advertising, bracketed by golden swirling graphics. The advertising can and frequently does pick up on a sob story or on a pseudo-sob-story, the raising of the stars and stripes, and the teared-up athlete on the podium. (It never focuses on the losing kind of sob story, however.)

• Irrelevant local color, such as footage of the Great Wall, zooming in on white people buying, you guessed it, Coca Cola: see, they’re capitalists like us really.

I am at an absolute loss to see how people who are avid Olympics followers—and it seems there are a lot of them—can keep their sanity or even their dinner when pelted with this insulting cack. Even more mystifying is how the athletes themselves can tolerate the inane interview questions or the fact that they don’t stage a massive Free-Tibet-Style Protest against NBC (or CBS or ABC in other years; let’s be fair and balanced, here). The athletes love their sports — revere them, respect their rivals, have trained their entire lives for this moment — and it must be infuriating to watch their work being trivialized so moronically, or even worse, to be forced to participate in the trivialization. I’d go nuts.

The sad thing, folks, is this: there are some really superb sports commentators in the United States. Some of them are even still alive. They must watch this dreck and weep, providing yet more material for the ravenous sob-story writers. You can just see it now: “Jon Miller, forced to watch twenty minutes of Olympics coverage, collapsed in a tearful heap and required sedation. He used to be a much-admired baseball commentator…”