Tag Archives: NBC

NBC & NASCAR Show F1 How To Advertise

NBC Sports ran this great ad during the Super Bowl, starring Nick Offerman, espousing the bad-ass virtues of NASCAR and inviting you to “get some NASCAR in your life”.

Wouldn’t it be great if Crazy Uncle Bernie would allow this kind of promotion for Formula One? Oh wait, he thinks there’s no point in trying to reach teenagers because “they could not afford anything the sport is promoting”.

It’s time for some warm cocoa and a nap, Bernie. A very long nap, far, far away.

In the meantime, enjoy the ad:

– MCZF1

MCZ F1

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Olympics Always Worth Watching — China, NBC Notwithstanding

I always feel a sense of melancholy when the Olympic games end. For 16 days, we have the privilege of seeing the world at its absolute best. The best moment for me wasn’t the legendary performances by Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt (more on that later), but an unnoticed moment after a Russian freestyle wrestler defeated his Georgian opponent in a semi-final match; they both embraced and exchanged pleasantries, belying the current military conflict both their countries are currently engaged in – a clear reminder that it is governments and armies that fight wars, not people. It is against this real-world backdrop that makes me wish that the feeling you get from over two weeks of man at his best could last much, much longer.

Still, I find myself strangely conflicted about these particular Olympic games. As always, the events were enchanting and the performances were mesmerizing; how else to explain how anybody could even remotely care about fringe sports they ordinarily would give a second of thought to (Synchronized diving? Team handball? Trampoline?). Yet despite this familiar idiosyncrasy of the games there was always, in the back of your mind and underneath the surface, the subtle reminder of where these games took place.

China remains an enigma to the world in general and to America in particular. A more open society, a free-market economy, more individual wealth and freedoms, and its status as an emerging world superpower notwithstanding, you have to remember that China is still a totalitarian regime. And if you scratched the surface and really took a look past the façade that the state wanted you to see, there were several indications of their true Kafkaesque nature.

The cast of 16,000+ performers for the opening ceremony executed quite probably the best opening ceremony ever  — certainly one that will be hard for any subsequent Olympics to top – yet it became hard to appreciate after the fact when we were informed of the exhausting 20+ hours-per-day of tortuous practice they all had to endure for the three months prior to the opening (the 2,008 drummers had to wear adult diapers just to make it through the day). What was more disappointing was how unapologetic Zang Yimou, the world-famous film director (a personal favorite of mine) and producer and director of the opening ceremony, was about his harsh tactics. The little 9-year-old girl who “sang” that beautiful Olympic-themed song really didn’t sing it at all, but lip-synced to the voice of a pre-recorded 7-year-old, who was cheated out of her international face-time by a state who didn’t think she portrayed the country the way they thought it should be.

For most of the Olympics the air-quality was so bad in Beijing that a thick smoky fog hung over the city making distant visibility non-existent. A few athletes refused to participate in their events, most notably the defending marathon champion from Athens in 2004, and when two swimmers arrived in Beijing wearing surgical masks, they were threatened with expulsion by the state. Yet the state insisted (read: required) that any and all new media refer to the “weather” as “hazy” or “sunny and somber” (I couldn’t make that up if I tried).

Religious practices were allowed only at state-approved religious functions and places of worships. On the day that President Bush attended a “state-approved Christian function”, two of that church’s own members were arrested on their way to worship with the president, and detained until after the president departed the country days later, never to be informed why they had been detained. In a related matter, peaceful “protests” were allowed at designated protest areas as long as you requested and received a permit from the state. Yet of all the people that requested a permit, nobody was ever granted one, and the two senior citizens who tried to more than once, were arrested and sentenced to a year in a re-education camp.

The Olympic Games mean so much to so many people, and they always have from their inception back in 1896. Yet you got the feeling that it meant so much more to the Chinese. For the people it was their greatest post-Great Leap Forward moment, a thing of beauty not even Chairman Mao could have imagined (and if you think that is so 40 years ago, there are still huge murals honoring him throughout Beijing; Big Brother is still watching). We don’t know under what circumstances the more than one millions Olympic workers and volunteers were under, but they couldn’t have been more accommodating and friendly. It was clear that despite the numerous issues China still has, for 1.3 billion people – a full 1/5th of humanity – this was a moment in time they were all supremely proud of.

But even with the welcoming and friendly nature of all of its citizens, the state was more about façade. Even with more foreign visitors than has ever been in China there were still places, however benign, that foreigners weren’t allowed to go. Tiananmen Square, the sight of that famous democratic uprising in 1989 that was brutally crushed by the Communists, is tightly controlled by the state; permission is needed to go. A stroll through much of renewed infrastructure reveals that some of the “new” buildings aren’t really new buildings at all, but rather computer-generated buildings transposed on giant vinyl backgrounds, with the messy construction (maybe) or slums hidden behind them…

…To the state, image is everything.

China spent 40 billion dollars to put on these Olympics. That is almost three times the amount spent on any other Olympics. In 2004 Athens spent 15 billion and will be digging from underneath that gargantuan tax hit for close to the next two decades. A concern China doesn’t have to worry about; when you are a totalitarian regime, you don’t have to concern yourself with the niceties of asking your population to fork over their hard-earned wages to pay for such things – and you certainly don’t owe the world an explanation for where the money came from.

Reporting from China by the world media was as fair and honest as it could be, but the state still controlled the message as best they could. If there were any western media who deigned to report something they didn’t like they were threatened with expulsion. Internet access was provided through the state, and there were hundreds of thousands of web sites that people were denied access to. This became much more of an issue when a number of the gold-medal-winning gymnast’s actual ages were accurately reported on a video web site that had interviewed them not a year earlier; the state just shut down the web site and stuck to their story (As an aside, I can’t blame the gymnasts for any of this; they are children performing at the behest of adults who should know better). When Lu Xiang, China’s first gold medallist in track and field in Athens in 2004 and by far their most popular athlete, couldn’t defend his 110-meter hurdles title because of a heel injury, nobody knew about it until it happened. In a more open media society his injury would have been reported as soon as it happened, and the media would have followed it religiously up until he couldn’t compete and for days afterwards. As it is we will never know what happened to Lu, only what it is the state told us: “Lu is a warrior of tried to run for his country. He should be sympathized.”

It was widely reported about the state-sponsored sports machine and the obscene amount of money spent to identify and train elite Chinese Olympic athletes, but what the function really entails was barely reported at all. In a majority of cases, the state sends representatives of government-run elite sports academies to small towns and hamlets around the country, identifies adolescents as young as 3-6 years of age with good hand-eye coordination, and requires the parents to give up their children for training, in many cases separating parents from children for up to 10-12 years and allowing parental visitation only once a year – and the parents have no choice. All for the good of the country. If that doesn’t harkens back to the halcyon days of old East Germany, I don’t know what does.

It is difficult for me to separate these Olympic Games from the host city and country. Given the ethics portrayed to us by the state and the reality under the surface, I can’t really say whether or not Beijing ever deserved to be granted these games by the IOC, but I guess that is water under the bridge; we should have taken it up with them seven years ago. For whatever unknown reason, these games went of without a hitch and like clockwork. But no matter how I feel about China and their Orwellian government, our actions over the last 7 1/2 years leaves no room for us Americans to complain. Because of Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Graib, Guantanamo Bay, FISA, Ohio and Florida election fraud, the justice department, and renditions, we have lost the moral high ground to take anybody to task about their record on human rights and totalitarianism. Our president and this administration have lost all credibility and “juice” with the rest of the world, so what made anybody think that the world’s other emerging superpower was going to cave to American diplomatic pressure? Giving them the Olympics isn’t going to change China’s record on human rights; keeping the games from them wasn’t going to, either.

It is also difficult for me to separate these games from NBC’s coverage of them. Each event was great and the commentary was its usual strong, but I live on the west coast, so there was nothing about NBC’s prime-time coverage that was “live”, even though they left that claim in the upper right corner of my television. The east coast got the live Beijing morning feed at 8pm their time; at the same time, 5pm on the west coast, not only did we not get anything on the primary network, there was nothing on any of their affiliated networks, either. That’s three hours when there was no television coverage. So we didn’t get the 24 hours of coverage they promised, we just got 21 hours. On most nights, these “live” events went well past midnight into 1am on both coasts. Wanna tell me how it is that the Super Bowl, World Series and Monday Night Football can be shown live at 5pm but the Olympics can’t? (Even more infuriating, every night NBC was skipping from “live” event to “live” event, thereby not showing large swaths of either. But it wasn’t “live”. They couldn’t have just replayed every event in their entirety in post-production on the west coast?) Even if I was as wedded to the women’s gymnastic all-around final as I am to the 49ers, I have to go to work at 5:30am, so staying up past midnight every night was out of the question…

…If you didn’t have a computer with broadband you were shit outta luck…

Furthermore, on several overnight programs they were just plain wrong about what was scheduled to air. Early the second Sunday morning I stayed up to watch what I thought was going to be the women’s doubles final in tennis – that’s what NBC said was going to be on. Instead they showed both the men’s and women’s singles final back-to-back. I never got to see Venus and Serena Williams win their second gold medal in doubles – NBC never even showed it on replay.

I remember watching my first Olympics back in 1972 from Munich, West Germany. ABC did the coverage back then, and I remember there was four hours of primetime coverage every night, with about three hours during the day, nothing else. But even back then, ABC squeezed more events in those four primetime hours than NBC did every night in 2008. My mother reminded me the other day that even back in 1972 you got boxing, weightlifting, wrestling, canoeing and rowing in primetime, three sports which didn’t get a single second of primetime coverage in 2008. (I’ll cut NBC some slack on that one; there are three times as many medal sports now than there were back then, so NBC had to be very selective about what they thought their American viewers wanted to see)

By now I’m sure you are wondering why I even bothered watching. I watched because with all that was going on these are still the Olympics, and at the end of the day they make for great TV. Even America’s multi-millionaire NBA basketball players showed up at the swimming venue to watch Michael Phelps win his record-setting eighth gold medal. How could I not watch that? The proof was in the pudding: These games had the highest domestic television audience of any non-American-hosted Olympics.

We all expected a legendary performance from Michael Phelps, and we weren’t disappointed. He has clearly earned the title of greatest Olympic champion. What’s more astounding is that — at age 23 and with two Olympics, 8 gold medals in one and 14 over two – he isn’t even closed to finished. Phelps will clearly be there in London in 2012 to defend all of his eight event titles and quite possibly will try to add to his gargantuan gold medal haul four years after that. Does anybody realize that this guy could possibly have well over 20 gold medals before he’s done, a total that will stand up there with DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak as a record that will never be broken?

But what set these games apart from virtually every other was the presence of not one transcendent athlete but two. Sure, Michael Phelps set seven world-records but he didn’t do anything in any one event that isn’t superhuman; at least a few of these records will be broken in the next few years, maybe even by Phelps himself.

On the other hand, what Usain Bolt did was, well – MY GAWD!!! He broke the world record in the 100 meters without even trying – he just loafed the last 20 yards across the finish line. Can you imagine how fast he would have run had he tried? (I have a DVR, and I was so disbelieving of what I saw I had to rewind it several times to make sure I saw what I saw, and still got dropped-jaw disease) Bolt then bettered a world record most insiders thought would stand for generations, Michael Johnson’s 12-year-old 200 meter record. What made him the talk of the sports world, though, was the relative ease with which he accomplished both. Neither race, coupled with the world-record in the 4×100 relay, was even close. I’ve always said that the benchmark for a truly transcendent athletic performance is how easy the athlete makes it look, like anybody could do it. Put simply, Bolt has redefined what fast even is. Three events, three gold medals, three shattering world records. To paraphrase what Jack Nicklaus said when Tiger Woods lapped the field at the ’97 Masters, Usain Bolt is running a race nobody even recognizes.

It is safe to say that both Phelps and Bolt put on two of the five or ten greatest Olympic performances ever.

Haven’t we gotten past caring about medal counts? I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but please, why does that matter anymore? Do we really need a medal count to validate America’s sports superiority? Even if the USA had done poorly as a country we all recognize that a vast number of the planet’s world-class athletes live and train on our shores. More than 50 of America’s 469 athletes at these Olympics are naturalized citizens; so are a good number of the team coaches (Marte Karolyi and Andre Liukin, anyone?). Don’t you just want to recognize a great performance from an athlete regardless of where they are from? Unlike a number of his countrymen Usain Bolt never spent one minute training in the United States. He did something otherworldly not because Jamaica is any better or worse than America. The Cold War is over. It’s time to leave that shit to dogmatic ideologues that it matters to – like the Chinese.

More than any other Olympics I found a lot to concern me. I hope that in the future the IOC does a better job of choosing host cities (Vancouver in 18 months and London in four years is a good start; Sochi, Russia in 2014 could be problematic given its proximity to Georgia but I don’t really have too much of a problem with it; Chicago and Rio de Janeiro are really good options two year’s hence). We watch sports – any sports – because we want and hope to see something we’ve never seen before. No matter the ideology or politics of the host country, or the jingoistic coverage by the networks, the Olympic Games always deliver on that. Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt and any one of number of other athletes provided just that in Beijing. Hell, even the Cuban tae kwon do athlete who maliciously kicked the referee in the face for disqualifying him was something I had never seen before, however uncivilized it may have been. With the Olympics I always watch in wonder at what will happen next, even in marginal “sports” I ordinarily wouldn’t care about. That alone will always outweigh all other tertiary concerns. That alone makes for great TV.

daveydoug