Bob Sledding
We watch the Olympics throughout most of the day, so that you don’t have to.
On Friday, I wrote in my “Bob Sledding” report – “For that matter, why not have one-man bobsled? You would just push your own sled, jump in and steer. Honestly, that almost seems to make the most sense, yet it’s the one they don’t do.” Well…to my total shock and pleasure, on Saturday the Olympics introduced a new event – the monobob!!! Yes, one-person bobsled! This is for women only, because the men have four-person bobsled and women don’t, so it equals out the number of medal events. Why they didn’t add four-person bobsled instead, I don’t know. (And some women bobsledders preferred that, because it would allow more people to compete – besides which, they say that most monobob drivers are also drivers in the two-person event, so you’re not adding many competitors.) But me, I’m just glad that I typed it here, and it came out over there, just one day later – and so there now is a monobob event, which is only right and proper. And even more, it’s also a name I think is great and a hoot.
The mixed team snowboard cross race was one of the more emotional of the Games. For starters, Lindsey Jacobellis, who in 2006 had a defining self-created screwup but redefined herself over the next 16 years as the best in her sport and finally won her first Gold Medal, put an exclamation mark on all that by winning her second Gold Medal. And that would have been enough. Except for the rest of the story with her teammate, Nick Baumgartner. Just days earlier, the 40-year-old Baumgartner was in tears for finishing low in his race, feeling he’d let down his family and supporters in what was likely his last race and last chance to win his first Olympic medal – only to discover that he qualified to be in the mixed team event, and with Jacobellis. And not only won his first-ever Olympic medal, but won Gold. NBC’s video afterwards of them isolating a camera on Baumgartner watching Jacobellis on his final run, tense, cheering her on, anxious, calling out advice, yelling – with his fellow-competitors behind him clearly excited for him – and then his joy at winning and rushing over to her, was truly special. (And even better was the next morning when they showed the same video…but split the screen and synched it up in real time to video of Jacobellis’s race.)
Apparently, TV ratings for the Olympics are very low. Usually, people like to point to “one reason,” though my observation over time is that there is rarely “one reason” for anything. I have no idea why ratings are down, but I can make a few guesses on some of the reasons. Among them are: I think people are a bit bothered that China is hosting the Games – not for being the country where the pandemic started, but also for egregious human rights abuses and political strong-arming. I also think whenever the Games are so far away from the U.S. that it screws up live programming, that often has some impact. I think, too, it was a big mistake for NBC to close their NBCsports channel only weeks before the games. And related to this, it was a mistake to move a lot of the coverage to the Peacock streaming service, which I don’t think many people use. I think having a bizarre amount of curling (of all sports – something so slow, pretty silly, and with rules few people understand) on during the day was very poor decision. Conversely, one of the more popular sports is skiing, and there hasn’t been much of that broadcast so far – and the one most-popular skier (who I’m sure NBC was counting on for viewership) is Mikaela Shiffrin…who in her first two events went out after a combined 15 seconds. And though the IOC they added the X Games-type events to expand the Winter Games and hopefully bring new, younger viewers, the early part of the Olympics is heavily loaded to these events, and they aren’t as popular with the general audience as was thought – and might not even have brought in as many new, younger viewers as they hoped. And finally, who knows how TV viewing patterns have been affected and changed by the pandemic, perhaps with people watch so much more television than in the past, and so just not as willing to devote even more time to wall-to-wall Olympic-watching. I don’t know if any of these are valid, but I suspect that all of them are to at least some degree, and some of them to a large degree.
P.S. I also have a theory that NBC broadcasting SO much curling has had an impact on ratings. On the one hand, they want to put on as much live content as possible, and with the Games in China, that’s difficult during normal viewing ours in the U.S. Doing this keeps the Olympics even more in the public eye. But I also think it may be counterproductive. That’s because a great many people looking for Olympic coverage tune in, and all they see – again and again and again – is curling. A sport that is probably mind-numbing to most viewers (not all – hey, I watch it a lot and don’t really understand it fully). And so, they not only turn it off, but because it’s on SO much, they get burned out and don’t check back as much. Far better, I think, would be to fill up some of those normal hours with replays of events that took place during the middle of the night when people weren’t watching.
Ice dancing began yesterday. I didn’t watch. As I’ve often noted, any event that has a required cha cha and tango is something I find numbing as far as Olympic sports go, for my taste, no matter how pretty it is. Ballet is pretty, too, but so far there’s no discussion to make it an Olympic sport, thank goodness, even if on ice. Though that I might possibly watch. Not if it was on skates, no, that would just be ice dancing with the required pas de deux. But ballet in ballet slippers on ice? It wouldn’t be a sport, but that’s entertainment. Here’s how bad it was – when I flipped the channel to see what was on, there was Tara Lipinski giving a preview of the ice dancing to come, but not about what to look for with what the skaters would be doing, but – what cool pop singers they’d be dancing to. (“Can you really go wrong with a boy band?”) Aghhh.
Okay, there has been one ice dancing pair who I’ve watched. It was Torville and Dean. But I watched them because…well, they were Torville and Dean. It’s like, you might hate Shakespeare, but that’s Laurence Olivier. You might hate the violin, but that’s Heifetz. You didn’t watch Torville and Dean because they were great ice dancers, you watched them because they were great. It almost wasn’t ice dancing, they created something their own. (Almost literally. There was a challenge by some that they were breaking the rules of ice dancing, but the complaints were overruled.)
This is what I mean. This is Jayne Torville and Christopher Dean winning the 1984 Olympic Gold Medal with their famous “Bolero.” It got them 12 perfect 6.0s, the most ever in Olympic history, including perfect 6.0 scores for artistic impression from all nine judges. If you haven’t seen them, then for 4-1/2 ethereal minutes, here’s why –
More to come...
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