The Winter Games Are Over. Did You Notice?

Well, I, for one, thought the Olympic coverage was abysmal. Proof positive that the inmates are running the asylum over at NBC. It’s like they said, "Let’s show the US runs/jumps/races and then the people who actually won. I mean the Luge finals were boiled down to 10 minutes. 10 minutes! Only so we could get back to Michelle Kwan falling on her behind or some special interest story about some figure skater’s cousin who competed in a neighborhood match that took place next to an Olympic venue. Sheesh.

Where do they get the commentators for figure skating? Could there be more nonsense and drivel? The answer is none. None more nonsense and drivel. They chastised one poor girl who had no chance of winning a medal (I thought we only saw the US competitors and the ones in medal contention here) because her laces weren’t tucked. Well la dee freakin’ da. Besides the drivel, they were mostly negative towards everyone. I’d like to commentate on their commentary while they listen.

NBC neglected to show anything live during the day. Personally, I get up between 5 and 5:30 every morning and I would have gladly turned on my TV to watch some of the Downhill – LIVE or Bobsledding – LIVE. I would even watch Curling – LIVE; but I’m really glad they do edit that for us or it would be like baseball… Slow.

I will give them props for hockey coverage though. Even though I missed most of the hockey tournament because they played during the day, they did air that live on CSNBC or USA network. Plus I thought getting Bill Clement to be the hockey anchor dude was a good move as well.

The "official web site" wasn’t much better. Before the games started, I couldn’t find a simple schedule that was formatted for printing. They tried to cram way too much on the front page. To top it off, no results page that you would go to would default to the current day. Most annoying. All the other Olympic web sites would either have next to nothing or link to NBC’s thoroughly unusable space on the web. I think they would have been better off setting up a MySpace account for the Olympics.

I enjoy the winter Olympics immensely. In fact, I enjoy it more than the summer Olympics. I just hope NBC has learned some lessons this go around and will listen to what people have to say about the coverage and fix it in time for the 2010 games in Vancouver. At least the time difference will be easier to work with.