MISCmedia by Clark Humphrey » Blog Archive THINGS I'VE LEARNED FROM THE OLYMPICS

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THINGS I’VE LEARNED FROM THE OLYMPICS

February 21st, 2010 by Clark Humphrey

Curling really isÂ the greatest game of all time.
Apolo Anton Ohno is in line to replace the disgraced Tiger Woods as the champion all-around ad spokesman for everything. This does not, however, mean anyone will care about speed skating until the next Winter Games.
I can see why the Intl. Olympic Committee chose to add more “x-treme-y” events and not to add women’s ski jumping. Why simply stick on an extension to a legacy Olympic sport when you can instead grow your young, hip, edgy, more marketable side?
The whole thang’s already a fiscal disaster for the Vancouver and B.C. governments. But the province’s zeal in attracting the Games is understandable if you know how it works. Over recent decades, successive provincial leaders have staked their political careers on “megaprojects,” big govt.-subsidized development schemes that invariably funnel money from the taxpayers to politically-connected landowners and construction firms. The Olympics are simply the biggest, costliest megaproject of them all.
NBC’s coverage sucks because the network’s stuck in a coverage model invented decades ago by ABC sports exec Roone Arledge. He operated from the premise that too few Americans intrinsically cared about these sports, so instead he’d put on a drama serial. Pretaped profile pieces turned these athletes into instant celebritiesÂ (even if, in real life, they were often bland workaholics). Armies of videotape editors would slice-n’-dice the competition footage into “shows,” carefully timed to draw and keep the biggest possible mass audience for the longest possible viewing time. But we’re not in the three-network era anymore. In the age of cable + Internet, audiences are fragmented into little pieces based on shared intense interestâ€”such as those who are intensely interested in winter sports. The more you care about any of these events, the more you’re disgusted by what U.S. TV does to them.

One Response

Steve & Eliza writes:
February 21st, 20109:10 pmat

Also, NBC is completely ignoring the mascots!

Fans of Quatchi, the cool sasquatch mascot, should check out our Quatchi Watch blog.