Olympics

[jbsegal]

1) If I were in charge of Olympic coverage, I'd make sure that every competition of every country with fewer than (10? 5?) athletes in the team was televised - perhaps in a couple of programming blocks - and promoted so we'd be able to find them.

2) Ok, what the hell was it with the 70's and 80's greatest hits of the US/UK/AU during the entrance of the athletes? Even Bob Costas was moved to comment on it.

3) What the HELL was it with the dancing cows?

4) I suspect, if I watch much of the coverage (not having access to BBC or Canadian feeds), I'll get just as pissed off as I have for the past... 3? 4? 5? Olympics. This makes me sad.

Comments

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

Damn, you make me wish I'd saved my database of athletes per country, but you're talking about a *lot* of athletes -- I wouldn't be surprised if 20 or 30 countries had ten or fewer than ten athletes. I think maybe 7 had only one. (I know this because I built a spreadsheet to test a hypothesis that number of olympic athletes was proportional to population, which was not true at all overall, but jumped to about R-squared=0.25 when I tossed out China and India as outliers.) I remember the number of 1-person teams because I deleted them, too, in an attempt to correct for the lack of granularity at that level, but it didn't help nearly as much as taking out the billion-person countries.

[istemi.livejournal.com]

Amen, brothah!

And the couples in Jersey-cow prints during the cow segment -- freaky! I wonder if they're on an Olymic ballroom dance exhibition team.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Agreed on all points. But as a partial answer to (2), sdavido, who is generally Aware Of Trends, says that disco is very big in Europe right now. (He has some foreign students who are really into it.) Strange.

[tamidon.livejournal.com]

I was so pissed off about their inane voiceovers during the last opening ceremonies I swore I would never watch their coverage of them again. I wish I lived closer to Canada, the CBC does it right.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Bob Costas did make a funny this time around, though. He and some other guy were commenting upon all the 70s and 80s disco music, and Costas said, "Now if they would only play 'Bette Davis Eyes' by the incomparable Kim Carnes, my night would be complete.'" Bwahahaha. :)

[anjea.livejournal.com]

Found your blog through a friend of a friend. I'm with you, man! I also hate that we only televise the events that the Americans are expected to medal in -- and then we don't show half of the ocmpetition, unless they're in line to beat or cause an upset of the American teams.

I fence -- hopefully fencing (a grossly undertelevised event) will get more recognition in two years, since we brought home a gold medal last time!

[amsra.livejournal.com]

And what is up with all the silly hats this year? The American teams hats are just bleh....

[foms.livejournal.com]

The cost of olympic coverage has risen considerably. If I understand correctly, the feed for each event is sold separately. The CBC can no longer afford to cover it all the way that it used to. More's the pity.