Awful Coverage

[Slowrunner]

Re: Awful Coverage

[quote="CookyMonzta"][One other thing: NBC screwed the pooch by asking China to bend over backwards to hold their swimming finals in the morning to accommodate primetime viewers on the East Coast. Imagine if it backfired and took a lot more swimmers out of their sleeping patterns and game plans. [One wonders if someone like Laure Manaudou (who came away empty) was really affected by the morning-finals-before-evening-heats structure of the events at Beijing.]

I think Luca Marin may have messed up her sleep patterns more. Seriously though, she hasn't been swimming well this year. And most of the other swimmers seemed just fine by setting a whole mess of world records.

[Slowrunner]

Oh by the way, coverage of last night's LATE LATE night events:

Men's HJ - 1 min, 52 sec.
Men's DT - 1 min, 53 sec.

[asindc]

have you hopeless people stopped to think that they are NOT catering to the 1 % of the audience, ie sports fanatics and track nuts like the people who post here. they are instead catering to the average casual sports fan who ONLY knows a handful of athletes and watches olympic events only during the olympics. it makes sense that they are trying to satisfy the 75 % and do not care if they disatisfy the 10 % niche fans. in the final analysis they are a business and i am 100 % certain that any of you would do what you feel is best for the business. i mean if you guys were trying say to sell bibles would you cater to devil worshipers ?

Good post

So, would you say T&F is more of a niche sport, particularly when it comes to the Olympics, than Trampoline or Beach Volleyball or Springboard Diving is? Because those are the sports that bumped T&F off the Sunday afternoon schedule. By the way, T&F is the 2nd most participated-in HS sports among girls, and 3rd most among HS boys.

For the record, neither Trampoline, Volleyball (of any kind), Gymnastics, nor Diving were ranked ahead of it. No, I didn't make that up: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2007-09- ... 2078_x.htm. Additionally, the IAAF WC are the third-most watched sporting event in the world, behind you know what. And of course, T&F is the seminal sport of the Olympics, without which there probably would not be an Olympics. Niche sport my ass. :roll:

[400h]

I feel cheated by the lack of live coverage. It just isn't the same "watching" the olympics by constantly hitting the refresh button on the IAAF website, or by checking message boards.

The mens 200 and 100 (in that order) should be the two greatest races my eyes have ever seen. Instead, the thrill is gone after 8 hrs of reading about a race before i get to finally watch the race.

My two favorite races of all time are: 400 hurdle race at the 2003 World Championships. My coach Joey Woody finishes strong to take silver. I remember running around my house all by myself screaming at the top of my lungs. I was robbed of that experience today by not being able to watch the race live. (at least give me a paper view opportunity)

The other is the 400m race at the 2005 world championships. My training partner Andrew Rock also finishes strong to take silver. After the race I didn't have to worry about who knew the results and who was waiting to watch it on tv that night. I could talk about it with whoever i wanted without worry'n about pissing them off.

Those two races had a personal connection with me, yet these olympic sprint races would blow them out of the water, had I had the opportunity to watch them live.

--There is no chance in hell i am not checking the results just to watch the race 8hrs later, I'm a track fan. I want to know what is going on. The best i could do was the bahama site that gets overloaded and gets very choppy to the point where you can't truly understand what is going on.

A possible life long memory .... ruined quite a bit

[onyourmarktf]

As lucky as I am to be in Seattle - and a teacher in his last week of summer vacation - the CBC coverage is, naturally, quite Canadian, with an understandable focus on Canadian athletes. But this means you could be watching semi-finals of rowing featuring a Canadian athlete while live T+F finals are taking place.

Worse, it is far more painful to be up at 4:30am only to have the morning chatterboxes yammer on about 'up close and personal' stories when they could be showing T+F finals. Spare me.

And yet... gotta give 'em credit: I saw Usain Bolt's 200m WR live this morning... gotta be my highlight of the Games. Thanks, CBC. At least they recognized the importance of showing that race live, regardless of the presence - or absence - of Canadians.

[MattMarriott]

If you did not get that the psy-ops justifying the censorship of athletics with the "niche" argument are on the same payroll as the WADA employees or the staff managing the IAAF site ... then you did not get anything about the doping conspiracy yet despite the fact that we are now at year 6 after it was fully launched and year 20 after the first act (Ben Johnson at Seoul).
http://doping-conspiracy.blogspot.com/

[lonewolf]

Forgive us Matt, we are not all as perceptive as you.

[Mellow Johnny]

If I could ever watch track live, I wouldn't give a rip what time that happens to be. I've literally seen ZERO track and field events live.

[EPelle]

Read a report yesterday that ESPN is bidding on two future Games, promises to not delay West Coast broadcasts.

[Mellow Johnny]

Read a report yesterday that ESPN is bidding on two future Games, promises to not delay West Coast broadcasts.

EPelle- don't get my hopes up like that :wink:

[cacique]

there are so many reasons why NBC sucks majorly (and almost as many threads on this) but here's another one. one night, they showed in prime time a replay of the women's gymnastics when nastia liukin or some other american won a gold medal -- they showed a REPLAY of the previous evening action because it had gone on late at around 11 pm or so -- instead of showing any T&F. so it's not like NBC has only so much time to fit events in -- how many more interviews with phelps and the gymnasts do we need to watch?

the worst of it all is really NBC' s lack of respect for the audience. i wanted to watch the women's indoor volleyball gold medal match between brazil and the US, but i wasn't going to sit at home from 10 am to 6 pm on a saturday to catch it (since they won't tell us exactly when they'll show it). instead i taped it off telemundo, which at least did tell us it was from 6 to 7:30 pm.

[Alan Shank]

The same thing was indicated the day before, but instead of the 2am block being a re-run of primetime, it was a continuation of the 12:35 broadcast! Of course, since I didn't record the 2am block, the recording ended with a hammer thrower in the middle of a wind up!

Part of the problem is that when NBC's prime time block runs past its scheduled midnight ending, that causes the late night block to start later, and hence finish later. I have taken to telling my DVR to record everything for 15 minutes past the scheduled time.

Unfortunately, this was not enough on Sunday night - my recording cut out just as the heptathlon 800 was about to begin.

I had my DVR recording an additional 30 minutes, but it got confused, because of the prime-time replay starting right after the late-night show. The last couple of days, I just had my DVR record a long time block, regardless of what the schedule said. In fact, on Saturday-Sunday I had it record 19 hours straight!! It's very fast to FF4 through, so I was willing to do that rather than take any chances on missing something. I even got the men's javelin, which was shown on the late-night, after the show with all the final-day races. They only showed five throws, I think, but it was better than nothing.

NBC = better than nothing, as usual
Cheers,
Alan Shank

[cacique]

throughout the games, i watched the prime time show every night, and most of the morning and late nights. but i didn't catch all of the late night shows, so i did not catch among others: w800, m1500, mDT, wTJ, mLJ, wJT, m3,000sc. i assume they showed them late night.

[Mellow Johnny]

throughout the games, i watched the prime time show every night, and most of the morning and late nights. but i didn't catch all of the late night shows, so i did not catch among others: w800, m1500, mDT, wTJ, mLJ, wJT, m3,000sc. i assume they showed them late night.

Yep, saw all those on NBC online about 48 hours after the events actually occured. NBC blows...