| | | | YOU THOUGHT I was going to lend my fingers to the acres of criticism of the pairs judging, but the worst thing about Monday night’s highway robbery of Canadians David Pelletier and Jamie Sale was how NBC’s announcers botched the coverage of the first “controversy” of this year’s Olympic Games. | |
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To recap, Russian skaters Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze did a good job, but Sikharulidze stumbled coming out of a double axel (a double axel! C’mon, isn’t that the first jump they teach you in figure-skating school? You fall, you bawl, dude). The judges’ scores were high, but not shockingly so, so skating commentator Scott Hamilton, who spews sycophantic hyperbole like a human Vesuvius, predicted, “If they [the Canadians] just skate clean, they’ve got it!” Sale and Pelletier held up their end of the bargain, so toward the end of the clean routine, Hamilton, whose self-control is on a hair-trigger anyway, went further, predicting “The gold is theirs!”
Of course, the judges didn’t agree and awarded the gold to the Russian pair. Afterward, rather than do his job—i.e. explain to the viewers what actually happened and why he was wrong—Hamilton stuck to umbrage and prejudice.
“They won that program,” Hamilton sniffed. “There’s not a doubt for anyone in the place, expect for maybe a few judges.” | |
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A few moments later, NBC’s Beth Ruyak had a chance to redeem her network’s coverage when she pulled Sale and Pelletier aside for an interview while they were still raw with fury—but failed to even ask a question (or, at the very least, condemn the Russian skaters’ taste in clothes, which is consistently deplorable).
Instead of asking them the obvious opener—”What do you think of the judging tonight?”—Ruyak muttered, “I can’t imagine what it’s like for you ...” and turned the microphone over to Sale, who said only “We skated perfect” before a timid NBC cut the interview short, giving the impression that the network is nervous whenever the emotions are not prerecorded with the right lighting and the sappy music.
This fear of intimacy has been a consistent problem with NBC’s coverage. Take Picabo Street, a former American downhill champion coming back from an injury that would’ve ended most skiers’ careers. The network hyped Street’s return with a predictably sappy “up close and personal” segment, the goal of which was not merely to remind viewers of all the adversity Street overcame, but to convince everyone that she actually had a chance of winning the gold.
Who were they kidding? Street finished 16th! The only chance she had against the younger and swifter competition was in the minds of NBC producers.
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| During the opening ceremony, Bob Costas noted that the Iraqi athletes present hailed from a country in President Bush's 'axis of evil.' However, writes the author, 'in the end, NBC doesn't have the guts to remind viewers of age-old national rivalries'
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NBC has been criticized for politicizing the Games, but if you ask me, I wish there were more overt calls to patriotism. I thought we might be in for a fun two weeks of reopening bitter geopolitical wounds when NBC’s master of ceremonies, the ever dry Bob Costas, remarked that the Iraqi athletes entering the stadium hailed from a country that was recently named to President Bush’s “axis of evil.”
But in the end, NBC doesn’t have the guts to remind viewers of age-old national rivalries that may flare up on the fields of play. Anyone who watched that Austria-Germany hockey game on Monday couldn’t help but notice that hatred, more than any desire for gold, was the motivating factor. This was a brutal game! The Austrians were slamming the Germans—elbows high—as if each body check was revenge for the Anschluss. I haven’t seen this kind of hatred on ice since the siege of Stalingrad.
The more I watched, the more I rooted against the Germans. But the announcers refused to play along, preferring to see this as just a normal game of Olympic hockey. But why sugarcoat it? This was war.
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| 'Anyone who watched the Austria-Germany hockey game couldn't help but notice that hatred, more than any desire for gold, was the motivating factor,' writes Kuntzman. 'But the announcers refused to play along ... why sugar-coat it?'
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And it wasn’t lost on me that I had to find the game on CNBC, the ne’er-do-well uncle, because the real NBC is apparently adverse to showing any sports that women might find distasteful. The network is showing so much figure skating—at the expense of great sports like curling, luge and skeleton—that it seems like Dorothy Hamill has locked herself in the control room with an Uzi.
Beyond that, though, you can’t fault much of NBC’s coverage. I’m being completely serious when I say that the network deserves a perfect 10 for technical excellence (although the Russian judge will still only give them a 9.1). NBC’s cameras are so omnipresent that the FBI will be scanning the network’s tapes—rather than the bureau’s own surveillance cameras—if there are any terrorist incidents. I mean, they put a camera in the middle of the ski jump! (Call it “Crotch Cam.”) They another one in the hockey goal (which provided intense coverage of some ice repairs during the Austria-Slovakia game). And their roving speed-skating camera captures that great moment when a woman skater removes her fitted hood to reveal that she’s actually a babe and not an extra in the new “Star Wars” movie. | |
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NBC couldn’t even be blamed for the monumentally dull opening ceremonies. For an unbearably long time, the network was given nothing to shoot except that famously battered World Trade Center flag being carried into the stadium. The flag’s patriotic symbolism had troubled the International Olympic Committee, but the IOC had nothing to worry about, as the moment fell flatter than Canadian speed skater Jeremy Wotherspoon. Because the flag was carried in like a corpse—instead of flying, defiantly, from a flagpole—viewers were again left with the lingering impression that we’re all in this fight together and that all the athletes of the world exist in some kind of international brotherhood of sweat. It was a missed opportunity.
And what’s a network to do when the Olympic “theme” is “Light the Fire Within” and is dramatized through a treacly presentation that resembled “Cats: On Ice”? Costas, ever the professional, gamely interpreted the presentation, but not even preternaturally perky Katie Couric could sound even mildly interested as she claimed the ice show “represents the adversity we all go through.”
What, if I may be so bold, exactly represented the adversity? Was it those guys in icicle costumes that looked like they were part of the KKK’s Arctic Brigade?
The Alvin Ailey on Ice routine was just a precursor to what we were all waiting for: the arrival of the athletes and the lighting of the Olympic torch. The organizers of this year’s Games were criticized for having the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” U.S. hockey team light the flame as a group, but I applauded the gesture.
After all, there’s nothing like a nice reminder of what it felt like to kick some Soviet butt.
Gersh Kuntzman writes the ”American Beat” column every Monday on Newsweek.MSNBC.com. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv
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© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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