I have been a fan of sport for as long as I can remember. As a youth, my favorite activities followed the sporting calendar; baseball/basketball in summer, football in the fall, hockey in the winter and tennis to coincide with the Borg McEnroe epic matches. I discovered soccer when I entered High School and have been fanatical about the sport ever since. To this day, I am actively involved with soccer as a referee, have been pretty much continuously been a referee since I was 20 except for a brief spell when my kids were very young. Naturally, as a fan of sport, I would get very excited every four years when the Summer Olympics came to television spending hour upon hour taking in as many events as possible, marveling at the athletic prowess of amateur athletes on display for the world to marvel. I would cheer for the red, white, and blue who seemed to have a competitor in every event. It didn't dawn on me until years later that there was an American in every event because the US TV coverage only broadcast events in which Americans were participating. I guess the assumed fans of athletics were too self centered to care about other events.
My taste for the Olympics soured around the time of the big boycotts, the boycott of the US against Russia and the counter boycott of Russia against the US. It soured because of the influx of political ideals into what was supposed to be a celebration of sport and, more influential, I soured on watching the Olympics because the coverage was awful. It was commercial laden, focused more on 'people of interest' than sport and the jingoistic nature of the US broadcasts stuck me with hour after hour of boxing while other events, events without US participants, barely earned a mention.
It was following the olympics that tried to drown me with boxing that I became fed up with the broadcasts and quit watching the games. It wasn't that I didn't like boxing it was that the broadcast whores would shove it down our throats to the exclusion of many other events that turned me against watching the corporate greed that the Olympics had become. As near as I can recall, that was the last time I wasted my time watching an Olympic broadcast. That was the last time until the 2012 Summer Olympics when I turned on the Saturday evening broadcast.
I turned on the the first Saturday broadcast because my curiosity got the best of me. Had the networks learned anything in the past 30 years, had they listened to the people and eliminated the commercialism that, like a cancer, infects the broadcast of the event? Would the networks portray sport for the beauty it is or would they still suck the life out of the event?
To my utter dismay, it is the same feeble minded broadcast style from all those years ago, the same feeble mind excrement fed to me in my youth. Sadly, the network didn't even show the big swim meet between American greats, the 400m individual medley, on live TV in the US. The rest of the world saw it live but not us in the US. The bastards showed the event on tape delay many hours after the fact, after the results were posted all over the news. The greedy bastards showed the event on tape delay because they believe more gold coin will cross their Judas palms by showing the event in prime time.
I have no problem with a rebroadcast in the evening but for sporting sake, show the event live. The World Cup broadcasts live. The Euro 2012 championships were broadcast live. Why not show this premier event live? I will tell you. They don't really care about the Olympics as sport. They only care about the Olympics as a cash cow.
To say I am disappointed in the networks is an understatement. I am as disillusioned by the corporate greed now as I was in my youth. It will be another 30 years before I can look forward to watching the Olympics again. Maybe then the greedy bastards will get it right. Somehow, I don't think NBC and the networks will ever change, will ever do what's right for the Olympics.
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