Before getting into my rant about the coverage of swimming and gymnastics, here are my observations of a few other events.
Baseball: USA loses its first round match against Korea. Supposedly the quintessential American sport, baseball has taken on a seriously international flavor – whether you’re looking at the countries of origin of professional baseball players in the States, or how the USA does in world competitions. Is its imperialism coming back to bite the US in the balls?
Softball: In softball, on the other hand, the USA women are kicking ridiculous butt. First Jenny Finch and then Cat Osterman pitched Olympic no-hitters. Has anyone seen these matches on TV? I sure the hell haven’t. The baseball rout of the men, though, was shown from start to finish.
Judo: Congratulations to Ronda Rousey of Santa Monica, California, who became the first U.S. woman to win a judo medal with a bronze in the 70-kilogram competition. Only by accident did I discover that she tied for bronze with Edith Bosch of the Netherlands. That hasn’t been mentioned. Can anyone name the gold (Masae Ueno of Japan) and silver (Anaysi Hernandez of Cuba) winners? Oops, they’re not Americans so NBC seems to have neglected to show us their matches or even their faces. I couldn’t find any photos of the gold/silver winners, so here’s one of Ronda.
Single Kayak: Anyone who can’t watch all day on the secondary broadcast networks is missing the excitement of such events as the women’s single kayak through plunging, roiling white water. Slovakia’s Elena Kaliska is the defending champion and she’s facing former gold-medalist Stepanka Hilgertova (age 40) of the Czech Republic, who apparently trains with her 20-year-old son.
Beach Volleyball (women’s): The relief! Thank gawd the Americans have finally taken the damned gold and will no longer be clogging up prime time. I’ve learned more than I wanted to know about the men in their lives, their wedding gowns and rings and their invincibility (although they have certainly been unbeatable). The endless bikini body-part shots have put me off sand (photo) forever. Why has this relatively new and minor sport been given such endless primetime coverage? Is this a sport or an excuse for these cameramen (sic) and producers to be naughty?
Swimming: The coverage of the swimming is insufferable. As my media-savvy friend said, Haven’t they heard about computer graphics? Here’s some of the stuff that bothers me the most:
They use no graphic (Why not an arrow? a dot?) to point to the swimmer they’re talking about during the races.
Last night they showed endless preliminary rounds of endless different swimming events (at least the men’s) including repetitive warm-ups and goggle adjustments – at the expense of coverage of the men’s gymnastic all-around competition!
They rarely discuss the quality of the strokes or explain the difference in the skills needed for different events, but they show us lap turns over and over until we are dizzy and dazed.
They fetishize the talented Michael Phelps who, while doing amazing things in the pool, is in a position to get so many medals because there are so many different swimming events. The most the Venus sisters, for example, could possibly get is two medals: singles and doubles. NBC is hyping him - at age 23, in the middle of an Olympics – as the greatest athlete in the history of sport!?! Didn’t they ever hear of Jesse Owens? Martina Navratilova? Pele? Or The Greatest, Muhammed Ali?
NBC’s irritating habit of putting up their “Live” logo, even when they are showing clips from four years ago, is particularly prominent during their exhausting swimming coverage.
And strangest of all: Where are the crowds? We can hear them cheering, we can see them as little dots of color from a distance, but NBC does not pan the crowd - not unless they're focusing on Bush, Phelp's mother or a famous coach. I want to watch the celebrations, I'd love to see what the general Chinese crowd wears to the Olympics and I want to feel part of the global Olympics fan base. This erasure of the audience is downright rude.
Michael Phelps: Allow me a sub-category for the man who is totally dominating the men’s swimming competitions, sometimes winning two gold medals within an hour or so. As energized as he seems to be by the team events, one wonders how he keeps going, event after event, gold after gold, pressure after pressure. I suspect that he lives like a fish – only swimming, eating, sleeping – and not just during the Olympics. In one race, his goggles filled up on one side as soon as he dove in, so despite breaking the world record (yet again) and winning the gold medal (yet again), he felt frustrated because he could have gone faster. Phelps is racing against himself at this point.
Gymnastics: What’s up with NBC’s constant close-up coverage of one of the broadest stages in the world? I stayed up Wednesday night until, well, Thursday morning to follow the should-have-been-riveting men’s all-around individual gymnastics competition, but it was NBC that blew my mind. It is a good thing that I am not homicidal towards TV screens or we’d have a glass problem on the carpet.
I would greatly prefer not to have to talk about NBC and their impossibly irrelevant coverage – I want to talk about the Olympics, the athletes and their events. NBC however is making that almost impossible. Why not just turn off the sound to avoid their off-topic chatter, you ask, and just watch the sport? Because they do not show us the sport. Let me explain.
Picture the venue (at left) in which Gymnastics takes place. It is a huge stadium, with areas for each apparatus. There are groups who rotate among these stations, and in these groups are the two most highly-rated gymnasts of each participating country. If you are watching gymnastic competitions, you will be astounded to hear that there are a total of 267 competitors. You would be astounded because you never get a peek at most of them. Not Mohamed Srour (Egypt), not Ana Rente (Portugal), not Thi Ngan Thuong Do (Vietnam) nor Wania Monteiro (Cape Verde).
Last night NBC decided, incorrectly, from the start that the all-around was a contest between the USA’s Jonathan Horton, who finished 9th, and the eventual winner, China’s Yang Wei. In the middle of their coverage, NBC suddenly admitted getting caught “off-guard” and – too late for the viewers – began covering France’s Benoit Caranobe (Bronze) and increased coverage of Silver medalist Kohei Uchimura from Japan.
And what did their coverage involve? We follow their favorites as they wrap and unwrap their wrists, as they chalk up their palms or as they sit, with very little facial affect, waiting endlessly for their slow-coming results. And we watch this over and over and over. The camera stays close on faces that barely change or that momentarily break, smiling into the camera nearly stuck up their schnoz, while all around them other, hidden from hungry viewers, gymnasts from everywhere are having their chance to compete on the global stage.
We want to see the competitors from the smaller countries. We want to know the spectrum of achievement that qualifies a gymnast to compete. We want to see the behavior of those athletes who don’t come out of the massive sports machines of the richest countries on earth. We want a wide view of the multiple disciplines happening simultaneously. We want NBC to use the time to generously include the world.
And when NBC’s favorites (and in this case they picked poorly except for the obviously unstoppable Yang Wei) perform, do they name and explain the moves, do they tell us what is involved in holding the body parallel to the floor on the rings or comment on how they learn to do those twisting, spinning dismounts? No. These criminally negligent commentators chat. They do not comment on the routine or outline the rules or criteria. They talk about other competitors or what they saw at the market. They don’t teach and they don’t illuminate. They blather.
Of course, because of past problems with “subjective” judging, they have changed gymnastics judging systems – for the worse. Now it is all about deductions – not about achievements. Competitors start with a maximum score and each imperfection takes away a prescribed fraction of a point. The judges – and NBC’s commentators – aren’t watching for creativity, innovation or elegance: they are only watching for errors. It’s not about the fearless acrobatics in the air or the extraordinary degree of strength; it’s about a hop on the dismount. What a terrible blow to gymnastics this new judging system is.
Trampoline: Of all my frustrations, the gravest is my failure to find out if and when this glorious event is going be covered. The person who can point me towards coverage – TV or online – wins a public declaration of my gratitude on my blog – one that is as under-rated and unrecognized as the very entertaining Synchronized Swimming, slated for broadcast on the 18th at 3:00 am.
I love your commentaries. Thanks so much. I've been watching the olympics on CBC (Canadian Broadcast Company) for the most part and I think they better than NBC.
They still feature their own athletes more than an international field, but the commentaries are better. And I'd just as soon know about Canadian athletes as US ones.
And they do draw white circles onscreen around the athletes they refer to. Or maybe that's NBC. I don't remember.
Anyway, great posts.
Posted by: liza | 14 August 2008 at 23:29
Fabulous post Katz. Two comments: Michael Phelps wins his 7th gold by one one-hundredth of a second in a race where he looked completely out of it at the half-way point, and NBC doesn't even show the reaction of the swimmer he edged out (Cavic of Serbia). I honestly cannot tell you who won the bronze medal...
Men's beach volleyball...much more interesting than the womens event. As I watched I was trying to figure out why. Then it struck me. At the end of an hour of coverage I knew nothing about these men's love lives, I hadn't been treated to crotch shots every few seconds, and I had learned about how the athletes select partners, their training regime, who specializes in which type of shot and the different strategies each team was employing to win the match. Sexism in sports? Surely not!
Posted by: Gema Gray | 16 August 2008 at 07:35