The giant NBCOlympics vulva almost makes me forgive their tape delay excuse pic.twitter.com/CkDGPWuIIP
— Jennifer Gunter (@DrJenGunter) August 6, 2016
What say y’all, about the sports so far?
Ready to root on #TeamUSA! Our team's unity and diversity makes us so proud – and reminds the world why America sets the gold standard.
— President Obama (@POTUS) August 5, 2016
I honestly wonder who Trump pulls for in the Olympics.
— John Dingell (@JohnDingell) August 6, 2016
Another reason to hate the Olympics
RT @andrewteman This is tremendous. #Rio2016 pic.twitter.com/thRCLxhnKc
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) August 6, 2016
SERIOUSLY NBC WOULD HAVE IT BEEN THAT HARD TO HAVE FOUND SOMEONE WHO KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT WORLD POLITICS DO THE COLOR COMMENTARY?
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) August 6, 2016
If I had a dollar every time NBC cut to commercial break I’d have enough money to defend myself in a lawsuit for using an Olympics GIF
— Sam Stryker (@sbstryker) August 6, 2016
Felonius Monk
Yawn.
jeffreyw
I’m so old I remember when they showed the games instead of feel good backgrounders on the struggle the contestants went through to get there. I don’t give a fuck what the actor’s politics are, show me the movie.
jeffreyw
Thread needs more Gabe. Bonus Homer!
Felonius Monk
@jeffreyw:
Now, those are champions!
MaryRC
@Official_Rule40 is a parody account but regardless, I don’t need another reason to hate the Olympics this year. It’s turning into the Donald Trump of sports events. My office is full of sports fans, we have office pools for every playoff season and major sports event, especially the Olympics. This year there isn’t one, no-one has the heart for it.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Road race has been exciting the last little bit, in a car crash sort of way.
Villago Delenda Est
NBC is a sewer. First they cancel Star Trek, now this crap.
JMG
On the plus side, it was a pleasant surprise to hear Mike Gorman, the best basketball play by play man there is, doing the basketball for NBC. Of course, it was just France-Australia. NBC might go for one of its “names” for Team USA games.
Baud
Watched on DVR, so I was able to avoid the commercials.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Speaking of sewers, lots of boats getting swamped in rowing this morning. One two-man boat dumped its crew into that nasty bay.
Baud
Y’all be cranky
raven
With all due respect, which ain’t much, turn the games off and drive on with your miserable fucking lives.
Mary G
Since I am not watching the Games, and it’s an open thread, I have to talk Trump. A bunch of foreign news organizations are saying that he bashed our relationship with Japan today, saying that according to the treaty we have with them, we are required to fight if they are attacked, but if we’re attacked, they will just sit at home watching on their Sony televisions. Does he know any history? OK , SATSQ. It’s being reported in England, India, and of course Japan, but crickets from the American news I follow.
Helen
Have to say I was pleased to see Kip Keino. I remember my parents being huge fans of his WAY back in the day. Brought back some fond memories.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@jeffreyw:
Remember when MTV was a music video channel? That ended about the time that TV Olympics coverage stopped being about sports competition.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@raven:
Hating on TV coverage of the Olympics is a venerated American tradition.
raven
@Ultraviolet Thunder: And it has been ever since they went to mandatory viewing. Douche bags.
Emma
@Mary G: well, you can’t say he’s not consistent. He hates all our allies.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@raven: Guardian live blog, mostly. I’m curious how the rowing will go with the venue such a disaster.
New WR just set in 100m breast stroke.
Mike E
@raven: With or without shoes?
Ultraviolet Thunder
@raven:
How have the TV Police overlooked me for 30 years? I stopped watching in ’85 and I’ve gotten away with that so far.
raven
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I’m watching and will be the whole time.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: Amen
Ruckus
@raven:
How would anyone else know it’s a miserable life if we didn’t complain about it?
Fuck LBJ
Fuck fucking cancer.
There I think that about does it.
Gin & Tonic
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: For those who follow the sport all year, it was in fact an exciting and difficult race. Crashes were expected, given the nature of the course, but Nibali’s was a real surprise.
JMG
In my former career as a sportswriter, I was lucky enough to cover four of ’em, three Summer, one Winter. They remain highlights of my life and I hope career (readers get to decide that). The Games are corrupt and horrible in many ways. They are also magnificent and moving in many ways. Kind of like every human institution when you get down to it. BTW, the in-house Olympic TV system in the main press center is the best. Live broadcasts of every sport on a huge bank of TVs. There are graphics, but no announcers and no commercials. Sports TV paradise.
Libby's Person
I was SO annoyed at NBC last night! My favorite part of any Olympics is the beautiful theatrical spectacle at the start of the Opening Ceremonies. NBC kept cutting away to commercials – there was nearly as much time taken up by commercials as performance, and they cut out parts of the performance to save time. It was an interesting and beautiful interpretation of Brazil’s origin and culture, and it was almost ruined by NBC’s ham-fisted, insensitive editing. I know they need to make lots of money, but they need to be a little more considerate of their audience if they want us to put up with the commercials enough to justify the sponsors’ big payments. Grump!
gene108
NBC’s coverage of shooting events – air pistols or archery, etc – is awful. They show a close up of the person’s face/the person holding the weapon (pistol/bow) and then the target being hit.
The challenge in hitting targets is distance. You get no sense of the distances involved the shooter has to deal with, which is part of the drama of any target shooting game, from darts at the bar to the Olympics.
It is infuriating.
Mnemosyne
@MaryRC:
If they’re a parody account, it’s kind of dickish to troll the Pope for saying something anodyne about the Games. There are more worthy targets.
JMG
k@gene108: This is how those events are covered on the official Olympic feed. It’s not NBC’s fault. There must be technical reasons why this is the case. Remember, a good percentage of NBC announcers for the “minor” (not popular with Americans) sports are back home in the States working from a studio feed.
stinger
@Ruckus: “it’s a miserable life” — great movie title! Let’s see, who shall we cast in the lead role?
jeffreyw
@Ultraviolet Thunder: I’m so old that I turned up my nose at MTV because it was teeny-bopper bubblegum music.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Gin & Tonic: I believe he had just crashed when I said that. It may not have been an unusual number of crashes at the end of the race, but it seemed like it to me.
And of course there was the explosion at the finish line….
Ked
You guys are all delusional. American Olympic coverage has never, EVER been about the sporting competition more than it is now, at least within my memory (which goes back to the 1980 winters).
ABC’s coverage back in the day was always taped, and jammed chock full of long-form “get to know the Olympians” backstory puff pieces. …I’d be interested to find out if the advertising densities have increased, but it was mainstream and overproduced as hell.
There were a couple of Olympics which CBS did (92/94?) after ABC’s contract ran out, and those were really, REALLY obnoxious. I remember they sent MTV’s Kennedy (gawd, there’s a flashback) to Nagano to find weird Japanese crap to emote about and about 15 minutes of that seemed to wind up in primetime every night.
Mercifully, NBC spent nine figures to buy out the IOC… I mean the US rights in 1996 and every cycle since the coverage has gotten better and better. They keep pushing more and more to their cable networks, who almost never back off to interviews or preproduced cruft and carry a pretty respectable amount of non-USA content. Yes, the broadcast network does more of that, particularly in primetime, but during the daytime it’s straight sports.
And that’s not even counting the live feeds of all sports you can get through the internet. I’m watching archery on MSNBC and judo on the NBC web site right now.
Sure, the opening ceremonies was a badly edited, tape delayed joke, but it’s hardly sports. They didn’t mangle the parade of nations too much, so I didn’t care.
Mike E
@gene108: TV medium’s weakness is resolution relative to screen size, even at 4k…it doesn’t lend to any kind of distance shots (ice hockey is a good example of this) and that’s why it’s a medium/close up endeavor. Crowd activities (sports, dance, musical theater) are hard to do justice to and hard on the viewer who’s been conditioned to want close ups for generations of tv viewing.
satby
@Mary G: Booman noted that today:
satby
@Ruckus: you missed: fuck the Olympics
Villago Delenda Est
@raven: As we said in the 8th Signal Battalion, Drive On, With Pride!
Villago Delenda Est
@stinger: Michael Keaton?
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: Fuckin A!
DRN3030
@jeffreyw: I’ve been watching the Olympics since 1964 andI respectfully disagree. “backgrounders on the struggle the contestants went through to get there” was Roone Arledge’s industry-changing insight on how to get non sports fans to care about sports, especially unfamiliar olympic sports.
Amir Khalid
@stinger:
If it’s any help, I picture the lead character of It’s a Miserable Life as a mashup of Jean Valjean and George Bailey.
Origuy
@Mnemosyne: I saw it as trolling the IOC for their tightfisted control over their branding.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mary G:
Digby’s picked it up, but her source is also the Telegraph. I had a quick look through the googles, and, like you, I couldn’t find any U.S. coverage of this story.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mary G:
@SiubhanDuinne:
As has BooMan.
Rob
@Mnemosyne 3:23 pm:
It looks like the Official_Rule40 account has been suspended. I had no idea it was a parody account.
raven
What a bunch of fucking dopes. The US women are playing France in soccer right now at the men’s hoops is on right after that. Can’t get the EIGHT channels plus streaming? You don’t really give a fuck anyway, you just want to bitch.
Citizen_X
@Villago Delenda Est:
Boy, do you know how to hold a grudge or what!
Brachiator
Yeah, I’ll rant about the damn Olympic games coverage. ABC was never as bad as NBC. The network refuses to deploy technology effectively, and tries to funnel viewers into primetime watching. They also maximize using their name talent (gotta get those highly paid people lots of face time) instead of using people who might know something.
NBC foolishly insists that the biggest ratings come from focusing on Americans and human interest stories. Yeah, ABC pioneered some of this, but they also provided essential information for even the casual sports watcher. They told you what represented the best performance in an event, who the top performers were, and how they got there.
One past Olympics, NBC focused on an American athlete who stood no chance, and insisted on interviewing her even though she came in fifth, as expected. Meanwhile, they barely mentioned the winner and ignored the other top finishers. Other times, coverage is so scattered that you completely miss the drama of seeing how competitors rise from the preliminaries to the finals.
The nearly dead newspapers and failing sports magazines can’t compensate for tv failings. The LA Times produced magnificent supplements in 1984 (and I attended those games). Now they produce a thin guide that focuses on US prospects, and relegates everyone else to a short miscellaneous paragraph.
Yeah, you can find a way to enjoy these games, but it should not be a struggle.
raven
@Brachiator: Yea, it’s rough, I turn it on and watch it. What a bitch.
I was in LA, walked to nearly all the soccer games in Athens, GA and went to track and field in Atlanta,
raven
That’s just dumb.
raven
This is the live stream coverage.
Brachiator
@raven:
Yeah, I turn it on, watch a little, then turn it off because it is a waste of time. I go online or elsewhere to learn what happened. Otherwise, it’s like watching a baseball game where they don’t tell you who a player is unless he or she was born in the USA.
Brachiator
Olympic Games Fun Fact
stinger
@Amir Khalid: Hmm, I’d rather torture Keaton than Jimmy Stewart or Liam Neeson!
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@raven: NBC’s app is dumb. I installed it briefly this morning expecting a more efficient version of their website. All I really wanted was the TV schedule, but javascript on Android can only be enabled/disabled globally.
The only thing their app does besides act as a livestream framework is post notifications exhorting me to livestream something NOW! Even when I have supposedly turned those notifications off. If I was lucky enough to find something that interested me, tapping on it fired up the livestream instead of giving me things like channel info and links to more detail.
At least ESPN’s app is giving me results when they drop notifications on me.
Brachiator
@raven:
I kinda like this idea
Dadadadadadada
@stinger: It’s been done. It was Beavis & Butthead’s Christmas special one year, in which a guardian angel tries to convince one or the other of the two to kill himself, and shows him how his absence would improve everyone’s lives. It was…kind of a funny idea.
MCA1
@Ked: I agree. The fact that you can binge on any fucking random event you please now is proof positive. In the old days it was one channel, so they could only cover 10% of what was happening out there.
Also agreed that the human interest stuff has been there a lot longer than we like to think. And frankly, I think they’ve ratcheted it back a bit from 10-15 years ago.
pseudonymous in nc
Pay for a month’s VPN service. Look at any other country’s Olympic coverage — not the multi-stream stuff, the network broadcast stuff — and then curse NBC to eternity for fucking you over.