The Olympic Television Bait and Switch

Another Olympics has come and gone, and while I don't recall a Winter Olympics in recent years that (1) the United States has been so successful and (2) I've actually had more than a cursory interest in (probably some correlation between those two things), there are still some things that I found terribly irritating.

It wasn't Kim Yu-Na and her (as NBC commentators called it) "sensual" and "flirtatious" skating, which, thank you very much, just set the "Asian women are not exotic submissive sex toys" movement back twenty years - it was actually the ridiculous "bait and switch" tactics that NBC tried to pull with their complete opaqueness in terms of when you could watch whatever you specifically wanted to watch.

For example, if you wanted to watch the Women's Figure Skating Final on a Thursday night, which is basically 25 minutes of television to watch the key contenders, can you figure out when to tune in? No way. This is the level of detail you found on the NBC 2010 Olympic TV Schedule website:

NBC New York (4) 8:00p - 12:00a (2/26)

Primetime

Gold is on the line for Rachel Flatt, Mirai Nagasu and Korea's Kim Yu-Na as Figure Skating concludes live (ET/CT). Plus Freestyle Skiing and Nordic Combined.

Medal Event

Gee, thanks, that's helpful. So basically you're left sitting in front of the television for four hours trying to find the 25 minutes that you actually care about. Of course, Bob Costas in the studio isn't helpful, either. Bob will sit at the sports desk and say, "Of course, we're almost ready to bring to you the showdown between Kim Yu-Na and Mao Asada (pauses for dramatic effect) ... but first we'll take you to a (taped from the morning) curling showdown between the Czech Republic and Austria." As a result, you're stuck watching all these crap sports (and commercials, for that matter) while you wait for the stuff you want to see.

I'm completely aware of why NBC does this. They have ratings and advertisers to answer to, and there's no way they're going to kill the golden goose by telling people precisely when they're going to air the most popular events. Besides, they need to play catch up after that Leno-Conan debacle.

And of course there's the tape delay issues. There simply just isn't enough live events to put into the schedule, so what happens is that they throw some of the events on tape delay and lamely attempt to broadcast them as "live events". Michael Rosenberg of SI.com wrote a lengthy article about this and (correctly) noted that part of the problem is that the Olympics is sort of stuck in this uncomfortable place in between a sporting event and entertainment. People don't really care about most events unless "their team" is in the running to win, and the Olympics are not going to arrange the schedule to accommodate each country's patriotic leanings and time-zone specific primetime windows. Furthermore, with the advent of the Internet, can you really keep results of any major event a secret?

But there's a lot to like about the games. For one thing I found it really cool to see Olympic athletes (granted, they were the half-pipe snowboarders) who wear their iPods while competing and laugh it off when they screw up.