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Daily Results from Monday, September 25
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 Highlights and Lowlights
- NBC tops three hours again tonight as they finally start to figure it out. Or do they? Tonight's numbers are once again slightly skewed because NBC ran over time to cover breaking news on the C.J. Hunter story. But even with this extra time factored out of the total, the "events" total is still better than last week.
- I'll start out the day with a small comparison of NBC's coverage versus the Canada Broadcasting Company's. I actually caught some of the Canadian broadcast off of a satellite dish today and was pleased to see how much of their time was spent covering events, live if possible, as opposed to fluff stories. However, in defense of NBC, the Americans do a better job in presenting the highlights. The CBC assumes you already know the results of the contest that happened hours earlier, even if it was in the middle of the night. So, for example, they announced "Cathy Freeman won the gold. Let's look at her race." By telling me who the winner was before they showed me the race, I lost all interest in actually watching the event. A better technique would be something like ESPN's "SportsCenter," which is really good at not revealing who won an event before they show the highlights. NBC follows more closely to this model than to the Canadian model. This is the slightest praise I think I could give NBC, but at least they have one tiny thing going for them.
- Every time I see synchronized swimming I think back to an old Saturday Night Live skit ("I know you, I know you..."), but still, I have to admit that the skill required to do it is impressive. The commentators did a good job of staying out of the way and just letting us watch. Nothing spectacular here about the coverage, but it did show us an event we hadn't seen before, and it did it without making us watch three minutes of narrative on one of the swimmer's family first. NBC should use this as an example for the rest of the games.
- "GM presents Olympic Moments, with Jimmy Roberts." Jimmy continues his bid to end up on the E! Network with four-and-a-half more minutes of syrupy, tearjerking foofaraw. Today's athlete with a tragic past was a mountain-biker from Kenya whose cousin should have been the contestant, but he mysteriously disappeared. Part of the reason I hate these segments so much is that Jimmy reduces a genuine tragedy such as this into an excuse to pad his resume, and I end up feeling guilty for hating everything associated with it. Example: Jimmy assured us that the athlete's inclusion into the Olympics wasn't a charity case, that he finished third in the continental championships in South Africa in 1999. Then he panders to us by claiming that even though he finished in last place, he was a "winner just for competing." This is completely wrong. If this biker, like that swimmer from Equitorial Guinea in an earlier GM piece, had been a charity case, then finishing in last place would be acceptable. But if he qualified and still finished last, then he's definitely not a winner. Jimmy patronizes the viewer to make us feel better about someone finishing in last place. See? Now I hate myself for being so mean. GM, this is why I spent these 270 seconds shopping for a Lexus.
- How about that table tennis coverage? Ha ha ha! Just kidding, of course! There is no table tennis coverage. I have a little chart that has all of the games broken down day-by-day and I counted twelve different events that didn't make it onto NBC's prime time coverage. Why not drop that 31 minutes of fluff and show some of it? Does NBC really think that their ratings are soaring because they show dramatic pictures of U.S. gymnast Elise Ray staring at the camera from her dramatically lit gymnasium?
- There's a fine line to walk when your intent is to create something serious. Even a slight slip-up can turn something from drama into self-parody (this site would be an example). Bob Costas' story on Cathy Freeman crossed this line early. I don't know which writer decided that a bunch of Australian schoolchildren should repeat "I am Cathy Freeman" in serious tones, but obviously this writer has never seen "Spartacus." Thirty seconds into a five-minute piece on how Cathy Freeman is shattering barriers, and all I can think of is a bunch of Roman slaves shouting "I am Spartacus!" at the tops of their lungs. I couldn't concentrate on the rest of the fluff because of it. I'm sure there was a point, but it was lost on me.
- The women's pole vault coverage was very similar to coverage of the high jump from yesterday, down to having Dwight Stone as the commentator. I liked the fact that they edited out all the between-jump waiting, but I would have thought that since Stacy Dragila has been on a commercial every hour for the entire Olympics ("I enjoy being a girl...") that they would have spent more than a couple of minutes on her actual event. A few more competitors would have been nice.
- You may have noticed that I'm kind of in a rut today. Well, to be honest, even the fluff was bland today. And there wasn't much variation in the events themselves. By my calculations, less than 30 minutes of the over three hours of coverage was devoted to an event that was not gymnastics or track-and-field. Even the fluff was mostly those two genres. I think NBC did a good job on both, so I'm not complaining about the events themselves, but a little bit of variety would be nice.
- Just before Cathy Freeman ran the 400m, Tom Hammond, NBC's track-and-field commentator, claimed that this was "the moment that Australia had been waiting for since it was announced that Sydney would host the games." Really? Let's see....Sydney was awarded the Olympics in 1993, and Cathy Freeman is 27 years old, so according to Tom, all of Australia was laying their emotions on an untested 20-year-old? I don't think so.
- Generally speaking, the things I complained about today are the same things I've complained about the last week. Hopefully, as other events start, we'll actually get to see some of them. Till tomorrow...
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