The Winter Olympics, Or: How NBC’s Coverage Broke Our Hearts

Achievement: #98. Get overexcited about the Winter Olympics

Well, this Achievement was supposed to have been a lot more interesting than it wound up being. However, in truth, it did end up being much more accurate than we had planned… And by that, I would like to emphasize the ‘over’ in ‘overexcited.’ Sheesh, what a let down the 2010 Winter Olympics were!

I am an Olympics nut. Between the Olympics, and the World Cup, and the Pens getting a new arena, and the Buccos… well, nevermind that part about the Buccos, but you see what I’m getting at: I was thrilled about this year for sports!

And Sid and Geno were going up against each other playing for their respective countries, and of course there would be CURLING (yes, I know it’s a personal problem, but I really do love watching curling, and you really only get the chance to see thoroughly competitive curling every four years). AND since Evgeni Plushenko had decided to come back for one more year, there was always a chance we’d see a “Sex Bomb” repeat!

I’m sure you can understand my disappointment then, when it was nearly impossible to watch anything live, or really to find any of the events you wanted to watch in the first place, with the exception of a few accurately-publicized hockey games.

Actually, to understand this fully, I do need to go back to our time in LA briefly. We lived in LA in the summer of 2008, when the Beijing Olympics were held. Since I’m such an Olympics junkie, of course we were going to watch nothing but Olympic coverage for most of August. We even had a special viewing of the Opening Ceremonies, complete with ethnic foods to complement the convergence of all of the different countries.

But you know what happened? On the West Coast, rather than show the events at 5 or 6pm live, they decided to play the events in prime time… three hours after they’d actually happened. A sizeable amount of our friends still lived on the East Coast, so imagine what it was like having to avoid Facebook and blogs and basically the internet as a whole for three hours every night just so you could watch the swim race without knowing for sure that Michael Phelps really was going to win.

You wouldn’t TiVo the Superbowl and watch it at a more convenient time, would you? (Excepting, of course, that you would probably record it as you watched it so you could watch the Steelers win it again later over and over.) Of course, as little as most Southern Californians seem to care about sports or anything other than themselves and celebrities, I shouldn’t have been all that suprised. And maybe I wasn’t surprised, but I was pissed.

So I was dancing about with excitement that we’d be on the correct coast for the Winter Olympics and actually get to watch things live… Which was when we were informed that things were being filmed all wonky and happening ‘live’ much later on TV than they were really occuring in real life. And it was like life in LA all over again.

So it didn’t really matter, then, that we wound up back on the West Coast during the Olympics, and so this picture of my husband’s joy at the upcoming Ice Dancing Contest was all for naught, because despite the ‘live schedule’ posted on NBC.com, they decided to broadcast the snowboarding finals that had ended that morning in the time slot instead.

Olympics
Ah well, 2012 is not so far away…. 🙂

Comments Off on The Winter Olympics, Or: How NBC’s Coverage Broke Our Hearts

Filed under #98, #98-10, california, sports

Comments are closed.