"They need that superhero story, that star quality. They don’t really see the Olympics as a true sporting event, but rather as something more personal."
Said Tang Tang, a media professor at Kent State University who has studied the Olympics, quoted in "Beijing Olympic Ratings Were the Worst of Any Winter Games/NBCUniversal’s coverage had 11.4 million viewers per night on average, compared with 19.8 million for the Pyeongchang Games in 2018" (NYT).
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111 comments:
My interest has waned due to any number of factors, but the increasing professionalization of the games has been one of the largest ones.
Greatest US Olympic moment of all times? The Miracle on Ice.
Least noteworthy moment? Any of the Dream Team victories.
Another huge factor is the increasing knowledge of the shocking corruption of the international governing bodies and US Gymnastics in particular.
"Audiences watch the Olympics for the stories.…They need that superhero story, that star quality. They don’t really see the Olympics as a true sporting event, but rather as something more personal." Said Tang Tang, a media professor at Kent State University.
I have pretty much stopped watching the Olympics because of all the sappy "personal stories". I just want to watch the competition.
But what do I know? I don't have an advanced degree in "media".
At least among long-time fans, it's the opposite. People don't care about the personal stories. Why would they?
We watch sports to see feats of athleticism that are far beyond anything we can do ourselves. I have my own family dramas. Why in the world would I tune into the Olympics hoping to hear about somebody else's?
I don't have anything to do with anything from China as much as I can help it. We should have stayed home, instead of giving them a stage. Besides that, the atheletes are there to compete FOR America. We don't care about their political beliefs. If they want to spew Wokeness, I turn them off. I have better things to do with my time, then to get lectured to by some ignorant punk that watches CNN.
I'd like to see the breakout by sex. Its women who need the "emotional connection", that's originally why ABC started its "up close and personal" segements. Most men just want to watch the sport and root for the USA.
The other problem is NBC and liberal MSM hate patriotism. And they run around calling half the country Nazis and racists. So when the Olympics come around who wants to root for the USA? You need patriotism to do that, and the Liberal/Left doesn't even like America. At all.
Off topic: Further, I've found NBC's coverage so awful in so many ways. Non-stop commercials, weepy personal stories, idiot commentators who jabber constantly, and Attention Deficet disorder level back and forth from this sport to another. Fortunately, I can use the intertubes to get other coverage from other countries. Its much better, for the few sports I care about.
The Olympics brand is really struggling.
No, the Olympics brand is not struggling.
The answer is clear to everyone but their masters won't let them print it.
The NYT's can't talk about the real reason ratings are down.
The Olympics is an evil institution run by corrupt evil people.
NBC just tried to whitewash China's genocide and authoritarianism.
Just like they are whitewashing Canada's Regime.
Most people are tired of supporting the corrupt evil aristocracy. There are a few bitter clinger democrats that are all for jackboots and genocide. But most Americans are decent people.
I stopped watching the Olympics because of the stories.
Setting aside the fact that this "media professor's" take on sports is incoherent (superheros and star qualities are not characteristics of "true sporting event[s]"?!)...
If it's personal to the would-be viewers, and people in record numbers chose not to watch the Olympics hosted by China's repressive regime, what does that say? Did Tang Tang connect the dots?
All sports are about stories. When an involved football fan watches the Super Bowl he sees a player make a good play and says, "Remember when that guy played at Wisconsin," or Penn State, or wherever. There is a whole story arc by which that guy got to the Super Bowl. Fans follow these guy's careers over many years. Same with the franchises, there is history evoked in watching almost every big game. The Olympics brings these athletes out of hiding and reveals them to the world, and attempts to artificially construct narratives for the players and the events that are based on anything but the athletes exploits on the "field of honor," mostly in misguided attempts to appeal to women by all but ignoring the sports aspect.
"that superhero story, that star quality"
Americans need American stars, who this time mostly failed. And who will get excited about a star winning the women's 500M?
As previously discussed on this blog, the slight complication this time was that the greatest stars were exploited young Russian girls. Can anyone still get excited about that, even if Valieva, by my 2-minute observation, is a superlative genius at what she does?
I stepped away from watching the Olympics because of NBC.
NBC always wants to inflate the athletes with their "Up close, and personal" coverage. I think that might work for women, but I just want to see the competition.
This seems 100% wrong. I don't watch because I'm tired of the "stories" about how some athlete overcame some adversity. I want to see the sports. Also, if the Olympics are in an inconvenient time zone, it's easier to just look up the results on the internet.
America 1st?
In the same way Democrats blame messaging for all their problems, these analyses of the decline in sports viewership deliberately miss the mark. Any mention of the rejection of having wokeness shoved down our throats by the ‘olympic network’, the greed and corruption of BLM, of the IOC, the kowtow to the China regime…the Russians, just because.
Get back to us with your plan to win us back after you apologize. Sincerely…
They should go back to every four years, let them 'draft' off of each other, and stay away from the Chinese communists.
I suppose that could be the reason for some people. As for me, I refused to watch because of the following reasons in this particular order:
1. The games were in China and being used as propaganda for same evil regime.
2. The Olympics are outrageously corrupt and I did not want to put up with their garbage. They did not fail to live down to expectations this year with the Russian cheating scandal ruining women's figure skating.
3. Most of the Winter Olympics is sports that I do not particularly care about. Hockey is interesting and some of the other sports are interesting to watch as novelties, but for the most part these are not compelling contests. Given #1 and #2, it made it a lot easier to live without.
Alas, much of the past couple of years has been learning what I can live without.
At Athens '04, an official from IOOC said the challenge for the future was to keep the games relevant in an age of declining nationalism. Older people who grew up with the Olympics as the proxy battle between East and West would still tune in, but as they die off will be replaced by generations less steeped in national narratives. Thus, he went on, it will require two full years of marketing before each games to get the audience focused upon the personal stories of individual competitors regardless of their country.
Fail
"Audiences watch the Olympics for the stories".
Yeah.... no. When they started focusing on the stories, often about those finishing WAY out of the medals, I lost interest.
I actually tuned into sports programming for the sports.
But the, "We'll capture the female audience" won the day.
For the stories? I don't think so. It was sappy story angle on the athletes that lost me.
I would be I interested to learn how the Olympics played elsewhere. I assume they got big coverage in China. In general better than would have been the case if held in Kazhakstan, the runner up. Expect much better viewership in Paris, and Milano/Corvino, and LA.
Exact opposite for me. The less time I've got to watch some sappy, tug-at-my-heart-strings piece, the better. Show me the competition. I don't need or want the fluff. (I watched a combine 9 minutes of the Olympics this year - maybe).
The Olympics have not been about athletic excellence for quite some time. Now they're just another way to sell running shoes on TV.
When I watched it was for the athletics, not the soap opera stories and bios.
Or on another possibility, the Olympic Organization has adopted Global-Leftist-Corporate ideology, and when dealing with any organization that has adopted that ideology that most common emotional response in people is one of grey, bleak, nihilism much like was experienced by the people of Oceania.
Didn't have access to the article, but did it quote anyone who didn't watch the Olympics, why they didn't watch?
Easy test:
Have a version that is just stories, no sports at all.
Have a version that is just sports, no stories.
They've been inching closer to the first one for a while.
Earlier Olympic coverage were much more like the latter.
I think the sports ratings would win. The trouble is they did to the Olympics what they did to so many things, they wanted to expand viewership beyond sports lovers, but have increasingly alienated sports lovers to do it. Like with most media coverage of the last 20 years, I blame Jeff Zucker, who ruined NBC before he ruined CNN, but kept getting promoted. Now I know it is because he had so many secrets and was using those to maintain his own corrupt lifestyle in their company.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s the Olympics were in their commercial prime: widely accepted nationalism and a set of Communist villains. Everyone knew the East Germans cheated, as their female athletes stomped on the other women and often looked like men due to the testosterone injections.
Still, the "honest amateur competitors" of the west sometimes defeated the cheaters and thereby the victories were twice as great. Never mind that most athletes were spoiled wealthy folks who could afford to spend their lives preparing for a single event, or faced such small competitive pools that athletics wasn't particularly relevant. The amateur angle died with the Dream Team, as the USA wouldn't let its basketball medals go away.
Today, the Olympics is a mix of abused teenage girls, cheaters who fantasize about being the best but who are not the best, and bodily oddballs who win through an accident of birth. No one could compete with Michael Phelps because of his uncommonly long arms and short legs. No one could compete with Usain Bolt because of his uncommonly long legs. Come to think of it, THE COMPETITORS ARE A LOT LIKE THOSE IN POLITICAL POWER AROUND THE WORLD!
"Further, I've found NBC's coverage so awful in so many ways. Non-stop commercials, weepy personal stories, idiot commentators who jabber constantly, and Attention Deficet disorder level back and forth from this sport to another."
Ditto 1000 times.
The commentary was abysmal. I would sometimes swing by NBC to catch up on anything that might be of interest. The maudlin stories about what athletes had overcome, the syrupy and then dramatic background music, the high-school level dialogue, the pretense that these athletes had suddenly become national heroes, and worst of all, "he/she is the first _____ to appear/place at the Olympics!" - it was all puke-worthy.
And possibly the saddest athletic moment I've ever seen was the finale of women's figure skating. A group of young girls standing there, alone and deserted, holding their stuffed animals, hating their lives, unable to enjoy their accomplishments, with no one to help them.
It's also indicative of current media reality where a significant number of people in charge of coverage, product, presentation don't actually like the content of what they are responsible for. So they take the name and the event, turning it to what they do like. But that ruins it, and then they are mystified and think the problem was they didn't change it enough.
This happened to Star Wars too. Which is why Jon Favreau's part of it (Mandalorian and Boba Fett) are significantly better than the recent movies).
It happened to news channels, Zucker was a gossip guy who made the Today show successful for a while and who didn't like actual news coverage.
Progressive churches have the same problem too, people who don't like Christianity making it into something they do like.
The list can go on and on. It's a curious reality that people who don't like something are put in charge of it, but it's strangely very common, because people with ambition aren't themselves creative so they are ruthless about getting power over whatever is popular even and especially if they don't like or understand it.
Get woke, go broke. Alas, it really is that simple.
What Michael said. The Olympics' big selling point in the past was nationalism. Competition against them weird furiners. Lots of coverage of where each country stood in regards to medals won. Now, nobody cares.
Was it Bob Costas or some other "personality" that ruined the Olympics with all these personal interest stories? Doesn't matter, because I'll assign collective guilt to the Olympics broadcasters for the last twenty plus years.
I want to see the shot putter put the shot for 75 feet, the bob sledder beat the competition by two tenths of a second (usually less), and the ski jumper fly through the air. I don't care if any of them grew up in a chicken coop in lower Mongolia or upper Montana. Did they get it done in the competition--whatever it was.
"The Olympics brand is really struggling. A lot of people don’t feel that emotional connection anymore... Audiences watch the Olympics for the stories."
"They need that superhero story, that star quality. They don’t really see the Olympics as a true sporting event, but rather as something more personal."
No, actually we watched it for the sports and excellence, and to see America win.
Since NBC's coverage is all about the stupid stories, and about purple haired freaks "winning", not America, we've stopped watching
I have been to literally hundreds of live sporting events and the coolest experience was spending 4 or 5 days at the Albertville Olympics in 1992. It was an absolute blast, I chatted briefly with Herschel Walker (bobsled) and hung out with Bonnie Blair's (speed skating) family all afternoon one day. I was there with three Army buddies (we drove from Germany) and we were waving American flags most of the time. People from all over the world were super nice, probably half of the events I saw was because someone from, say, Norway, had watched their team participate and just handed us their passes so we could watch the U.S.A.
The emphasis is on the superhero, not the story, and superheroes aren't real. The "up close and personal" style of giving each (American) competitor a "story" was fresh at one point and attractive. By now, though, everybody has gotten used to that approach. Everybody hates it and nobody cares. Also, the sports have to be ones that people are actually interested in. Michael Phelps (swimmer) probably got a lot of viewers. Eric Heiden (speedskating) probably didn't.
The Olympics are like World's Fairs and a lot of other things: there are two many other things to watch on television and the internet. When there was no internet and only three or four television channels, the Olympics had a much larger audience. Maybe a very charismatic competitor could bring viewers back, but I doubt it.
Static Ping said...
Alas, much of the past couple of years has been learning what I can live without.
Yes, but it's not "alas". I've saved a bunch of money, and avoided a bunch of calories, by getting rid of Coke after they went Woke.
I've saved a lot of time, and had less conflict with my wife, because I feel no need to waste any time watching NFL games post them letting Kaep spit on the flag.
Thanks to the Left, I've dumped a lot of shit out of my life, and replaced it with better things. Go Woke, don't get my money, time, attention.
It was kind of cool watching the snowboarders in 2018. Other than that, I can't think of anything about the Genocide Games that I'm sad I missed.
And watching NBC lose a lot of money? THAT is priceless
No no no! Not the stories! I mean, yes, their stories can be interesting, as Tim points out. We like *knowing* the stories of the athletes we follow.
But we don't watch Olympic coverage to watch the stories. The men's half pipe competition was thrilling. We actually cheered out loud. But the fluster cluck around the ice skating, and having China haul out poor Peng Shui to watch their new American-born sports start Eileen Gu, just was a reminder of how corrupt it all is. China and the IOC and the doping committees. That makes it harder to support the Olympics as the pinnacle of competition.
Readering said...
I would be I interested to learn how the Olympics played elsewhere. I assume they got big coverage in China. In general better than would have been the case if held in Kazhakstan, the runner up. Expect much better viewership in Paris, and Milano/Corvino, and LA.
I bet it played well with democrats in the US too.
The only people that stopped watching are the people who object to fascism and genocide.
"They need that superhero story, that star quality. They don’t really see the Olympics as a true sporting event, but rather as something more personal."Said Tang Tang, a media professor at Kent State University who has studied the Olympics
Tang Tang.
I wonder why this professor ignored the Chinese Genocide elephant in the room.
And of course an idiot journalist is going to talk about the stories.
NBC started stuffing the "Story" bio soap opera nonsense in there to get women to watch.
Feel the power of my fully operationalized gold medal! The olympics is politics by other means. It is perfect for creation of phoney baloney jobs for the inept but connected members of the 2nd world elites. A master class in overt bribery.
I think the Olympics started their decline with the horrendous programming by the tv networks.
When curling becomes the fan favorite you know the Olympic Committee has done a thorough job at destroying amateur athletic competition.
Good gravy, it was all that personal stuff that turned me OFF of the olympics. I used to watch the actual events and keep track of winners. Now I'm just bombarded with the personal nonsense (so and so had to overcome the tragedy of a car wreck on their road to...) that means absolutely nothing to me. The worst is when they focus so much on an individual athlete who DOESN'T EVEN WIN. Yes, I'm talking about Simone Biles, but there are plenty of others.
I will confess to watching the mesmerizing activity called curling, just to watch. Other than that, I watch none of it anymore.
I prefer events where I can see that one athlete or team is faster, stronger, better than another. The judged events, like gymnastics and diving, while impressive, are more performative than straight-up, head-to-head competitions. And, yeah, enough backstories.
I think tim in vermont's comment is very perceptive. I don't entirely disagree with micheal's IOC official saying the nationalism of the games would need to be downplayed but I do disagree that it would take two years of marketing. In ABC's heyday Jim McKay could get the US TV audience (and really, that's who they are pitching to) rooting for a bi-athaloner from Serbia with a 10 minute bio. The thing was, the bio was reinforcing the story that was being seen on the screen in the competition. It wasn't presenting the Olympics as the Sports Division of the Intersectionality Games.
In a slightly different vein, Cool Runnings is one of those movies that couldn't be made today. You couldn't play the obvious challenges of training for bobsled in Jamaica for laughs, and the team's secondhand equipment would have to be made into some Global North-South story about resources. You couldn't tell Junior's story about his conflict with his father without having him come out as gay or trans. John Candy would have to be the 'white savior' rather than a human looking for some redemption after going off on the wrong path. The movie worked for the same reason that the old Olympic human interest stories worked. They were stories about humans working toward goals in sports, not stories about what it's like to be a something something incidentally participating in the Olympics.
I see I am not the only one who reaches for the remote as soon as the "heart-tugging" theme comes on.
Eric Heiden got a lot of viewers. Won at every distance at US venue.
Speaking of dittos, wasn't Rush Limbaugh one of the first to notice the feminization of sports in general but particularly the Olympics? That would have been more than 20 years ago, when it was still a big event.
Lefty - given that 90% of profs are - prof disassociated from reality thinks Olympics are a soap opera.
It seems unlikely that women are the primary viewers of sporting events including the Olympics. I suspect men and some women stopped watching this year for several reasons: the CCP threat to the world and athletics and sponsors pandering to them; acceptance by sports authorities of trans athletes disadvantaging women; commercialism and wokeness of athletics and sponsors; unwillingness to patronize NBC mediaswine; diminishing pride in neoliberal, QuidProJoe America.
One of my favorite Olympic moments was at the 2014 Winter Olympics when, during the opening ceremonies, the NBC commenter referred to the Soviet communist system as “one of modern history’s pivotal experiments." Soon thereafter, Bob "Pinko" Costas come down with pink eye.
idiot commentators who jabber constantly
I will say that I enjoy listening to Tara Lipinksi and Johnny Weir. They know what they're talking about. Similarly, in the Summer Olympics, Rowdy Gaines is a treat.
But the rest of them? No.
The Olympics has been feminized. In the 70s, the coverage was all about times, points, records. Just pure competition. Nowadays, it has to be about 'stories' - tales of personal tragedy and triumph. Bleh.
Nationalism/community for some, perhaps, probably. It was about human performance in two categories: male and female sexes, first, and about competition, second.
The X-Games are a whole lot more fun to watch then the Olympics...and they are on every year!
Skeptical Voter it was Dick Engberg that I thought peddled the worst of the sap.
After watching some of the events something hit me - just how dangerous some of these events were.
luge and that skeleton
high flying ski/snowboard jumping, especially the ones where they twirl themselves in the air
that whole half-pipe stuff
speed skating
American broadcasters ruin everything they touch. The Olympics should do a number of things simultaneously such as moving the summer Olympics to Greece and the winter Olympics to Norway permanently. Keeps the politics down to a more manageable level, Greece is the birthplace of the Olympics and generally doesn't cause political problems and neither does Norway. No under 18 year old and the kids have to have actually graduated their normal school to keep the excesses down to a minimum. Straight streaming by subscription without the commentator nonsense at a reasonable price.
Once again NBC has proven that it's not called the the Nothing But Crap network for nothing.
IMHO, the complaints here are years out of date; (snark)not necessarily surprising given the age of this group(/snark). If you subscribed to the NBC sports streaming channels, you had access to full streams, often with no commentary at all, of all of the events. My wife is still watching her way through them. I checked in from time to time and it was so refreshing to be able to just watch the figure skaters without the constant babbling from the booth. If you want the "up close and personal" treatment, you can watch the major network streams, those are available too.
Corporate bullshit and wokeness destroyed the ratings.
Nobody gives a fuck about a black bobsledder or a non-binary skater, but that's what was crammed down our throats every night.
Good riddance...
Get the 'lympics out of China.
That Iowahawk quip about killing it, gutting it, wearing its skin and demanding respect also comes to mind...
Best Olympic Moment...
Little Chocolate Donuts
11.4 million in 2022 vs 19.8 million in 2018. Just about all the Republicans tuned out?
Factor in as well the proliferation of absurd new sports and events--team skiing, the myriad snowboarding events (solo or not), new ice skating events, new gymnastic events, etc. while other sports have their events cut back or competitors limited due to geographic "equity" considerations--(I'm looking at you, rowing--do we need to exclude high-performing European entrants to be sure Dahomey gets a quad scull in the summer Olympics?). Add on the corruption, doping, professional participation, and the saccharine TV production values, and it made me a non-watcher for the first time ever.
Oh, another point--if you can plausibly associate the phrase "...and a 4.5 from the Russian judge" with a "sport", it's not a sport.
I never liked the sports or the stories. I have an overhype detector that looks for the commercial.
The crippled French guy who lit the Olympic flame with a burning arrow was good though, not for the feat but for the nerves. I tuned his story out if he even had one.
The "stories" are what made me stop watching the Olympics.
Allowing the Olympics to be rebranded as nothing more than "Beijing 2022" by the totalitarian communist Chinese government was a bad idea. Anyone watching on TV saw not the Olympics, but "Beijing 2022" in almost every single moment of the broadcast.
What Joe Smith said. It's no longer about the sports thanks to NBC's woke coverage.
Besides the China aspect this year, the problem with Olympic coverage is that it is geared toward women. So for the Winter Olympics, rather than seeing full coverage of the alpine events, as an example, we are stuck watching two weeks of ice skaters falling on their arses. In the summer it's gymnastics, diving and women's beach volleyball. Yes, track and swimming get primetime coverage. But, other traditional Olympics sports, like boxing and wrestling get shoved off to some obscure sister network aired at 2:00 in the morning.
Tang Tang: Pootie so nice they named it twice.
Sorry, I wanted to leave a comment about the Olympic coverage but I haven’t owned a television since 1999.
Audiences watch the Olympics for the stories.
They need that superhero story, that star quality. They don’t really see the Olympics as a true sporting event, but rather as something more personal.
No. Many/most actually do want to watch the sporting events. It is NBC that provides nothing but that story crap that focuses on one or two people and ignores the rest.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who longs for the days of ABC broadcasting.
Ficta said...
IMHO, the complaints here are years out of date; (snark)not necessarily surprising given the age of this group(/snark). If you subscribed to the NBC sports streaming channels
Then you gave money to worthless shits who hate us.
Which I'm not going to do, now or ever.
I do find it very funny that you have to pay to get the cheapest to produce content (just put out a camera), and get teh expensive crap (talking heads cost money) for "free".
But I suppose if they reversed it, they'd find out that almost no one is willing to pay to listen to the talking heads, and that would hurt their egos.
But no, not going to pay. Not going to reward NBC for corrupting and destroying the main "sports" broadcasts with the whiney shit.
If they want our eyeballs, they're going to have to give us what we want, not what their girlfriends want
This same idiot story dynamic happens with football too. They show a play and then immediately cut to a shot of someone in the stands for the fan reaction.
Look, when I'm actually at the stadium watching a game, the LAST thing I do after a play is turn around to look at the other fans to see what they are doing. I watch the damn field. Which is where the plays happen. But the TV people spend so much time cutting from a fan to a coach to another fan, etc., that often they miss the beginning of the next play.
Then there was the CCP Pandemic (sometimes called “COVID-19”). The world rewarded the ChiComs with the Olympics for releasing that place on us, and killing millions, most likely through shoddy lab practices while engaging in Gain of Function viral research, that much of the world considers immoral. Then, they treated visitors, athletes and tourists both, for the Olympics with supreme distinctive, requiring them to run software that spies on them on their smart phones, as a condition of entry into the country. The facilities for the athletes were substandard, and the food apparently was unappetizing and almost inedible.
If you subscribed to the NBC sports streaming channels, you had access to full streams, often with no commentary at all, of all of the events.
IOW, if I PAY EXTRA, i can get decent coverage. THanks! DO I still get commericals?
I'm with Freeman Hunt on this.
I like the competition. Up close and personal? No, thanks. They drowned the competition in the human interest stories. Yech.
I'm not Much of an Olympics fan; but aren't we about due, for another Olympics?
The last one was 5 or 6 years ago, wasn't it?
The only story out of this Olympiad is the viscous destruction of child by adults.
The Chi Com Virus LeBron Olympics.
Try that! real winner.
"Freeman Hunt said...
The "stories" are what made me stop watching the Olympics."
Me too. And also America's Got Talent. My son and I call it America's Got a Sob Story.
"IOW, if I PAY EXTRA, i can get decent coverage. THanks! DO I still get commericals?:"
You still watch over the air TV? Yeesh. Like I said, this crowd is old. :-)
To answer your question: I think you could watch for free. There were ads. I don't know for sure because I was already subscribed to the $5 a month tier. Clearly NBC totally screwed the pooch on getting the word out that that happy golden day was here when you no longer had to watch their irritating human interest version of the Olympics, since pretty much nobody in this comment section knew about it.
In too many events the winners are determined by vote of "experts." Makes it less than compelling when the athlete is at the mercy of judges. The judged events may be exciting but I'd rather watch an event where the winner is determined by some measurable quantity -- final score, elapsed time, height jumped.
Hmm. A Chinese Academic finds any reason except ideology and communism to explain why people do not like these Olympics.
Quelle Surprise
gspencer said...
After watching some of the events something hit me - just how dangerous some of these events were.
luge and that skeleton
high flying ski/snowboard jumping, especially the ones where they twirl themselves in the air
that whole half-pipe stuff
speed skating
***************
I didn't watch, so I genuinely do not know: are there both Men's and Women's divisions for these sport?
Congrats Ficta. You thoroughly immersed yourself in the Genocide Games, giving legitimacy to and enabling the Communist Chinese. You're right - you're so much better than the geezers here.
The Olympics brand is really struggling.
How really struggling is it?
It is really struggling with an unstable identity and progressive crisis in the modern model. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall...
Speaking of sports crashing like a dud, did you see that truck blowhard do his best Biden imitation in bragging that he would shutdown the D.C. Beltway today, with delusions of being this great leader, and then no one showed up to join in?
"To answer your question: I think you could watch for free. "
Thanks for the reply. But I think that's wrong. According to the Peacock website:
At $5 month you get the olympics and "Live sports and events"- including the Premier league. And you get commericals.
At $0 per month - all you get is commericals and "40,000 hours of TV and movies"
At $10/month I get everything and I'm ALMOST commerical free. Seems a "small amount of programming" will have ads. Even if you pay $10/month because -its implied - NBC is being forced to. Damn those "program rights"!
[Shrug] The best American female skier competed for China. Kinda took the edge off.
I trust that Tang Tang and Fang Fang are utterly unrelated.
Recall that Russia was banned from Olympic competition after the Sochi games because of large scale, more or less industrialized doping. Sort of costs you your interest in an event when the Russians are still competing and apparently still doping.
One of the reasons I stopped watching was too much story and not enough of the sport I wanted to see.
I've always considered athletes and athletics boring--from mildly boring when I was young enough to play, to profoundly boring as I've gotten older.
The personal stories are nauseatingly inspirational.
The Olympics in particular are an orgy of chauvinism. (Which reminds me that I have to admit in all honesty that I did admire the East German Youthsex Squads back in the day.) And the 'sports"--synchronized diving? Seriously.
Does the US government pay for any of this stuff? If so, I want my portion back.
Is it still live via satellite?
Had Trump been President : would TEAM USA have gone to the Bat-Cave of ChinaVirus
Jim McKay, as mentioned above, made my Olympics. China and the NBA's fall to the greedy CCP all convinced me to ignore this year. Rappin Ho showed quite clearly what the Olympics had evolved into.
Like lots have already noted, the stories drove me away maybe 4 times. Each time I was watching, and then I was locked into some 5 minute puff piece on an athlete. So I found something else. Then just stopped checking in.
The last story I liked was local. An Iowa woman had been competing for 5 or 6 straight Olympics. Trap shooter. Several gold and silvers. But she was average, except for her talent to knock down 25 straight. That's the key. Let the locals cover it.
"You still watch over the air TV? Yeesh. Like I said, this crowd is old. :-)"
You say old. I say I have a life. I don't need the annoyance of individual subscriptions for each thing I might want to watch. Not worth my time.
One suggestion: going back to the good old days (minus the slavery) and having nude Olympics.
To be honest I find it difficult to cheer for the empty shell of what used to be my country.
Not me.
I don't give two hoots about the Olympics and the weird sports they do there.
I'm sorry I've lost the Olympics, Hollywood movies and professional sports as sources of entertainment. I'm sorry I think the government and the universities are staffed with people who are heartless but incompetent. I'm sorry that writers no longer know that jargon is a sign that the writer does not know what he is talking about. I'm sorry that hundreds of white people thought it was being an "ally" to mask their faces and burn down buildings in the black community as long as they wore a sign saying BLM. I'm sorry that the President is incompetent and so is the Vice-President and dangerous people around the world know it. I'm sorry that 50% of the people in this country think that there is no God and no men and no women. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. we've done Part 1.
Ficta said...
You still watch over the air TV? Yeesh. Like I said, this crowd is old. :-)
To answer your question: I think you could watch for free. There were ads. I don't know for sure because I was already subscribed to the $5 a month tier.
I may be old. But you';re paying NBC, which means YOU are stupid.
I'll take old
""You still watch over the air TV? Yeesh. Like I said, this crowd is old. :-)"
It's a great supplement to cord cutting. Free NFL, free PGA, etc. Maybe you are the one who is not "with it."
I don't understand. I watch the same thing I always do. Men's Downhill. That's it.
I usually get a pirate copy of non-US coverage, ( no stories, and they show EVERY RUN) ,but, this year, I have Peacock TV (Got it for the Supercross coverage), and they show every run, and eliminate the "stories".
Yay.
Many factors have contributed to the long-waning popularity of the Olympics. That said, I continue to think that the true beginning of the end started when the Olympics stopped being a “just once every four years” All Sports Winter and Summer Big Deal. There’s no such thing as an “Olympics Year” anymore. It’s not special.
Everything is becoming professional wrestling: "Story lines" with a little bit of action.
I used to watch ESPN's college football morning show (Game Day) religiously, but then they went with three hours of Story Lines and I mostly gave up.
I'm not Much of an Olympics fan; but aren't we about due, for another Olympics?
Please dear God, no!
I'm not Much of an Olympics fan; but aren't we about due, for another Olympics?
Please dear God, no!
When all the athletes are safely back in country and rested up from their travels, we will probably start hearing some real details about how things were from them. What little we have seen was bad but I suspect it's a lot worse.
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