Wouldn’t you be surprised if, in the middle of the World Series, the announcers cut away to do a five-minute interview with the pitcher’s parents? While the game continued?
Wouldn’t you be surprised if, in the middle of the Super Bowl, the camera left the field and did a five-minute-long interview with the quarterback’s high school friends watching the game in a bar in his hometown? Wouldn’t you be surprised if TV stations around the country decided not to show the World Series unless a local team was in it? If none of these sound strange to you, you’re gonna love NBC’s prime-time coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics because these kinds of things will happen all the time.
The Olympics celebrates the coming together of the best athletes to promote a better understanding between peoples and nations of the world. Not that you will see much of those “peoples” from other nations in prime time if the broadcast is anything like the Olympics of the past. If an American is favored to win gold in an event, you’ll see more of that sport than all the other sports combined. If an American is not favored to win an event, its chances of being on television drop dramatically. I wonder how often network executives and the IOC have this debate: Should a sport an American can’t win be considered an Olympic sport?
You’ll also learn just what it takes to win the gold. You might think it takes years of training, coaching, sacrifice and natural talent to win. But that has nothing to do with it. According to NBC, if an athlete’s wife is having a baby on or near the event, it’s better than Human Growth Hormones and steroids put together. And it’s legal. “How can he lose? His wife is having a baby!” An athlete’s chances also go up if there’s been a recent death in the family or even a life-threatening illness.
It’s sports for people who hate sports.
It comes as no surprise that there will be a lot of ads during the Olympics, but after 17 days, it will slowly occur to you that the only people who are not allowed to suck every possible dime out of the Olympics are the folks without whom the events would not be possible – the athletes.
