The Trials and Tribulations of the not-so-New Bear Icon

The Olympics have arrived. Get ready for one of the biggest expenditures of cash around, and I don't necessarily mean the Chinese. NBC will be spending millions to bring you the games while probably suffering a further viewership decline.

One reason is that the games don't seem to have the same gravitas they did during the cold war era. Rather than hurling bombs, the battle between east and West was truly played out in the pool, or on the track. Now world conflict is so spread and sporadic, the games suffer from a lack of black and white, even while coming into your homes in living color.

NBC is in a particular quandary this year as they want to exploit the political tension of having the games in China, returning politics to their coverage of the games. Unfortunately they are in China as a guest of the government and have to play somewhat nice as all their resources are at stake. We've already had trouble with painting the Chinese as enemies despite the fact we bristle at thier human rights violations and crack downs of information, but we find it had to see communists in the old sense, of have total contempt for a country that manufactures a great deal of what's on the shelves at Wal-Mart.

Frankly, NBC's coverage suffers from three problems, packaging, timeliness, and focus.

As I type, there are many accounts of the Opening Ceremonies being written, and even we won't see for hours on US television. I'm sure thought, If I wanted to, I can find it on the internet being played on some other network in the world. What's great about the internet is that we don't necessarily have to have the constraints of our local, authorized provider, but we do end up having to watch in Italian, of Finnish.

During the last Winter Olympics, some footage I saw coming out of the CBC was more complete than the NBC coverage, wasn't so "mostly American" centric, and showed sports that NBC thought had no interest to US viewers.

Personally, I think I may do some digging to find more Archery, Weightlifting, Wrestling and Team Handball. The latter never gets coverage, because the sport has never been properly explained to Americans. It's not that it's full of hotties, but it's interesting and different, and something you don't see between showings of "World Series of Poker" on our local sports networks. One of the biggest problems with NBC's coverage is they don't use the opportunity to show interesting sports that don't get airtime. They continue to feed us hours of women's gymnastics (or as I like to say, NBC's tribute to pedophilia) and leave field hockey fans to try to catch a few moments on the 3 AM telecast on CNBC.

Trampoline fans, you many get some coverage during one of those late night oddity segments, oh, but for ratings the BMX competition will be shown because we know that 18-25 demographic loves their X-Games.

I get nostalgic for Jim McKay and the ABC coverage of the games back in the 70's. Sure, the times were clearly different, and ABC initiated the "Up Close and Personal" coverage of the games, but they still showed it as a sports competition, not entertainment, editing and presenting the games in ways they don't even happen. NBC takes advantage of the time difference to change the order of competitors, place strategic commercials, and overall try to heighten the drama just as much as any reality TV show does today. It comes of fake and over worked, like Joan Rivers' face.

I still loved the NBC Olympics Triplecast from Barcelona in 1992. NBC created three pay-per-view channels that just showed feeds from different events. Here's hours of equestrian, here's the entire table tennis matches, and what I was kept glued to, hours of wrestling coverage. Hello Bruce Baumgartner! The effort was a failure then, and my family was refunded it's money for the event because we were one of two families who actually ordered the thing in our town.

Still, NBC could do the triplecast now because it owns so many cable networks, but they don't, cutting from sport to sport never giving the full coverage even on early morning coverage on channels you never knew you had. You don't need to change sports after every commercial break. We can change the channel now!

It's not that I won't watch the Olympics this year, I still like to watch the Opening and Closing ceremonies (the closest thing to Cirque de Solei that i'll watch), but you have to admit that the events are greatly enhanced by Tivo.

I'll also be watching for LJ bear approved Hotties Christian Cantwell (Shot put) and Casey Burgener (weightlifting) and previous year weightlifter and current broadcaster Shane Hamman, and looking for who is the new hot wrestler.

Really, I'm not so American-centric that i can't root for a hot Turkish weightlifter of a Swedish javelin thrower or a Spanish archer. I just have to be able to find them, and NBC does such a poor job of showing anything besides Americans in sports that aren't Gymnastics, Swimming, Beach Volleyball (women in bikinis, men can't go shirtless? What's up with that?) and Basketball. Oh and running, no Field, where the hotties are, only Track.

Just finding when something is on is a sport in itself. Personally, if someone knows where the best internet feeds are, please let me know.

EDIT: Well hot redhead Casey is not going to compete (story HERE), so now I have to find a new hottie. Damn.