Olympic frustration
When I was growing up in the US I didn’t notice that everything within the country is largely biased by strong US patriotism. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing anyway. But it is a frustrating thing when something like the Olympics happen and you aren’t expecting it.
In the UK the Olympics are shown on the BBC and they show a varied selection of events with an emphasis on showing whatever finals are currently happening. That is any final, whether there is a British competitor anywhere near them or not. And there aren’t any commercial breaks in the action either. (Okay, you could argue that the Brits have far fewer events where they are medal contenders, but the coverage is still considerably more even handed.)
Here we have been watching a lot of Olympic coverage and the emphasis is definitely on the US athletes, whether they are in medal contention or not. Finals in cycling or shooting or a myriad of other events are taking place all over the place and the US network covering the games insists on showing hour after hour of women’s beach volleyball qualification matches where the American women have an excellent chance at gold eventually, after all the qualification matches finally finish.
Obviously in today’s “digital” world, we can get wider coverage by using the internet and the BBC website has had a lot of hits from our household in the last week. But it is still annoying to know that there is a lot going on over there that we don’t get to see. Some days I really miss the BBC.
Tags: BBC, olympics, us coverage
August 16th, 2008 at 9:21
Last night, midway through the women’s 800m freestyle swimming final, NBC cut to a commercial break and another examination of the Phelps 100m finish. That is totally out of order. If NBC is going to bid for the right to show the games it should broadcast them. To break away from an Olympic final, where the longest ever standing world swimming record (19 years) gets broken, just because there was no US involvement in the race simply documents the quality of NBC as a broadcaster.
(And yes, due to that event and heroics in the cycling events which were also not shown Great Britain is now ahead of Michael Phelps in the medal table!)