oyceter | Brief Olympic notes

I love the Olympics, despite the fact that I generally despise the nationalism that goes along with them.

On the other hand, it is very frustrating watching them in the US and having the focus be on all the US athletes, all the time. Plus, the announcers ask the stupidest questions!

ANNOUNCER: Keri Walsh, just how good does it feel to have found your wedding ring after it fell off during your game?
KERI WALSH: Oh, so good!
ME: ... DUH.

Also, besides the annoying US-centrism and the annoying faux Chinese commercials, all of which seem to feature dragons, and the horrible pronunciation of Chinese names (seriously, announcers! I know Mandarin is difficult, but it is still painful to listen to, especially for the athletes who aren't exactly new on the scene) and the desire to watch people not from the US, the focus on the US athletes is also just boring.

We all know the US is going to walk out of the Olympics with a ton of medals, right? As such, I am disgruntled and contrary and rooting for everyone else, and it feels like there is very little suspense in the broadcasts.

ETA: spoilers in comments

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1. The reason there are profiles and stuff is to bring in people who don't really like sports (ie, women) because the Olympics need to have really high ratings to payout for the network. On top of the money they spend just to cover the thing, the fee they have to pay to the IOC is insane. (This is why the coverage from other media outlets is blacked out, like, you can't watch BBC video from a US IP address.)

2. I know that most of the people on my flist are watching the US coverage, but I always feel like they get an unfair rap because everyone's coverage is about their own contenders and then whoever the gold medalists are.

3. You can stream a lot of things online; I know people who are only watching the games online.

4. The show that is going for the broadest audience possible is the prime time show. They juggle a lot of events, and pile the most popular stuff into that show. There's a lot of coverage during the day that will show entire games all the way through—tons of boxing on CNBC and I watched a lot of water polo today.

5. The other major complaint is always that not enough events are shown live (though I think with the 12 hour time difference they're trying to show stuff that happens in the morning Beijing time live here in prime time, like the men's gymnastics tonight) but I know folks in the UK who are annoyed that the BBC is showing everything live because they don't want to have to stay up until 3am to watch what they want to watch.

I don't want to come off as an NBC apologist; I think Costas can get more than a little full of himself and isn't as gracious as Jim McKay was, and obviously they're taking a lot of sportscasters who are used to covering football and hauling them to China with little more than a briefing book and some DVDs. When I was a kid in the 70s, the Olympics were 100% about the cold war, about the medals race and how many did the Sovs have v the US, how many did the Eastern bloc have v the NATO countries. It was absurd. I'm actually impressed that there isn't a lot of weirdo jingoism being attached to the wins for China. So it could be a ton worse! It's just that I hear this complaint so many times and it's like, find me the country that isn't doing this and fine, you can knock NBC. There are plenty of reasons to knock the US and the media that's here; I'm just not sure this is a fair one.

Or is it just the entire set up of athletes in country-based teams?

Are you seriously saying that women don't like sports, or ironically mocking the ignorance of the TV executives who think that?

I'm not saying that women don't like sports, but I am willing to say that the American female television audience is not watching sports on television.

It's important to remember that we're talking about broadcast television here, not even cable, so the numbers we're looking at are in the tens of millions—if there aren't 8 million people doing something (and if they aren't younger than 55) then they aren't going to have the scale to hit the radar of a network television executive.

It is true that if you look at the viewership numbers for television sports the gender skew is overwhelmingly male, especially when television in general skews distinctly female (and that's not just true of daytime, but of primetime as well—that female skew is why programmers are always trying to attract men). One of the things we learned in the early days of the WNBA is that while women were going to the games and supporting the teams very strongly in other ways, the act of watching sports on television is still male. While usually primetime is about trying to find the men, for the Olympics NBC is desperately trying to find the women, especially the women who would not be attracted just by sport itself, which describes most American female television viewers.

So I would say, women do not watch sports on television in large numbers. Whether the athlete profiles and all the drama is really what can attract more women to the Olympics, I'm not sure; it's what the focus groups and other research are telling them, but that kind of research is highly subject to bias anyway.

I don't mind them sticking the most popular events in prime time, since it means I can watch them.

And while I know that all other countries focus on their own athletes as well, I think the US's focus on their own is particularly bad because the US has the population and the money to grow a really huge sports program wrt the Olympics, which means that yeah, there are going to be a lot more wins and medal contenders, which I think again reflects on US-centrism. So if you get Taiwan's coverage, frex, it's going to focus on Taiwan athletes, but since we don't have that many, we're going to end up seeing a lot of other people as well.

Plus, on a whole, I think the coverage re-emphasizes US-centrism and US patriotism. And while other countries' may emphasize their own centrism and patriotism, I feel it isn't as harmful as the US's, given the US's relative privilege in the global order, particularly in term of exported culture. I mean, yay not as much China-bashing as I expected, but on the other hand, I feel that's damning by faint praise.

As a Canadian who has the advantage of being able to watch both my own country's coverage of the Olympics and the US coverage, I can say that there are differences.

Generally speaking, Canadian commentators talk over the events less and make fewer awkward and unnecessary comments about issues unrelated to what the athletes are actually doing.

While of course there is a focus on the efforts of Canadian athletes, there is generally at least some coverage of all the leading competitors in any marquee event - usually more than I see on the American coverage. Finals of popular sports are shown whether or not there is a Canadian competing in them.

Also, there seems to be more of an assumption that the audience will be interested in the background and history of non-Canadian athletes - so we get a lot of quick profiles about training details or previous medals or whatever about leading competitors and other competitors of interest (the human interest stuff, about the person who may be the first one from her country to medal in an event, and so on.)

There is also a different tone, and I think one that is more respectful, less "jingoistic," from most of the Canadian commentators when discussing athletes who are not Canadian in comparison to the tone of many American commentators who are discussing athletes who are not American. It's almost as if American commentators sometimes present other athletes only as opponents whose natural role is to be defeated by the American competitors, and this can be very grating.

Brief Olympic notes

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