AGONY OF THE SPEAK
Olympics coverage embraces familiar flaws
HERE we thought that after half-a-century we’d finally made noteworthy progress. Even my pet, Peeve, wagged his tail.
NBC had broken a senseless allnetworks, all-NFL telecasts habit by showing the starting Super Bowl lineups just before kickoff rather than wait until the game began to introduce the 44 starters. We’re on a streak! One in a row!
But six days later, NBC’s latest Olympics coverage renewed two of the same old questions:
1) How is it that TV’s top shotcallers don’t realize that television is not radio?
2) Is there a polite way to holler, “Shaddup!”?
Saturday, 20-year-old U.S. figure skater Bradie Tennell hit the ice to warm up — plenty of time to provide a bio, set her scene before her program.
Yet, at the moment her music began and Tennell began to skate for keeps — the music coordinated with her routine — analyst Tara Lipinski chose to drown the music and diminish the scene with extraneous gab.
The music, Tennell and Lipinski began at the same instant.
Lipinski: “She’s so reliable, she’s the [U.S. team’s] pinch hitter with the bases loaded” — Huh? She’s the current U.S. champion — and, “She has never been under such type of pressure” — well, it’s the Olympics, no? And she twice noted Tennell relies on “precision” skating, as if imprecise is a logical option.
It didn’t matter if she, and to a lesser amount, Johnny Weir’s intrusions were live, live on tape or voiced over after the fact from an NBC studio. The needless commentary was both aggravating and standard for what TV sports analysis has become.
NBC’s figure skating coverage has been heavy with such needless over-the-music word-surplus. OK, a triple rear axel camel lutz a with a bicarbonate of soda is worth noting, but can’t we otherwise just watch and, crazy as it seems, just enjoy? Not a chance. The weekend’s Olympic viewing was loaded with what struck the reasonably good senses as irreconcilably odd.
As we watched American Red Gerard win gold in Slope-Style “Skateboarding” — at 117 pounds he’d either land softer than most or be blown into the parking lot — two things be- came inescapable to this viewer.
1) The competitors, mostly young — Gerard is 17 — were incredibly skilled and daring. They performed, or attempted, multiple flips — forwards and backwards — after launching themselves at top speed off extremely high ramps.
2) The winner was determined by who came as close as possible to killing himself while remaining standing on his board.
The commentary and backstories seemed to confirm both.
We were told that arctic conditions made the course more difficult — in this case “difficult” was heard as extra dangerous — and in the case of Canadian Mark McMorris, NBC presented a sensational side story: Eleven months ago a snow boarding accident left him in a “medically induced coma.”
NBC then showed a photo of McMorris, 24, in a hospital bed, attached to countless lifesustaining apparatus to treat — ready? — a fractured jaw, ruptured spleen, internal bleeding, multiple broken bones and a collapsed lung.
NBC’s coverage did not include McMorris’s post-recovery audio/ video testimony, “I thought I was going to die.”
Well, safe and skillful isn’t going to win medals, which led me to wonder: How many of these contestants know/knew someone who was killed or crippled pursuing this sport? I’d guess quite a few.
We know the deal. Higher-risk competitions have been added to attract younger audiences turned on by extremes — extreme sports, extreme video games, extreme hamburgers, extreme behavior. Several Olympic sports are dangerous — downhill skiing (as opposed to the uphill version), luge, ski jumping. So let’s add more? You bet!
If it can attract the omnipotent, increasingly desensitized and ESPNized young male demographic — viewers TV’s adult strategists have determined would rather watch 360degree slam dunks than a good basketball game — it’s a go.
And as long as American TV money — NBC’s, of late — is the tail that wags the Olympics ...
Next to be added? My guess is men’s and women’s no-holdsbarred, bring-on-the-blood Olympic cage fighting. I wouldn’t be surprised — and neither would you.