Tuesday, August 24, 2004

The fluff skyrockets! NBC protests! But the Rockwood 2004 Olympic Watch judges are having none of that. There is precedent for their low score. Denied!

• We open tonight with quarterfinal heats in the Men's 200-meter dash. Shawn Crawford for the U.S. was impressive was impressive, but how about 36-year-old Frank Frederick of Namibia finishing second? Give it up for the old guy!
  
• Justin Gatlin, 100-meter dash winner and now title holder of "fastest man in the world," gets 30 seconds of flashy editing about how he has different strategies for running the 100-meters and 200-meters. We never really get to find out what they are. Personally, I would much rather hear about these differing strategies than see an overexposed, slow-motion close-up of Justin.
  
  
• Ads. Can I really trust Michael Biehn to be a cop in "Hawaii?" I mean, what if he decides that crime has run rampant on the island? I fear he'll just take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
  
  
• And now, on to why the fluff count is so high. Tonight Al, Tim, and Elfie get their last digs in on gymnastics as we all get to pay tribute to the medal winning gymnasts in the "Champions Gala." Why don't they just call it the "Ratings Boosting Gala?" Look, I understand that NBC makes their money back on gymnastics, but let's be honest. This is in no way an event. It exists solely to get ratings.
  
  If there were tributes in other sports, I might be a little more forgiving of this sort of thing. After all, who wouldn't want to see the "Champions Gala" in boxing? But to dedicate over 20 minutes of the broadcast to gymnasts giving half-efforts is disgraceful to the Olympics themselves. I'm sure Juan Antonio Samaranch would be terribly upset if he wasn't so busy rolling in piles of crookedly-acquired money.
  
  Just to give you an idea of why this ends up as fluff, here are some of the other sports that got played today that we didn't even get an update on because we had to watch Carly Patterson come out and flub her floor exercise:
  
  Women's volleyball, men's handball, equestrian team jumping, synchronized swimming, field hockey, sailing, canoeing, women's water polo, track cycling (my personal favorite), boxing, and baseball. Those are eleven events that we could have spent a mere two minutes each on if we hadn't had to watch the "Champions Gala."
  
  Oh, and one more thing. It was hard to tell in the darkened arena, but there were a lot of empty seats for the "Champions Gala." Even the locals knew to stay away!
  
  
• "Chevrolet Olympic Moments" with Jimmy Roberts today picks on Greco-Roman wrestler Rulon Gardner, who had the best story in the 2000 Olympics. How good, you ask? I'll illustrate.
  
  To accurately measure times for the Olympic Watch, I record every night's broadcasts and then use the clock on the VCR to determine the times. This way, if I miss part of a broadcast, I can go back and watch it afterwards. Anyway, usually I just record over the previous night's show, as I don't really have any reason to save 17 tapes full of Olympic coverage. However, to this day I still have the recording I made of the night that Rulon Gardner won his gold medal. I can't bear to record over it.
  
  Anyway, Jimmy tells us all about what Gardner has been through since the Olympics, which is just about as amazing as him winning the gold in the first place. Rulon lost a toe after being stranded in the freezing wilderness from a snowmobile accident, then he suffered a wrist injury in a motorcycle accident (Rulon, for God's sake, stay in cars!).
  
  Jimmy actually did a pretty good job on this segment. Although, maybe that's just because there's actual drama in this story, whereas in most of the stories he does, he tries to create it. Regardless, it's still fluff.
  
  
• Greco-Roman wrestling with Rulon Gardner. He wins! Yay!
  
  
• On to beach volleyball, where maybe Misty May and Kerri Walsh can finally win that gold medal that NBC has so decreed that they should have won already.
  
  You know what? This sounds a lot like I'm picking on May and Walsh. I'm not. They really are incredible players, and they did win the gold. Furthermore, they both sang during the medal ceremony, and I thought for sure that Kerri Walsh was going to bust out of her skin she was so excited.
  
  NBC really did a good job of covering this, and the women deserved to win. I guess I just would have enjoyed it a little more if it wouldn't have seemed so preordained. But then, maybe it was. May and Walsh didn't lose a match over the entire Olympics. Let's just give congratulations all the way around, shall we?
  
• Off to the Men's 400-meter hurdles and 30 seconds of fluff, where U.S. competitor James Carter thinks he's being disrespected by some of the other athletes. Or something. James, James, James...just run your race, okay? Win and you'll get all the respect you want.
  
  
• Back at the "Champions Gala," Al Trautwig says that tonight is "just for fun," and after someone doesn't stick a landing he says, "we don't have to care about the start value or the step." You know what, Al? We don't have to care about the "Champions Gala," either.
  
  
• Ads. Another Nike "Speed" commercial, this time featuring Serena Williams. Nike is now three-for-three in picking athletes for their ads who didn't make the Olympics in their respective sports. I find this amusing.
  
  
• One last trip to the "Champions Gala." Igor Cassina of Italy gets back on the high bar, where he medalled last night, and falls off. Al says "it tells you a lot about him that he'll miss it when there's no pressure on him, but when everything was on the line, he hit it."
  
  Really? What does that tell us, Al? Does it tell us that he got lucky last night? Maybe he usually falls off and last night was a fluke? Or maybe it tells us that he, like any right-minded person, thinks the "Champions Gala" isn't worth his time or effort. How about a "Champions Gala" in archery? They could shoot apples off of each other's heads!
  
  
• Over to the pool we go for some springboard diving. Oh, if only Al Trautwig had been here instead of at the "Champions Gala" he would have finally got to see the 10.0s he wanted so badly. Chinese diver Peng Bo gets five 10.0s on one of his dives. The Canadian diver immediately after him does the same dive and looks almost as good, but analyst Cynthia Potter notes that he'll probably score slightly lower. Slightly lower than five 10.0s? Ya think?
  
  
• Lest you think I'm being too hard on Cynthia, let me tell you about some of the things she's doing right. The Russian diver, 30-year-old Dmitry Sautin, consistently performed dives that were of lower difficulty than the rest of the field. Cynthia noted that he chose these dives because he knew he could perform them well, and said that was a good strategy for him. And later, Cynthia pointed out on the replay the moment when Sautin would look at the diving board while descending so he would know how far above the water he was. It's little details like this that make excellent analysts.
  
  
• A couple of minutes of fluff on Mexican runner Ana Guevara, the 400-meter world champion who's inspiring other women in Mexico to break out of their traditional roles. You know, this sounds like it would have fit perfectly in Jimmy Roberts' story the other night about how women are making a big splash at these Olympics. But then, Jimmy really doesn't care too much about substance. He only cares about how he makes you feel. And Guevara? Well, her real-life inspirational story was just too hard to work into the inspirational story that Jimmy was writing.
  
  
• Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco is in his third Olympics. In 1996, he was favored to win the 1500-meter race when he was tripped and ended up in 12th place. In 2000, he was again the favorite, but was overtaken right near the end by Kenyan Noah Ngeny and he had to take silver. Tonight might be the last chance for this world record holder to win an Olympic medal!
  
  Sounds like fluff, doesn't it? But yet, this was all told to us by the announcers mere moments before the race. I'd never heard of El Guerrouj before tonight and there I was cheering him on at the end. See, NBC? You don't have to waste our time with fluff if the story is good enough.
  
  Oh, and he won, by the way.
  
  
• Oh no! Bob Costas has gone fluffy on us! What I thought was going to be an update on the Iraqi soccer team, instead turned into a fluff piece. There was some actual event footage from earlier today, so I'm not dooming the entire six minutes to fluff, but still, did we really need to be inspired one more time by the success of the Iraqis? NBC thinks so.
  
  
• Bob closes by telling us one more tale of Hicham El Guerrouj. In 1996, when he was tripped, the king of Morocco called him and said that "you are still a champion." Today, after he finally won gold, the new king of Morocco called and was "super-happy."
  
  A king says "super-happy?" Okay. Well, in any case, we're sure the king will do the right thing for El Guerrouj. Perhaps he'll even hold a celebration for him. They could call it the "Champions Gala."
  

With no pre-planned "Champions Gala"-type fluff foreseen, I'm still looking forward to the rest of the games, but NBC slipped a little tonight. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

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