Saturday, August 21, 2004

The fluff goes down, the rules get explained, and the benefits of tape-delay, today on the Olympic Watch! Let's get started.

  • The evening begins back at the pool with coverage of the Men's 1500-meter Freestyle. Whenever one of the swimming events comes on, I do the math in my head to figure out about how long it will be. Typically, 100 meters takes about a minute to swim (for Olympians, not for me). So, 1500 meters should be about 15 minutes long. Wow! NBC is going to show a swimming race for 15 minutes? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! How foolish of you.

    They do indeed show the start of the race, where Australian Grant Hackett, the heavy favorite, builds up what seems to be an insurmountable lead in the first three minutes. So, with the favorite in a comfortable lead and 12 minutes left in the event, it's time for a commercial! NBC leaves the event at an elapsed time of 3:39 and after two minutes of commericals comes back at...

    11:17? Okay, let's be honest. Did anyone want to see Grant Hackett slowly lap the pool for the eight minutes? But wait! The United States' Larsen Jensen has closed the gap! No longer is the Aussie way out in front, now he's only kind of in front, and his lead is shrinking! With only two laps to go, could Jensen steal the gold?

    Uh...no. Hackett pulls away the final 100 meters and wins, as predicted. Anyway, I don't particularly mind edited-for-time sports, as long as they don't cut out anything exciting. In this case, I think NBC made a good decision.

  • More beach volleyball with Misty May and Kerri Walsh. Did you know that there's another U.S. team and that they too are undefeated? That's not to say that I'm tired of watching May and Walsh (believe me, I could watch Walsh all day), just that it seems odd that NBC has deemed them unworthy of prime time coverage.

  • Zoom! Off to the track! Look at that! Three completely different events in the first hour. Very nice, NBC. Anyway, we're off to watch Jeremy Wariner of the U.S. once again completely blow out his competitors in the Men's 400-meter semifinal. I only bring this event up because announcer Tom Hammond explains that there are three semifinals and that the top two runners from each race advance to the final, as well as the two other fastest remaining times. Explanation of the rules is good! Thanks Tom!

  • We get two-and-a-half minutes of fluff on Stacy Dragila, American pole vaulter, and then she doesn't even qualify for the finals. Still Dwight Stones does a good job on the analysis.

  • And not to get all Joe Theisman-like, but part of the reason given for Stacy missing the finals was that she had to wait 30 minutes to vault because a Russian vaulter broke her leg during the competition and delayed the event. Why didn't we see that?

  • Men's sprinting fluff! American Shawn Crawford is not only fast, but once ran a stunt race touted as "Man Versus Beast," where he ran against both a giraffe and a zebra. Obviously he has a good sense of humor about the whole thing, although he did put on a mock-serious face while saying that the only reason the zebra beat him is because it didn't get called for the false start. Oddly enough, the replay showed he was right. Stupid cheating zebra.

  • Shawn went on the win his heat in the Men's 100-meter dash, and then, in one of the weirdest moments of the night, appeared to invite random people up to his room. "C-12! It's where (he's) staying at in the village!" Okaaaaaay, Shawn. We'll be right up (backing away slowly).

  • NBC wasted 30 seconds of our time with quick edits on Maurice Green, but then showed us something fascinating, which was Mo measuring out how far back to put his starting blocks by using his fists as a measurement. NBC, I would much rather see details like this than see just how good your editors are with their slow-motion effects and flash edits. Maurice Green posing, backlit, in slow-motion shows me nothing. Maurice Green meticulously measuring out the exact placement of his starting blocks shows me that maybe there's more to running quickly down the track than just running quickly down the track.

  • Jimmy Roberts spoils some more of my evening with "Chevrolet Olympic Moments." Today's platitudes come at the expense of women in the Olympics. Afghanistan sent their first woman to the Olympics, ever, this year. This is a good thing, but once again Jimmy makes me feel guilty for hating having to hear about it from him. But, to summarize, women used to not be part of the Olympics at all way back in ancient Greece, but now they're almost 40 percent of the athletes.

    So, now that we've got that out of the way, let's get back to picking apart Jimmy's schmaltzy writing. Today's bad line: "Sometimes the things that happen quietly end up making the most noise." Oh please. Let me try...sometimes the ideas that start off great end up being the lamest. Sometimes the things that start off as hard news end up being the cheesy, throw-away story. Why is NBC letting The Sphinx from Mystery Men take five minutes of their broadcast every night?

  • Fluff on American Laura Wilkinson on the secret to success. Don't think too much. She calls it "diving stupid." Does Jimmy Roberts write stupid? Oh, that was just mean, wasn't it?

  • Diving coverage is using every trick it can. First they used the synchronized dive-cam, where they superimpose one video over another. Then they used their "strobe-motion" trick (which I've commented on before but didn't know the name of until today) to show the position of a single diver all the way down to the water. Very nice.

  • Admittedly in the diving area there's not a lot of ground to cover, but the handheld camera did a good job of catching American Sara Hildebrand's reaction to her advancing to the final. She was crying because she thought, like in Sydney, that she'd missed it again. And when teammate Laura Wilkinson came over to tell her she had made it, she audibly said, "Are you sure?" Good camera work!

  • The announcers get a little cliche-y as the diving closes though. "Sara reminds us that sometimes Olympic dreams aren't measured in medals, but in just doing better than you've ever done before." Uh-huh. Let me check my extensive list of Olympic notes for people who were just happy to have finished fourth. Nope! Nobody!

  • Women swimmers from all countries remind us of just how tough the Women's 50-meter Freestyle race will be. This piece is twice as long as the race it's promoting! Fluff!

  • Lauryn Williams won silver in the Women's 100-meter dash. Her interview wasn't particularly coherent, but she sure was excited, wasn't she? It's good to see someone who actually is appreciative that she's the second fastest woman on the planet, instead of complaining about how something or someone ripped her off for first place.

  • It's the last day of swimming, so any fluff that needs to get in better get in now. Sure enough, we get both fluff on the Women's 4x100 team and the Men's 4x100 team. That's two-and-a-half minutes gone.

  • Rowdy Gaines goes way out on a limb and says that the U.S. Men's team with their three world record holders is the team to beat. Sure enough, they won handily. Better yet, during the medal ceremony, they all sang! But, unlike his teammates, Jason Lezak left his olive-branch wreath on his head. Jason! It goes over your heart! Look at your teammates!

  • Now that swimming is over, we get to see three-and-a-half minutes of highlight fluff. Hmm...in some of these highlights, NBC actually shows "highlights" of its previous fluff pieces. Fluff within fluff. Double fluff. Should I count this twice? Nah. Too hard.

  • Bob interviews Natalie Coughlin on the Olympic "Later" set. She's dressed up to go out on the town because she said she didn't know she was going to be on TV tonight. Really? How could you not know something like that? Olympian schedules must be very strange. Oh, and her birthday is on Monday. Happy Birthday, Natalie! Yeah, like she's reading this.

  • We close the night with one more fluff piece on Michael Phelps, because it's the last chance NBC has to use any extra Phelps footage. Well, at least until the closing ceremonies, but I'm sure we won't see any then, right? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

We're halfway done now, and NBC has pleasantly surprised me with their coverage of events. It makes me pretty optimistic about the rest of the games. Well, that and the fact that I actually got some sleep this weekend. Doing this is exhausting!

 


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