Olympic Scumming: Polympics as Usual

Like when you boil raw beets or turnips to come up with a nice chewy vegetable course (no mashed potato mixes please), one has to be patient with Olympics coverage as it is done by American networks, NBC this time around. There's a lot of scum that comes boiling up with the suds. Even Cameroon, with two or three athletes, if they have a television system at all, would have shown the events, at least the ones they are in, live when they happened. But not here in the USA. Good God, if we show it live at 4 in the morning, Coke will not get their promised advertising ratings! Old-time network idiots, because everybody who cares will already know the results hours before from the Internet, or even 'dumb' media like radio or newspaper, do not realize this yet. But they will, come the next Olympics. Because they are deservedly going to get clobbered by the viewer ratings and get sued for unfulfilled promises by companies that paid a zillion bucks to put on ads and be 'sponsors'.

Macdonald's, having gotten the food-supply monopoly, sued a standard Aussie bacon-and-egg sandwich maker to stop the sales of a traditional buttie-type thing, a well-known breakfast item there, saying it was an infringement of the egg-mcmuffin concoction. Big M won in court, in the sense that the buttie-makers had to substitute hot-dog rolls instead of the traditional downunder specialty bread that was too much like an English muffin for the international bully corporation to put up with. Typical of this whole charade of worldwide athletic competition to find the best perfomers wherever they come from, which is now PROSTITUTED by medal counts by country, who can finance the largest team, and how many sob stories the network can prefilm to fill in the gaps when something they think no one wants to see is going on (like any world-class event that doesn't involve the US, Australia, or Russia).

There was a really obnoxious Nike commercial, which the NBC execs finally agreed had to be axed, on opening night, where a half-naked gymnast was chased out of her shower by a chain-saw murderer and outran him because she had her running shoes on still (why you'd wear your shoes in the shower is not explained). The rest is even worse, if possible, like Tiger Woods (no actor, a squeaky voice like Tyson's) using his golf club in various events like archery and javelin, for Mercedes Benz or BMW or some such yuppie car. An awful rendition of the old spiritual 'Clap Your Hands' sounding like a dirge, for some financial institution or other. The swingle-singer-warbler-tabernacle-choir [SSWTC] (the ones that do ALL the commercial songs that are designed to make you feel like a callous cad if you think they are full of sentimental crap with nothing to do with the product). They must have made a fortune out of this, because every second commercial song is sung by them or their clones. Their only rivals for obnoxious songs are the ones who use kids (or have Judy Garland types pretending to be kids), especially when they try to be 'hip' -- nothing worse than a child trying to sound like Diana Ross.

But there are just a few main issues, which have remained the same for the last few Olympic Games (especially on American network TV, but not much better on cable). If you are lucky enough to live near the Canadian border, you can catch it all live and without too much hype on Canadian TV. Even better if you have satellite and can get BBC or something like that, where they can joke about their rifle champion shooting himself in the foot last time Olympics.

• Too many commercial interruptions, and worse, too many repeats of the SAME DAMN AD you saw just five minutes ago. Sports provides a variety of events, the ad-makers don't. Whenever this happens I vow never to buy that particular product (when I can even remember who the sponsor was -- that 'clap-your-hands' ad got me so PO'd I didn't even notice who did it), but in the long run it doesn't work out that way -- I will still buy a Big Mac regardless of how they bullied the local buttie producers.
• Chauvenism carried to extremes. Yes, you will see the top performers from other countries, but emphasis is always on the Americans -- if they don't have the slightest chance at a medal, or at least a good performance, you won't see that sport at all. (Has anybody seen any field hockey games on TV? India or Pakistan or somebody else, not US, will get this gold. It's a fun game to watch too. But no ... no US players of note, no sob story about being an orphan or breaking your ankle at the age of 12, etc.)
• Player Plugging (an expansion of that last remark). The network spent the last couple of years doing 'documentaries' about people they knew would be in these games (just as major newspapers have pre-prepared obituaries of all famous folks). These are used as fillers between commercials to build up so-called interest, and also to fill the gaps when Cameroon or whatever is doing something you'd rather see than this. [How does X drop from fourth to tenth, or go from tenth to fourth? They won't show you, you just hear it, or more likely just see it on the scoreboard.] These stories are all invariably weepies -- my toe was almost bitten off by a shark and I thought my swimming career would be over. My Daddy died of cancer and my sister has encephalitis. Come on! I lost two uncles, a sister-in-law, and two cats just this year, and I am an ordinary person. And God save us from the inspirational tales about serving your country or helping cure multiple sclerosis. Can it, please. At least the Bulgarians admit they use steroids sometimes, and put up with the chuckles that their women are really men, etc.
• Commentaries. How often are US sports of any kind screwed up by having expert commentators (like Marv Albert, yes he's back) and ex-champs blithering on with total platitudes? Isn't it great when they say so-and-so looks really wiped out, hasn't got a chance, and then wins? Or this-and-that has it locked up, and loses? These people are too busy gabbing and filling up their microphone time to watch what is really going on. You'd be better off watching with the sound turned off, except for the fact that the network hardly ever has the camera on the action itself. (How many times do we have to see mom's reaction up in the stands to that last move in the arena?)
• Olympic Drug Committee. That poor young Rumanian gold-medal gymnast was deprived of her gold medal because she had been given cold medicine by the team doctor (who was also banned by the powers for doing that). The medicine had something in it derived from codeine that set off red alarm bells. For shame! The drug tests should be looking for steroids and other morph-type things that turn you into Superman, not whether you had aspirin or something. There were riots in Bucharest over this, and the coach shilly-shallied over whether to boycott the whole thing and give up all the other medals his team won -- but he didn't in the long run. This drug testing is not something one should even consider 'constitutional' for these events -- sure, test 'em before the athletes even qualify, but to do it after the fact is a violation of human rights. Jeeze, I was chewing gum or smoking a cigarette, maybe had a couple of drinks, the day before. So what? Puritanism at its worst. (And what is really wrong with turning Bulgarian women weight-lifters into men, if that's what they want to be regardless of the long-term consequences?) Third-world countries want to win gold medals to support their dictators. OK. First-world countries like the US, with Big Mac, etc. footing the bill, just spend a lot of money on them for the same reason. What's the difference? It's a joke -- meanwhile a 15-year-old girl, one of the best at her sport, got screwed without her being involved in any scam, because she had a cold.
• Finally, and worst of all considering that they are just generating suspense about something you only have to log on to the Internet to find out the result that happened hours ago: We'll be back after this break with more of the xxx finals, but first we will go to the yyy events at zzz stadium. Cheap pulp fiction uses this technique -- so-called cliff-hanger chapter endings and alternating chapters between different casts in different cliff-hangers -- so you have to hang on and plow through the other stuff that you might not care about (or if you do, then it disappears without a conclusion). Lousy way to sell a book, let alone a sports event. If it were really happening that way, which it is only in the sense that there are simultaneous events in differing venues, then fine, in 'real time'. This way, when it is all several hours old, and edited in the studio for impact and timing (to make sure the commercial break will come when it's supposed to -- need a 30-second filler, then use one of those pre-filmed human interest stories) -- well, that's just plain dishonest. And I hope everybody realizes that and that NBC will lose a FORTUNE in lost ratings and revenues.
• Oct. 1 -- well it's all over now after the spectacularly schlocky closing ceremony where they hoisted that Qantas commercial brat up on a hundred-foot-high pedestal under the torch as she belted out some soppy song about world unity or something like that. I thought she might fall off (that would have been fun) but there was plexiglass platform around her. Four years from now the Olympics are going back to Athens, where they belong. One wonders what they use these expensive stadiums for after the games are over -- we know what the Serbs used the Sarajevo bob-sled run for, but maybe the Australians are more civilized than that....