Monday, August 23, 2004
A Mea Culpa of Olympian Proportions
I have a lot of experience being wrong. In 1981, at a national broadcasters' convention, after hearing a cable TV executive discuss his new channel, I confidently predicted it would never fly. The channel was MTV. The number of times during my baseball fan years in which I predicted the Cubs would go 162-0 is too many to count. (Of course, that's not as much wrong as it is stupid.) Last fall, I couldn't imagine how anyone but Howard Dean could become the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. And this morning I find myself quite spectacularly wrong again. Just before the opening of the Summer Olympics, I ripped the games, but after one week, it's clear that I have been wrong on nearly every assertion I made.
Regarding the TV coverage: NBC has done a very good job of showing nearly everything--a far cry from Atlanta and Sydney, when if it wasn't one of the marquee sports, it may as well not have happened. Fencing, archery, badminton, water polo, equestrian events--the sort of things Americans only watch in Olympic years--have been well-represented. NBC has cut back the number of soft-focus personality features to nearly zero, and we've been largely spared the obligatory shots of athletes' family members in the stands. (The broadcast did linger far too long on a reaction shot of disappointed Canadian diver Emilie Heymans last night, taking far beyond the realm of good taste what should have been a private moment for her after she lost a gold medal.) And far from overplaying the men's basketball team, it almost seems as if NBC is trying not to talk about it. In past years, games were tape-delayed to primetime, but this year, they've been shown live at whatever odd hour they're played (such as 6:30 this morning). It's as if the network is as embarrassed by Team USA as many basketball fans are. If NBC has overplayed anything, it's been women's beach volleyball. At one point yesterday afternoon, NBC had beach volleyball on two channels at once. But if you've seen five minutes of one match, you've seen all there is to see, both of the sport and of the hardbody contestants. (The Mrs. wants to know why the women play in those skimpy costumes but the men don't play in Speedos.)
Most of the network's announcers have done a fine job. Gymnastics commentators are the ones most prone to chirping out cliched cuteness, but I only heard the words "America's Sweetheart" applied to gymnastics champion Carly Patterson once. (What, Paul Hamm isn't sweetheart material? I'm just sayin'.) Track play-by-play announcer Tom Hammond did get into some overblown high dudgeon last night over two American sprinters' antics after winning their heat in the 100 meters. The woman doing commentary on diving--Cynthia something--has honed her Texas scold routine to a fine edge. She treats nearly every less-than-perfect dive as a terrible personal disappointment, and comes to those judgments in milliseconds. I feel sorry for her children. But anchorman Bob Costas is showing every night why he's the best at what he does--just talking, not hyping, and occasionally deflating the proceedings with wry humor. And who knew Bill Clement, known primarily as a hockey color man, had such a vast knowledge of badminton and table tennis?
There is one area, however, in which the Athens Olympics has been positively dreadful. The version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" played at the medal ceremonies is turgid and sludgy, overblown with strings and played at about 75 percent of its proper tempo. If there have been no fired-up displays of nationalism on the medal stand, it's because the athletes have been lulled to sleep by the anthem.
Recommended Reading: Over the weekend I finished 1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky. '68 was the year I first started paying attention to the news, and what news there was--from the student takeovers of college campuses to the King and Kennedy assassinations to the tanks rolling through Prague to the Democratic convention to the presidential election to Apollo 8 orbiting the moon at Christmas. Unlike many books of this type, Kurlansky barely mentions the year's pop culture, focusing instead on the student movements that shook most of the world's major countries. He maintains that the fall of communism began that year, when the Soviet Union crushed the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, and he effectively summarizes the way Richard Nixon used the year's upheavals to complete the political realignment that transformed the Solid South from Democratic to Republican.
Kurlansky deals briefly with the '68 Mexico City Olympics, which black American athletes first considered boycotting and later marked with protests from the medal stand, but more extensively with an event that occurred just three weeks before the games. Mexico had its own relatively late-blooming student movement, which was crushed when crowds of students were massacred by Mexican troops at a rally in a Mexico City square called Tlatelolco. The incident was never spoken of in Mexico for almost 30 years thereafter, and to this day, no one knows exactly how many students were killed and wounded there. That the 1968 Mexico City Olympics saw no protesters outside the venues was certainly odd, given the chaos of the year around the world--but the Mexican people paid a high price for that peace and quiet.
I have a lot of experience being wrong. In 1981, at a national broadcasters' convention, after hearing a cable TV executive discuss his new channel, I confidently predicted it would never fly. The channel was MTV. The number of times during my baseball fan years in which I predicted the Cubs would go 162-0 is too many to count. (Of course, that's not as much wrong as it is stupid.) Last fall, I couldn't imagine how anyone but Howard Dean could become the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. And this morning I find myself quite spectacularly wrong again. Just before the opening of the Summer Olympics, I ripped the games, but after one week, it's clear that I have been wrong on nearly every assertion I made.
Regarding the TV coverage: NBC has done a very good job of showing nearly everything--a far cry from Atlanta and Sydney, when if it wasn't one of the marquee sports, it may as well not have happened. Fencing, archery, badminton, water polo, equestrian events--the sort of things Americans only watch in Olympic years--have been well-represented. NBC has cut back the number of soft-focus personality features to nearly zero, and we've been largely spared the obligatory shots of athletes' family members in the stands. (The broadcast did linger far too long on a reaction shot of disappointed Canadian diver Emilie Heymans last night, taking far beyond the realm of good taste what should have been a private moment for her after she lost a gold medal.) And far from overplaying the men's basketball team, it almost seems as if NBC is trying not to talk about it. In past years, games were tape-delayed to primetime, but this year, they've been shown live at whatever odd hour they're played (such as 6:30 this morning). It's as if the network is as embarrassed by Team USA as many basketball fans are. If NBC has overplayed anything, it's been women's beach volleyball. At one point yesterday afternoon, NBC had beach volleyball on two channels at once. But if you've seen five minutes of one match, you've seen all there is to see, both of the sport and of the hardbody contestants. (The Mrs. wants to know why the women play in those skimpy costumes but the men don't play in Speedos.)
Most of the network's announcers have done a fine job. Gymnastics commentators are the ones most prone to chirping out cliched cuteness, but I only heard the words "America's Sweetheart" applied to gymnastics champion Carly Patterson once. (What, Paul Hamm isn't sweetheart material? I'm just sayin'.) Track play-by-play announcer Tom Hammond did get into some overblown high dudgeon last night over two American sprinters' antics after winning their heat in the 100 meters. The woman doing commentary on diving--Cynthia something--has honed her Texas scold routine to a fine edge. She treats nearly every less-than-perfect dive as a terrible personal disappointment, and comes to those judgments in milliseconds. I feel sorry for her children. But anchorman Bob Costas is showing every night why he's the best at what he does--just talking, not hyping, and occasionally deflating the proceedings with wry humor. And who knew Bill Clement, known primarily as a hockey color man, had such a vast knowledge of badminton and table tennis?
There is one area, however, in which the Athens Olympics has been positively dreadful. The version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" played at the medal ceremonies is turgid and sludgy, overblown with strings and played at about 75 percent of its proper tempo. If there have been no fired-up displays of nationalism on the medal stand, it's because the athletes have been lulled to sleep by the anthem.
Recommended Reading: Over the weekend I finished 1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky. '68 was the year I first started paying attention to the news, and what news there was--from the student takeovers of college campuses to the King and Kennedy assassinations to the tanks rolling through Prague to the Democratic convention to the presidential election to Apollo 8 orbiting the moon at Christmas. Unlike many books of this type, Kurlansky barely mentions the year's pop culture, focusing instead on the student movements that shook most of the world's major countries. He maintains that the fall of communism began that year, when the Soviet Union crushed the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, and he effectively summarizes the way Richard Nixon used the year's upheavals to complete the political realignment that transformed the Solid South from Democratic to Republican.
Kurlansky deals briefly with the '68 Mexico City Olympics, which black American athletes first considered boycotting and later marked with protests from the medal stand, but more extensively with an event that occurred just three weeks before the games. Mexico had its own relatively late-blooming student movement, which was crushed when crowds of students were massacred by Mexican troops at a rally in a Mexico City square called Tlatelolco. The incident was never spoken of in Mexico for almost 30 years thereafter, and to this day, no one knows exactly how many students were killed and wounded there. That the 1968 Mexico City Olympics saw no protesters outside the venues was certainly odd, given the chaos of the year around the world--but the Mexican people paid a high price for that peace and quiet.
