Spasibo to the geniuses who realized that cross country is much more compelling when it is athletes racing each other and not the clock. The thrilling finishes in many events would have been missed if they were still staggering starts.
Thank you to whoever invented the scoring illustration for the shooting range in biathalon. With multiple shooters at the stations, it was exciting (I’m writing about BIATHALON) to see who was going to be going all out and who was going to be taking a side trip to the penalty loop. (And isn’t that a great idea? How about a penalty loop for every announcer who can’t learn to pronounce Sikharulidze after a full week of controversy?)
Grazie to the virus that silenced Don Chevrier in the middle of the curling tourney. Chevrier and Don Duguid may be the best curling announcers in the business. (Hmm, in that Home Depot ad, Don Barcome is a curling expert. Is everyone connected with curling named Don?) But when you are broadcasting to a neophyte audience, at least a little guidance is welcome. The two Don’s commentary might as well have been in Chinese. When Bob Pappa was brought in as a replacement for the ailing Chevrier, he asked Dugie the questions I’d been asking the whole first week. Now I understand the scoring and I’m hooked. I even enjoyed the healthy Chevrier when he returned for the medal round.
Merci to NBC for showing some medal ceremonies that didn’t involve U.S. athletes. This may have been a function of the attractive and always rocking medals plaza. But it was still great to see folks not in red, white, and blue in their moment of glory.
Thank you Sandra Bezic and Tracy Wilson for overcoming the early hysteria in pairs and providing solid objective commentary on the subjective mens’ and ladies’ figure skating and ice dance competitions. This is the first competition I can remember for which the commentators concentrated on each of the elements in the short programs and clearly and simply explained what was right or wrong with each skater’s performance. Now if someone could convince Scott Hamilton to stop yelling. Figure skating does not require screaming from the announcers and surely the viewers don’t need to hear a man who isn’t skating grunt through the elements as if he’s personally providing the muscle power.
Apparently I’m segueing to the gripes, so here goes.
Siberian exile is too good for those athletes who still are more interested in the result than the journey. If you can’t win without cheating, don’t show up. Whether you take beta blockers to steady your rifle arm, steroids to build those pushing muscles on the luge run, blood doping for stamina, or stimulants to get you going, if you can’t play clean, don’t show up at the party. Jacques Rogge has it right when he says that if you don’t compete fairly you may win, but you will never be a champion. (Let’s be real. I may have suspected that Johan Muhlegg wasn’t running on normal fuel when he popped up with medal winning performances. There’s a reason this guy wasn’t wanted by Germany, after all. But when I see Larisa Lezutina lose medal number 10 for blood doping, I have to wonder if one through nine were legitimate. It destroys her entire remarkable legacy.)
A week-long, round the clock Jerry Lewis movie marathon to the proponents of short track speed skating who got it included as an Olympic event. It would be exciting if you could tell the winners and losers. But when no race is won by the swift, it might as well be one of those blasted judged sports. If you can’t have a majority of the races with folks playing fair, then stay on the county fair circuit.
Go back to your caves, folks who wish it was still truly amateur. Since it hasn’t been truly amateur since nations began using their military to house, feed, cloth, and train, this is a particularly annoying complaint. And it ignores the fact that without the constant worrying about whether a particular athlete is or isn’t professional, we at least have eliminated one of the main sources of whining. Now if we could get rid of performance enhancing drugs and subjectively judged sports, the only whining left would be the sore losers. We’ll have to put up with them, though. Sore losers are like the poor. They’re always with us.
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