The Rockwood 2004 Olympic Watch--Sunday, August 22, 2004

Sunday, August 22, 2004

The programming gets longer while the fluff gets shorter? Okay, who hijacked NBC?

Also, a bit of self-promotion before we get started. If you have a web page and you want more traffic, you're missing your chance at literally thousands of potential hits. Link to the Rockwood Olympic Watch on the Blogs and Links page, and I'll link back to you. I can't promise it will make you popular, but it will sure make you more popular than if you don't link to it!

Again, we start the night with a short intro from Bob, and then go straight into action. Tonight it's the rowing events, in which both the women and men from the United States are competing for medals. The women's team grabs the silver, and during the introduction to the men's team, play-by-play (row-by-row?) announcer Randy Rosenblum shows us a short video of the last time the U.S. Men's 8 team won.

It turns out the U.S. men haven't won a medal in this event since 1964's Tokyo games, and the "video" is all but unrecognizable. The rowers appear as light gray dots on a dark gray background. Apparently, the race in Tokyo was run at night due to weather conditions, and lit by headlights from cars.

Notice how much information is contained in that last paragraph? That's easily more than has been said in a lot of NBC's fluff pieces, but yet this was not fluff. Rather, this information was seamlessly integrated into the race. This is exactly how it should be done, NBC! Good job!
Bob Costas makes tape delay pay off again in the Women's 100-meter hurdles. When Gail Devers collapsed with a mysterious injury, no one knew what had happened. In normal, live circumstances, we wouldn't have found out for hours, or maybe tomorrow. But since the race itself was run hours ago, Bob could come right out of the event and tell us that Devers' injury had been plagueing her since the before of the games. Furthermore, he let us in on the little tidbit that Devers, knowing this, could have ceded her spot in the Women's 100-meter dash to Marion Jones. Could Marion have medaled in Athens in the dash? We'll never know.
More beach volleyball with Misty May and Kerri Walsh. At least tonight there was an acknowledgement that if they won (and they did) that they'd be facing the other undefeated American beach volleyball team, who shall remain nameless because NBC has already decided who they think the winners will be.
On to Men's High Jump, where U.S. competitor Matt Hemmingway has a grandfather who was a cousin of Ernest Hemmingway. Matt says he got the athletic ability, but not the writing talent. Cute, short, but still fluff.
Now we're off to the finals of the Women's 10-meter Platform Diving. Again, NBC is technically excellent, using the drop-cam, the synchro-cam, and Stobe-Motion. Also, when Australian Loudy Tourky tries to do a dive from a handstand but walks on her hands while doing it, the analyst tells us how that's a deduction. I've been very impressed with all of NBC's swimming and diving coverage. Can you tell?
Back to rowing, where we get to see the medal ceremony for the winning U.S. 8-Man rowing team. Look! Singing, smiling, even crying! Now that's what I want to see from gold medal winners! Of course, it probably helps that there are eight of them, so there are more opportunities for at least one of them to be doing something I like, but that's just being nitpicky.
"Chevrolet Olympic Moments" with Jimmy Roberts. Now that I've figured out that Jimmy Roberts is really The Sphinx, I can barely listen to him anymore. Not that I could before, but now it seems worse. Anyway, Jimmy gets all excited that the Greeks gave weightlifter Pyrros Dimas a four-minute standing ovation for winning the bronze. Dimas, a hero in Greece for winning the gold in this event three previous times, was hailed by Jimmy for having his motto on billboards around Athens. "His" motto being "impossible is nothing," which mysteriously coincides with Adidas' motto for their latest series of ads. So Jimmy has reduced a four-time Olympic medal winner to a person who plagarizes his motto off of sneaker ads. Only seven days left of Jimmy, only seven days left of Jimmy, only seven days left of Jimmy...
Golly, twins Morgan and Paul Hamm have been gymnastics teammates for their entire lives! It's hard-hitting news like this that NBC has been holding back on until just the right moment (hint: There's never a right moment for fluff, NBC).
We zip over to the track, where U.S. sprinters Justin Gatlin and Shawn Crawford are so beneath the "Greatest Of All Time" Maurice Greene that they even have to share fluff! Oh, and they're both ready to take the title away from Greene. Thanks for that deep insight.
Ads. You know, if all of those people who wanted to watch Tom's new HD Sony television would keep their one bag of chips and one jar of salsa and instead collect a few dollars a piece, they could buy their own HD Sony TV and leave Tom the heck alone.
After the pommel horse, Paul Hamm says in an interview that he knows nothing about the what the South Koreans are trying to do about the judging controversy that gave him a gold medal over the South Korean gymnast. He seemed sincere, so I'll believe him, but man, that is one thick bubble they have over the Olympic compound if he hasn't heard anything about it.
Maurice Greene gets two-and-a-half minutes of fluff all to himself. Take that Crawford and Gatlin!
NBC next runs 12 minutes of uninterrupted coverage of the 100-meter dash, which ends up being a sub-10-second event. I'm not complaining, just making an interesting note. I wish more of NBC's track coverage could be like this, but I understand the time constraints they're under. It was just nice to see this much.
Greek gymnast Dimosthenis Tampakos wins a gold medal on the rings in front of the home crowd. They all enthusiastically sing the national anthem when he takes the medal stand. Expect a story on him from Jimmy Roberts in the near future. I'm thinking something like, "He lifted himself onto the rings, and lifted up the whole country on his shoulders." Saaay, maybe I can work the next Olympics!
Triple jump coverage! Bob Costas points out to us that the triple jump was the first event in the modern Olympics, and was won by a Greek. That didn't happen tonight, as the Swedes went home victorious, but at least we got to see it for four minutes.
Remember Jimmy's story from a few nights ago, when he traveled to Olympia? Cheaters in the ancient games were forced to pay a fine so that their cheating names could be carved into a block of marble and remembered for all of eternity. Jimmy failed to show us a single one of these blocks, but Bob made reference to them tonight. Female Russian shot putter Irina Korshanenko, whose shot put distance is suspiciously long in retrospect, tested positive for steroids, thus disgracing herself at the oldest Olympic venue. Bob's suggestion was that every Olympic athlete should have to freeze a urine sample so that any drug they were currently taking could be tested for later. It's a noble idea, I suppose, but who wants to be responsible for testing thousands of urine samples for the next few decades, trying to discredit the 1976 bronze medal triple jump winner? I don't see that one going very far.
Once more we close with a final, inspirational minute of fluff. I know I'm inspired. Aren't you?

So, tonight's show was an hour longer than last night's, but had literally half the fluff. You know, I am having so much fun watching these Olympics. Why did it take NBC so long to figure this out?

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