I love the Olympics. I find it tragic that badminton, table tennis, hand ball, and field hockey are not treated like real sports in the United States; seriously, I think hand ball in particular could really catch on in American colleges if it were ever given a chance. But I have to say, I’m finding a few things annoying this year. And no, it has nothing at all to do with NBC’s coverage–look, people, you may not like the fact that the events are time delayed, but you wouldn’t like it any better if they were broadcast in the middle of the afternoon. Anyway, if I could fix the Olympics, here are the major changes I would make:
1) Pool Play Adjustments. A pool play tournament is one in which the teams are first divided into groups (or pools) and play a round-robin within their group, and then the winners from each group move on to a single-elimination quarter- or semi-final playoff to determine the medalists. I actually really like pool play tournaments–it avoids having people go half way across the world to watch their athlete compete in their favorite sport for exactly one match and be done. With the pool play, everyone is guaranteed three (usually) matches. It also better ensures that the best teams medal–the best teams can survive an early upset.
The problem with pool play is that the people who set up the single elimination portion of the tournaments don’t do a good job of it. For instance, in Men’s basketball, the USA is the dominant team; they will get the top seed from Group A. In the last game of the preliminary pool play round, Spain and Brazil should be battling for the second seed in Group B–but instead, the loser of the game actually gets the easier path to earn the better medal, because the second seed from Group B would have to play the USA in the semifinal, whereas the loser of the game doesn’t have to play the USA until the Gold Medal game (assuming that they win out). A similar situation led to the fiasco in women’s doubles badminton, where a Chinese team and a Korean team both fought so hard to lose a game that they were booed off the court and sent home from the Olympics in disgrace.
The best answer is to reseed the elimination round only AFTER the results from the preliminary rounds are all in. That way, during the preliminary rounds, no one knows exactly who will be playing who in the next round until the next round is about to begin. Moreover, that tournament should be set up, you know, logically, so that the two favorites (based on Group Play results) are likely to meet in the gold medal round–not before.
2) End all association with the AIBA–and maybe get rid of boxing all together. The AIBA is the International Boxing Association (the acronym dates from when it used to have Amateur in the name). The AIBA is just a flat-out corrupt organization. There’s no other way to describe it. There have been multiple fights just at this Olypmics whose results have been overturned after the fact; one referee was sent home and another suspended for five matched; one judge suspended indefinitely; and yet all of that chaos inside the ring just seems to be the result of shady deals going on behind the scenes. The worst was the boxer declared a victor on points in a match in which he was knocked down five times, and then the AIBA tried to pin the entire fiasco on the referee–as if the judges had nothing to do with awarding ten points in a round to a man who spend the entire round falling down. Corruption allegations have dogged the AIBA for decades, and the IOC (International Olympic Committee) has done nothing; it’s time for the IOC to give the AIBA the death penalty. Find another organization to manage Olympic boxing–and get rid of boxing until they can. Olympic gold medals shouldn’t be bought and sold, and that’s exactly what seems to be happening inside the boxing ring right now.
3) Work with MLB to bring back baseball–with professional baseball players. I know that it would mess with the baseball season, but the international publicity and goodwill it would bring to the sport would be worth a lot–there has to be some kind of compromise deal they can work out.
4) Fix women’s gymnastics. It’s gotten better in my lifetime, but I’m tired of seeing these incredible athletes who can do these amazing things, feel that they have to get out there and wave there arms around vaguely in beat to Andrew Lloyd Webber. They look like they are landing airplanes, and frankly I find it a little insulting that we ask them to do that because they are women. We don’t ask the men to do it–instead, we simply marvel at their athletic ability. So get rid of the music, get rid of the “artistic” components, and let the athletes do their thing.
Also, get rid of the uneven bars. The apparatus looks cool–but it penalizes tall (and I’m using the word “tall” very loosely here) gymnasts. The uneven bars are the reason that all women’s gymnasts must be extremely short–you have to be able to rotate fully underneath the low bar and around the high bar without your feet hitting the ground or the other bar, and you simply can’t do that if you are even of average height. Instead, it’s time for the women’s gymnasts to grow up–literally–and go to the high bar.
My problem with the NBC coverage is two-fold:
1) For the sports that won’t be in prime time – why is it that 3 of the 5 channels have analysis when there are a bunch of live sports going on. When there are competitions, show them. Nobody that I know of would rather watch analysis and speculation when they could be watching live competition. Or if you have to have that analysis and speculations – do it while showing the live sport (so you watch the live handball while listening to analysis of Michael Phelps) rather than watching two talking heads in the studio.
2) For sports that will be in prime time – I get why you can’t show the sports live, and so they’re blacked out. But then you edit them during the actual primetime show. As a volleyball fan, watching the entire game is important for getting a sense of the momentum shifts, where teams are strong and weak, what kind of tactics are evolving, etc. But instead I get to see points 1-4, then skip to point 17. I know that you have a lot of sports to show, and can’t devote the 2.5 hours to volleyball. But then you need to have some way of watching the whole game (online or something) for those of us who would actually like to watch the whole game instead of your cliff-notes. Because as it stands, you’re taking the most popular sports, and then editing them so that they’re no fun to watch anymore.
Quality of camera angles, play by play, and other such things has also been poor. I don’t mind about the tape delay so much.
I would like to see less emphasis on overall medal count. It seems odd to me that volleyball involves one medal, for competing in a dozen 2.5 hour games. While swimming you can get a medal for swimming 2 or three heats of 2 minutes. If you have to make it a competition about which country gets the most medals (which is inane, in my mind), then at least make it about total medals, not total sports won (e.g. team sports can count for more because they have more players).
So for camera angles, I don’t believe that’s NBC’s fault; there are only one set of cameras at each Olympics event (I don’t know who runs them, but I believe that it is the London Organizing Committee’s job), which is then beamed out to every nation. And I’m willing to cut the announcers a lot of slack; it’s hard to find quality NFL announcers, and that’s the most popular television sport in America. Finding announcers who can call a hand ball or field hockey match to an American audience, while explaining what’s going on, when you only need them once every four years (so it’s not exactly a full time job) isn’t exactly a simple task.
I understand your frustration about showing edited matches during prime time; sometimes when they do that they’ve shown the full match at another time on another network, but not always. Also, I hope that in 2014 and 2016 they allow greater access to their online feeds–right now, you only seem to have full access to all events if you are a cable subscriber. I’d love to see them just charge a flat fee for the entire online package.
As for the medal count thing, there are only three countries in the world that care about total medal count: the United States, China, and the host nation. Really, it’s a relic of the Cold War, when US/Soviet competition stretched to every facet of life, including who could win the most medals. Then after the Soviet program fell apart the US dominated for a couple Olympics, before China decided that the Olympics were a way to gain international prestige and pumped a lot of money and effort into recruiting and training athletes in a wide variety of sports. Finally, there is a well-known tradition of the host nation doing well at the Olympics, and so the host nations pay attention to that these day to make sure that they are getting the appropriate bump. But for most countries, most athletes, and most people in the world, the total medal count is pretty meaningless.
Ok, one more thing. This is again the IOC. There was a belly-flop dive. I read a news summary of it – I wanted to see it. I went on youtube. The IOC has been strictly enforcing that no clips of this can appear on youtube. One video that had gone up less than a half hour before I looked had already been taken down.
Ok IOC, I get that it’s your intellectual property. But which builds your brand name more – allowing people who want to see a 30 second clip to actually see it, or making it so that nobody has access to replays? I mean, it would be one thing if people were posting entire competitions. But the only thing that allowing people to see highlights does is get people more excited about the games.
The Olympics is wonderful, the IOC is a bunch of morons.
In response to the announcers, I realize it’s hard to get good announcers. But at the same time, they should be able to get people who actually know the rules and can announce things accurately…
You can see the clip here:
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/diving/highlights-german-diver-lands-on-back.html
Basically, the IOC sells exclusive television rights on a per-nation basis, and that’s how they make most of their money. And the IOC is EXTREMELY protective of those rights. But the people who buy those rights (NBC in the United States, BBC in the UK, etc.) can do pretty much whatever they want with them–including posting them on their own website. Which means that if you want clips, you can’t go to Youtube, but you can go to NBCOlympics.com (and likely the websites of whoever owns the tv rights in other countries around the world) to find them. In NBC’s case, they will only let you watch full events from start to finish if you are a cable subscriber (which is what I was complaining about earlier), but anyone can log on and watch a wide variety of select highlight clips from almost every sport.