Olympics

 

I don't watch much TV anyway, and have been less than impressed with what little I've seen of the Olympics so far. Mostly it's commercials or talking heads blithering away about how Canada ought to be doing in the medals race. The actual competitions have not been even the slightest bit compelling.

I was watching for a little bit this afternoon. Though I didn't time it, CBC seemed to be about 1/3 commercials. The same ones, over and over. I already had a dislike on for Air Canada, and the little logos doing their demeaning parody of the various competitions hasn't improved matters.

The whole point of commercials, as I understand it, is to persuade people to buy the advertised products or services. But commercials just get into my face with their sheer stupidity. They seem to think it's OK to annoy me, if that's what it takes to remember the company name. All it did was confirm my decision that doing just about anything else was better than watching television.

The talking heads are little better. I guess they have so much air time to fill up, and have to do something to justify their salaries and the expense to get them to Australia. One woman had the famous opera house as a beautiful backdrop, and could talk of nothing more exciting than IOC rules for determining how long an athlete had to be resident in a country before competing. Then she went on to talk about the behind the scenes manipulation of how one particular diver got to the Olympics, but was only going to compete in some events but not in others, because of the stress involved. Pu-leaze. The people that know that athlete care, but nobody else does. We just want the selection criteria to be fair, and the selected athletes to do respectably.

Generally they do. Anybody coming home with a personal best under the stress of Olympic competition isn't going to get any flack from me. I sometimes wonder how the athletes cope with the expectations that the media build up, since that almost seems worse than the competition. The focus on medal performances seems just a little unhealthy, and defining winners that way is morbid.

While I'm on about medals, do you notice how they only give the medal totals? Just a few minutes ago they showed the United States with 53 medals, and Canada with 7. That looks bad, until you think about it on a per capita basis. They have 10 times our population, but they don't get 10 times as many medals. Maybe once the Olympics are over I'll take a look at the medal totals, and compare them to the supporting population. That won't stop the hand-wringing that we are so fond of, imagining that something is wrong with our sports programs, and that we have to do something. The sports oriented talking heads want to see more focus on sports because that will give them more business. If there are any changes it will inflate their egos, making them think they perhaps have more influence than they do.

Which leads me into my next topic, nationalism in sports. Stay tuned, as they say.