Bravo to Bravo (some olympic comments).

Some commentary of the olympics. First it was nice to see that Comcast, the local cable supplier had actually added a special "Olympics" button to their digital cable menu to make it easier to determine what channels were showing what events. The disappointment is that there are so few of them (compared to six channels all showing baseball simultaneously on Sunday) that it probably wasn't really needed. It was great to see that the Bravo channel were actually showing competition between individuals and teams of competitors that weren't American. Can you imagine that? There are actually people competing in the games who aren't from the United States!

From watching the coverage on NBC you would have a hard time believing it. Why aren't we seeing coverage of the best performers in each sport rather that the the events where an American is present? And why do the NBC commentators insist on giving you an equal amount of coverage on the background of the competitor and the hard trials and tribulations that they've gone through to get to the games, as they do to the actual competitors performance there, where they are typically getting their butt whopped by somebody else from some insignificant third world country, who if truth be known, had an even harder time being there?

Where are the neutral commentators? I watched the U.S. basketball "team" on Sunday being soundly thrashed by Puerto Rico. It wasn't until near the end of the match that it was sinking in to the commentators, that the U.S. weren't going to come back and win, and that Puerto Rico were actually the better team. What about those U.S. basketball players? Wasn't the lost to Italy an early warning sign? The coach made it clear that he did not need any wakeup calls. Hmmm. Maybe he's right. He needs a team that wants to win. He needs players who can aggressively go out there, play as a team and be willing to commit to their own plays and not keep trying to pass the ball to the older more experienced players and expect them to do everything. As Vince Lombardi said, "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm". I wish it was true. That includes you coach. I wonder if U.S. professional basketball players can't perform unless there is a large monetary sum involved.

Maybe I'm just not the norm here. Perhaps this kind of coverage is exactly what most Americans want to see. I realize there is limited Olympic TV air time during the daytime on NBC and most of it is on during the middle of the night, but would it hurt to actually show more sport, less lead up, more of the top performances, less of the "well there is an American in it so we're going to show it" and do it all in a neutral way?

What do other Americans think? Yes I am an American now, albeit a very new one. Am I just way off base here? What's the Olympic coverage like in other countries? I seem to remember that the BBC did a pretty good job, but that might have been because there were less British athletes performing so they had plenty of time to show the best from other countries (half joking).

[Technorati Tag: Olympics]

[Technorati Tag: TV]

( Aug 17 2004, 03:30:27 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [8]