The original Olympic Games were performed naked. The current Athens incarnation of the event has come as close to that as the world’s more conservative broadcasters (i.e., NBC) would allow.
It seems as if Nike and Adidas decreed that all the players they outfitted for the Games, in any sport, would look more like beach volleyball players.
Even the track-and-field women this year are wearing midriff-bearing tops and dorsal-cleavage bottoms. Only the fencing, sailing, equestrian, baseball/softball, and indoor volleyball competitions still involve full attire, and they’re not getting much prime-time air in this country.
The guys are showing off more, too; especially in bicycling and weightlifting, not to mention swimming and diving. Where the men wear longer duds, they’re still tighter duds. Even the men’s basketball uniforms, at least from some countries, are significantly less baggy than the “long shorts” look of today’s NBA.
I happen to like half-naked women, and I don’t mind half-naked men. As I wrote about Seattle Storm player Lauren Jackson, who posed nude for an Australian art-photo mag to promote her appearance with the Aussie women’s basketball squad, athletic nudity represents a wholesome sexiness, a sexiness based on strength and achievement.
(By the way, just how did Australia become the new East Germany, winning medals far out of proportion to its scant population?)
Anyhoo, I’ve been watching with the sound turned to MUTE, switching between NBC, the various NBC-owned cable channels, and CBC. I’ve not followed any particular sports or athletes, but have enjoyed the whole spectacle of the thing. If I had cared about any one particular sport, NBC’s coverage would’ve disappointed me greatly.
The whole shtick about Olympics TV coverage in this country, ever since Roone Arledge formulated it for ABC in the ’60s, has been based on one big contradiction: Try to get the whole country interested in the Games, but assume your viewers don’t necessarily like sports and aren’t particularly interested in any of these esoteric competitions.
So, every four years (then, when the Winter and Summer games were biennially split, every two years), we got hours of human-interest profiles sandwiching minutes of athletic footage. When we were allowed to see the action (tape-delayed and selectively edited), what we saw almost always focused on US players, with the rest of the world pretty darned much ignored.
This time around, NBC seems to be finally starting to get it right, at least in its daytime and cable incarnations. The prime-time shows are still disjointed mish-moshes of whatever somebody’s decided will generate the hottest storylines that day. But the rest of it, scattered around the clock and the cable dial, we’ve gotten to see individual events more or less from start to end (though not in real time). Many of these events have even starred champions from other lands.
On the whole, though, I still prefer CBC’s barer-bones, more direct approach. Of course, CBC covers Olympic-component sports year round, unlike NBC, making its crews and its viewers more familiar with them.
(It’s a shame North American viewers are blocked from viewing the BBC’s streaming online video coverage.)
