Andy Chase

Maybe I'm wishfully embellishing my fond childhood memories of watching the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, but I do seem to recall watching a whole lot of Bobsled, Luge, and Skiing events that February... and not just the finals, or 2 minute clips of team USA's runs.



Pretty much every Winter Olympics since has been a disappointment - coverage of ice skating at the expense of the other events has slowly increased, as have the Hallmark-flavored 15 minute mini-bio-documentaries about American athletes. I heard last night that NBC will be showing ice skating coverage on 10 of the 16 days they're broadcasting the games; that's 62.5%. I'm not sure about the actual hourly percentage of coverage that will amount to, but it seems grossly disproportionate given all the different sports that countries are competing in. I also saw some statistics taken from a survey of what sports men and women were planning to watch; predictably, women were planning to watch figure skating and men were planning to watch downhill skiing. Figure skating won out over all.



As for non-ice skating events and medal ceremonies, you had better hope that somebody from Team USA made a good showing, because otherwise it's apparently not worth watching.



Winter and Summer Olympic coverage in this country is also obsessed with US medal count, recapping every 15 minutes how many medals we've won. It's nice when an American athlete wins a medal, but I thought the whole point of the Olympic games as revived around the turn of the 20th century was to celebrate the athletic prowess of all countries; a respectful competetion among the best and brightest of all the nations. It doesn't seem right to begrudge another country their medal, but that's pretty much just what our own obsessive medal-counting does.



I really dislike being shown only the highlight performances or finals of a given event, too, and yet because so damn much time is devoted to ice skating, that's all they can squeeze in for Skiing, Bobsledding, etc. I was really looking forward to the reintroduction of Skeleton this year, but when I looked up the broadcast schedule I noticed that we only get to see one segment of Skeleton, finals only. That'll probably be 1/2 an hour, a whole hour tops.



I will admit to a predilection for the "boy sports"... the ones where people go down mountains or iced chutes at unbelievable speeds, competing to beat each others' times by hundredths of a second. Why? Because they're exciting, and not subject to interperetation by a panel of judges.



I don't know what the demographic of the average viewer is, but it almost seems like NBC has entered a vicious cycle; by catering to skating fans (predominantly women, according to the survey) with ever more ice skating coverage, of course they're going to get increasing numbers of people watching skating events because that's all they ever show any more. I would love to get Olympic coverage from another country... I expect it would be much more varied and much less provincial.



This is where a Tivo would come in mighty handy.