Lack of Interest for Winter Olympics

I must confess. I hardly watched the Winter Olympics this time around. Instead, I caught myself watching a Clint Eastwood movie or two and surfing the Internet for news on events instead. What can I say? I’m a modern man of the 21st century that doesn’t like watching a sports event that is pre-recorded and half-a-day late. It’s like buying a Big Mac and letting it sit for half a day before I can eat it. Forget that.

Forbes has a couple insightful comments about the just finished Winter Olympic Games. Point one, the events in the Winter games are missing tension. Finally, someone brave enough to say it.

Yet sport is about tension. Unlike track or swimming at the summer games, there are few head to head events in the winter games. You want to see the best in their sport going skate to skate or ski to ski --not snowboard to timing device. Even in speed skating, which is a race after all, competitors start on opposite sides of the track. What's with that?

Point two. Just covering the United States and human interest stories on select athletes is beginning to backfire on NBC. Sports watchers are getting to the point that they cannot even watch sports on television without it being crafted by a Hollywood formula for success, well, actually the New York television broadcasting corporations’ formula.

… America operates on a grander scale. As blogger Pierre Tristam put it in a much quoted post "NBC covers the Olympics the way American neocons do foreign policy: The world is 95% America, 3% water, and 2% everything else."