Winter Olympics 2010

[Dr. Nguyen Van Falk]

Norway 0, Canada 0 after one period.

Color me shocked.

Wow.

Heia Norge!

[Dr. Nguyen Van Falk]

Norway 0, Canada 0 after one period.

Color me shocked.

Wow.

Heia Norge!

Fuck... I find the game on CNBC (?) just in time for a STOPITRIGHTTHERE replay of a Canada PP tally.

[Dr. Nguyen Van Falk]

Iginla, Pronger... Just punch me in the nuts.

[Slaky]

Iginla, Pronger... Just punch me in the nuts.

Damn you Pal Grotnes. You were our only hope.

[Slaky]

http://www.iihf.com/home-of-hockey/news/news-singleview/article/norway-hopes-for-progress.html?tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1&cHash=3c62952712

Here's where Norway is as a country with hockey. I know some people often wonder why Norway sucks at hockey while Sweden and Finland are so damn good. It starts at the bottom. Interesting to hear that the better Norwegian players were ready to quit playing internationally if their federation didn't start taking it seriously.

[thehawk]

Iginla, Pronger... Just punch me in the nuts.

Damn you Pal Grotnes. You were our only hope.

And now he's sitting on the pine, nothing like having the puck for a minute on a delayed penalty, nailing the cross bar before getting the goal.  At least Toews was in the middle of it all.

[Dr. Nguyen Van Falk]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/olympics/2010/02/a_word_about_nbc.html

...

Take Monday. American Bode Miller went off eighth, and was really the first true star to take to the course in Whistler. To the naked eye, his run looked solid, and his teammates confirmed it later. He was excellent through the middle portion of the course, struggled slightly at the bottom, but was a contender the moment he finished.

"I saw Miller skiing," Didier Cuche of Switzerland, the pre-race favorite, said afterward, "and I said, 'That's maybe gold.'"

NBC would have loved it to be gold, and maybe they would have milked the skiing coverage if it had been. But I was stunned -- perhaps naively so -- by what happened next in the broadcast. They started jumping through the competition. They showed Norway's Aksel Lund Svindal, who went eight skiers after Miller, almost immediately. Svindal, of course, topped Miller by two hundredths of a second.

Then -- and this is where it started to get egregious -- they showed Switzerland's Didier Defago, who laid down the eventual gold medal-winning run. The problem: Defago was two skiers after Svindal. The bigger problem: The skier they skipped was Austria's Michael Walchhofer, officially the fastest guy in the pre-event training run, the downhill silver medalist in 2006, and a major contender in this race.

By this point, any fan with a real knowledge of skiing back home had to be completely alienated, and had to know something was up. So many storylines were being tossed aside, not the least of which was Canada's Manny Osborne-Paradis, who grew up at Whistler and is third in the World Cup downhill standings. But it continued to get worse. The 20th starter, two after Defago, was Switzerland's Carlo Janka, a rising star on the World Cup circuit who is second in the World Cup downhill standings. Did NBC show him? Nope.

They went right to Cuche, who started 22nd. They showed a little feature on how Cuche broke his thumb during the season, raising questions about his preparation for the Olympics. They had to show Cuche, who leads the downhill standings and is one of the best skiers in the world. But after that? They showed Canada's Robbie Dixon, who wiped out, and then quickly awarded the medals to Defago, Svindal and Miller. They didn't even show the final American, California's Marco Sullivan, who had a harrowing run and an eventual crash.

The result of all this is that a significant portion of the drama is sapped from the event. There's no sense of what it's like for Miller at the base of the mountain, wondering if Walchhofer or Cuche or Janka or someone else is going to knock him off the podium. There's also no sense of what a skiing competition is like. In a tacit way, NBC is admitting that Alpine skiing, one of the flagship sports of the Winter Olympics, isn't interesting enough to hold its audience.

Why, then, even broadcast the Games? I understand that America can't stop in the middle of a work day to watch a couple hours of skiing, and that delaying some things to prime time maximizes the audience. But how did NBC fill the time immediately after the skiing competition? With a feature from Mary Carillo, who I love. But it was from Manitoba, which is not near here. And it was on polar bears. Seriously.

The message: As you sit on your couch for the next two weeks, remind yourself that what you're watching are merely little slices of the Olympics. For most of America, the real Games will never be seen.

That.

[Slaky]

So answer me this: with the Olympics being such a huge money pit for NBC, where do the games go from here? They've got it through 2012 as far as I can see, but will they really extend those rights? Nobody is going to accuse NBC of doing a good job of broadcasting this stuff except maybe Pre.

[Waco Kid]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/olympics/2010/02/a_word_about_nbc.html

...

Take Monday. American Bode Miller went off eighth, and was really the first true star to take to the course in Whistler. To the naked eye, his run looked solid, and his teammates confirmed it later. He was excellent through the middle portion of the course, struggled slightly at the bottom, but was a contender the moment he finished.

"I saw Miller skiing," Didier Cuche of Switzerland, the pre-race favorite, said afterward, "and I said, 'That's maybe gold.'"

NBC would have loved it to be gold, and maybe they would have milked the skiing coverage if it had been. But I was stunned -- perhaps naively so -- by what happened next in the broadcast. They started jumping through the competition. They showed Norway's Aksel Lund Svindal, who went eight skiers after Miller, almost immediately. Svindal, of course, topped Miller by two hundredths of a second.

Then -- and this is where it started to get egregious -- they showed Switzerland's Didier Defago, who laid down the eventual gold medal-winning run. The problem: Defago was two skiers after Svindal. The bigger problem: The skier they skipped was Austria's Michael Walchhofer, officially the fastest guy in the pre-event training run, the downhill silver medalist in 2006, and a major contender in this race.

By this point, any fan with a real knowledge of skiing back home had to be completely alienated, and had to know something was up. So many storylines were being tossed aside, not the least of which was Canada's Manny Osborne-Paradis, who grew up at Whistler and is third in the World Cup downhill standings. But it continued to get worse. The 20th starter, two after Defago, was Switzerland's Carlo Janka, a rising star on the World Cup circuit who is second in the World Cup downhill standings. Did NBC show him? Nope.

They went right to Cuche, who started 22nd. They showed a little feature on how Cuche broke his thumb during the season, raising questions about his preparation for the Olympics. They had to show Cuche, who leads the downhill standings and is one of the best skiers in the world. But after that? They showed Canada's Robbie Dixon, who wiped out, and then quickly awarded the medals to Defago, Svindal and Miller. They didn't even show the final American, California's Marco Sullivan, who had a harrowing run and an eventual crash.

The result of all this is that a significant portion of the drama is sapped from the event. There's no sense of what it's like for Miller at the base of the mountain, wondering if Walchhofer or Cuche or Janka or someone else is going to knock him off the podium. There's also no sense of what a skiing competition is like. In a tacit way, NBC is admitting that Alpine skiing, one of the flagship sports of the Winter Olympics, isn't interesting enough to hold its audience.

Why, then, even broadcast the Games? I understand that America can't stop in the middle of a work day to watch a couple hours of skiing, and that delaying some things to prime time maximizes the audience. But how did NBC fill the time immediately after the skiing competition? With a feature from Mary Carillo, who I love. But it was from Manitoba, which is not near here. And it was on polar bears. Seriously.

The message: As you sit on your couch for the next two weeks, remind yourself that what you're watching are merely little slices of the Olympics. For most of America, the real Games will never be seen.

That.

If there's one thing you can count on for the Olympics it's that NBC's coverage will suck.

[Powdered Toast Man]

The Olympics suck.

[BH]

I'm sure there are some truly touching feelgood stories of olympic athletes. But I typically hate all of the ones that NBC does their stories on. A female snowboarder who loses a gold medal showboating and then falls 4 years later isn't a tragedy. And lets be honest, most of the American winter athletes are tailwinders. They are rich kids who play rich sports. How bad could their lives truly have been growing up? In Aspen.

[Dr. Nguyen Van Falk]

And lets be honest, most of the American Olympic winter athletes are tailwinders. They are rich kids who play rich sports. How bad could their lives truly have been growing up? In Aspen.

Even those who didn't grow up in the nicer parts of Europe or North America went to boarding school there'd

[Pre]

So answer me this: with the Olympics being such a huge money pit for NBC, where do the games go from here? They've got it through 2012 as far as I can see, but will they really extend those rights? Nobody is going to accuse NBC of doing a good job of broadcasting this stuff except maybe Pre.

That's a low blow.  I said that they tend to have good announcers,
I didn't say they handle anything else well.  I do not love polar bears.

One thing about the $250 million number is that they are going into
negotiations with the IOC.  I'm sure they are just starting the negotiation
process early.  Otherwise it doesn't make a lot of sense to announce
that you're having a hard time getting people to care about what you're
about to do.

[Quality Start Machine]

Pierre McGuire sucks.

[Waco Kid]

I was really hoping that Milbury and Roenick would starting throwing punches over the Ovechkin/Crosby debate during the 1st intermission of the Canada game. When Roenick said he would pick Overchkin over Crosby, Milbury was visibly hurt.