![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Spanning The Globe
Feb. 19th, 2010 06:34 pmNow this, THIS is how you did sports!
I loved Wide World of Sports, especially in winter, when there was a lot of ice skating. They showed many events live, and there wasn't the bowing to the all-mighty advertising dollar you see today. They showed darn near anything.
(Apparently the "agony of defeat" guy is alive and well. He lived in Yugoslavia, and because of the Cold War, he didn't know until years later that he was immortalized on US television as a failure. Came as news to him...)
NBC can do a great sitcom, 30 Rock is one of the best comedies on the air. But their Olympic coverage is infuriatingly bad. Here we have the Olympics, right in the same time zone, and virtually nothing in the evening is being shown live. All the big-ticket events are tape-delayed so they can be edited and Americanized for the brain-dead US audience. And the skating, which they know everyone wants to see, is chopped up and drawn out for hours, so no-one will dare turn the channel to risk missing it. There's one routine at the beginning of the show. Want more? SORRY! You have to sit through three hours of fucking snowboarding before you get anything else! While waiting for the mens skating last night (I love spoilers so I googled to find out who actually won) I went to YouTube and looked up some skating names from the past.
Artistry like this is mostly gone from modern skating. I love a quad jump as much as anybody, but they come at the expense of this sort of slow, precise, deliberate beauty. Kinda sad in a way.
As I posted to Facebook last night, it does make me want to go skating. I haven't been in years.
I loved Wide World of Sports, especially in winter, when there was a lot of ice skating. They showed many events live, and there wasn't the bowing to the all-mighty advertising dollar you see today. They showed darn near anything.
(Apparently the "agony of defeat" guy is alive and well. He lived in Yugoslavia, and because of the Cold War, he didn't know until years later that he was immortalized on US television as a failure. Came as news to him...)
NBC can do a great sitcom, 30 Rock is one of the best comedies on the air. But their Olympic coverage is infuriatingly bad. Here we have the Olympics, right in the same time zone, and virtually nothing in the evening is being shown live. All the big-ticket events are tape-delayed so they can be edited and Americanized for the brain-dead US audience. And the skating, which they know everyone wants to see, is chopped up and drawn out for hours, so no-one will dare turn the channel to risk missing it. There's one routine at the beginning of the show. Want more? SORRY! You have to sit through three hours of fucking snowboarding before you get anything else! While waiting for the mens skating last night (I love spoilers so I googled to find out who actually won) I went to YouTube and looked up some skating names from the past.
Artistry like this is mostly gone from modern skating. I love a quad jump as much as anybody, but they come at the expense of this sort of slow, precise, deliberate beauty. Kinda sad in a way.
As I posted to Facebook last night, it does make me want to go skating. I haven't been in years.
