More on the Olympics

Being a hockey fan I'm unfortunately well acquainted with the quality of NBC's sports coverage. So I'm not exactly surprised by the fact that the Olympic coverage has been obnoxious. I kind of just fast forwarded through the non-sports stuff and tried to ignore the fact that most of the announcing is bad, incredibly repetitive, or both. I say mostly because the diving analyst is delightfully nasty. I like her.

Then, a few days ago, I read Claudia LaRocco's post about the Olympics in which she states that the packaging of the games, "does a terrible disservice to athletics and to culture." Now I had just been thinking that the packaging of the games was a disservice to me because it makes me want to bang my head into my coffee table, but I don't really disagree with her. The opportunity to see the best athletes in the world competing against each other in a wide swathe of sports is thrilling and it should be possible to provide compelling and worthwhile coverage of such an event. NBC's coverage is occasionally compelling but only because the competition itself is capable, at times, of overcoming the fatuousness of the network. More often than not, though, enjoying the sports requires ignoring the commentary.

Then, today, the Counter Critic put up a great two part post on China and the Olympics (Part One, Part Two) which looks at the divide between the real China and the illusion that China wants to present. An illusion that NBC is unfortunately helping to promote. And he uses Anne Carson and her explication of erotic desire to do it. Which is really pretty awesome. I don't have much to say, but check it out.

Edit: And the IPB ladies have written a letter to NBC pointing out that we so didn't wait 4 years to see features on Pandas and spend quality time in-studio with Bob Costas. I am seriously missing CBC right now. Chalk that up as an advantage to living in Buffalo. My dad's been all about CBC this year.

On a more sports oriented note, I'm loving watching the swimming and squirming through the women's gymnastics. I loved watching the gymnastics when I was little. I wanted to be able to do all that crazy stuff and my sister and I would pretend to be gymnasts and do tricks and such. So it's sad that when I watch it now I spend so much of my time cringing.