The Morning After: Did the Olympics Land Its Final Jumps?

I’ve really liked the coverage so far. The commentators they’ve picked for each event have been experienced and knowledgeable, which has helped me understand judging and stuff. They seem to pair an expert and a straight on a lot of events, so that when the expert descends into industry-speak, the straight man nudges them back on track.

This approach has really highlighted how incongruous, subjective, and just plain retarded some of the judging criteria are for some sports, though. In some cases, the competitions are blatantly unfair and it makes me wonder how the competitors have not shot up the post office. Case in point, the skiing jumpy thing (yeah, I’m getting technical with the names). The conditions had modified so much between the jumps made by the first set and the jumps made by the second set that there was really no comparison. Yet it was all considered the same event, which totally screwed the second set of jumpers. The attitude about it was, “Gee, tough luck that the best guys in the world get screwed by this and people who are far less deserving will get the medals but what can ya do?”

Well, I don’t know, isn’t there something they could do? Come back tomorrow? Have scoring that compensates for such changes? Anyway, yeah, I’ve seen a few things like that and it makes me wonder how the athletes deal.

I find myself fastforwarding through more and more. The first week was interesting, but this week has been just skating. Things that need to be scored by judges bore me, because they are all corrupt. And other events are unfair also, as masurix pointed out.

The hockey has been amazing though, so that’s nice.

Deteriorating conditions have been an issue in a number of events, definitely, but I was interested to see one interviewed athlete be pretty matter-of-fact about it. I don’t remember who it was, but the attitude essentially was — Yeah, we’re winter athletes, so the we know the weather and conditions will always be a factor. It’s just part of what they do.

Trying to stream the US Hockey semi-final right now. 6-0! the NBC Olympic site hasn’t streamed well at all. I blame Microsoft’s silverlight crappola. The coverage seems poor every night there is skating on. Wish they would stick with an event, even if it is figure skating. Also hate the tape delays. I check who won online and then could care less about seeing how it happened. I’m not sure I can make it through another 24 hours of canadian accents. The curling commentators have just about pushed me over the edge. Also, everytime I hear a Canadian Olympian start talking in French I’m reminded why USA is number 1!

During one of the endless short track speed skating events, one of the commentators was talking about an Olympics where short track was held outside. That would be awesome. Hockey would be awesome outside too. Honestly, every event that can be done outside should be.