Monday, August 22, 2016

Make Better Decisions: Olympic Edition


That does not seem like a sport.

"It's a marathon, not a sprint," I said to Eli 15.0 at the beginning of the Olympics. Trying to distill NBC's coverage--which is decent on some channels and absolute crap on others--is complicated enough, but just the sheer volume of footage to sort through every day is actually tiring.

If you live in another country, let me explain how the Olympics work here: 22-25 minutes of advertising an hour for the prime-time coverage on NBC. Then there will be 10-15 minutes an hour of puff pieces framing the individual athlete's struggle against darkness and evil overlords. So, at most, you might see 20-25 minutes an hour of actual competition.

The sub-channels, though--like NBCSN--were much better. They actually showed most of an event live, instead of tape-delaying and endless editing and reframing the footage for maximum emotional impact.

Except the field events. What NBC does to the field events is just an abomination. They refuse to show them in their entirety, or anything even remotely close to it.

I'm glad I saw what I saw, but man, I'm glad it's over. I need two years to recover before the Winter Olympics.

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