Oh, c'mon. If there's anything we should be more proficient than the rest of the world in, it's guns. How do we miss on the biathlon (besides the horrible difficulty of what they're doing and all...)

I mean, I get why we lose to, say, Norway or Canada, at the skiing. They ski to work, right? And the only people in the USA who do that live in, I dunno, Minnesota or Utah. But we should be better at shooting stuff- no excuses ;)

SI

Biathlon just amazes me - you take something that is all about utter calm and precision, and then combine it with tough athletic exertion - and if they miss even one shot it's a heavy penalty.

USA are beating China 9-0 in women's hockey. They'll probably reach double digits in goals before China hits double digits in shots.

I found some footage of that 82-0 Slovakia win over Bulgaria on youtube, after a few goals I couldn't even watch because I felt so bad for the Bulgarians.

What does the coach say in the locker room after a game like that. At least we didn't give up 100?

nordic combination is insane as well, first ski jumping which in itself where it is incredibly tough to balance athletic ability and weight and then a cross country race afterwards which is about athletic ability all the way, both sports need an incredible amount of practice time and to combine them is just incredibly tough.

Dang. I just got back about 15 minutes ago so I missed the end of the Nordic Combined :(

SI

What I wouldn't give for a non-figure skating channel tonight. I'm going to get screwed out of a ton of final luge runs and men's moguls and instead be forced to ignore Scott Hamilton and his whiny annoying voice and partner.

SI

Isn't there something streaming online that would work?

Might be luge here :

hxxp://www.vip--tv.com/londoner.php

yep, Moguls now, luge later tonight

I was thinking the same thing. Man is Loch tearing up the track in luge or what?

Oh, hell. Just give the Chinese the gold. Looked pretty much flawless and Lord knows they are the sympathetic favorites. Hand it over and let us check out the final 5 lugers (as that's where they're at now).

SI

Yep, one skating pair and it's the highest score ever in any International competition. Get your coverage to the luge.

SI

It just was no contest with as good as Loch has been on all 4 runs.

SI

Why on earth would they shift coverage away from the far & away most watched event of the entire Winter games?

I'd personally rather watch hockey practice than figure skating but reality is that I'm in the minority on that one.

With the men's moguls going on. I just have to say "thankfully, there's Justintv" even if it's consistent

SI

And holy crap is the moguls getting dramatic (the live feed, not the tape delay on right now)

SI

Moguls were awesome!



SI

(added some more details to the spoiler above but probably best to not read as they're showing it now)

SI

Ridiculous that the Russian couple scored that high with the fall and the rest of their program not being that much better than the other couples.

However, that Russian skater is gorgeous.

figure skating judging still ruins the enjoyment of watching it

Ayup

SI

Took three Olympics but we finally did it...THANK GOD!!!!

It was still too high, but had they hit their jumps, they would have been right up there with the Chinese team and now the other Russian team, because the rest of their elements were close to them in the eyes of the judges. With this scoring system, they only have so many (dictated by rule) points they can take away or add to the total for a missed element.

Would almost be better if they just did this for show and not scores. I mean the whole thing seems rigged anyway.

exactly

That did not help the feeling that this is rigged

SI

Minor note - but Dale Begg-Smith never won gold for Canada, he did it for Australia in 06 as well.

He left Canada when he was 14. Not sure what happened - but he seems very bitter towards Canada. He has even refused to do any media interview.

I thought they mentioned something about his side business gave the Canadian coaches a feeling that he wasn't taking it seriously and he felt slighted.

Yeah- I misunderstood what they said. My bad.

SI

I usually just loathe the TV coverage, but have to say I've been pretty pleased with the ratio of actual competition/features so far this Olympics.

I seem to remember saying that about 2008, too. I think they're getting better about stupid fluff stories.

SI

Could you imagine the Russian or Chinese mafia being behind these figure-skating riggings?

"We crush you---with a triple salchow"

Chalk me up as another one who just doesn't get the judging fit figure skating. How does a pair have a fall and still finish way ahead of a pair that had a clean routine? I find it hard to believe that the US routines are so dumbed down that even though another couple falls it still has a better routine.

I could be wrong, but it seemed like NBC was laying off the fluff stories during events like luge and combined, but ramped them up for pairs skating - when more women might be tuned in.

Figure skating, gymnastics, etc...

It makes so much more sent to me to have every person do the same routine. After that, bump it up to a higher level and have everyone do the routine again. Bump it up to the higher level and have everyone do the routine again. Keep going up however many levels you want to whittle the field down and make sure that the final round is extremely challenging but that at least everyone is doing the same routine.

As it is...it's just a stupid waste of time.

Everyone doing the same routine would KILL tv ratings. They are WAY more important than the purity of competition.

And I've been to gymnastics competitions where everyone did the same routine. I can assure you that makes it no less a waste of time.

What I'd love is to see the stats before the routine. I know, Scott, in your whiny voice you can tell us all you want about how so-and-so's routine is better but show me. I'm not a dope and I imagine this isn't too hard to figure out. I suspect they don't do it because they'd be showing just how much easier it was to rig these things.

Then again, if we can't get OBP and SLG on baseball broadcasts, much less something like wOBA or ISO, then it's probably a lost cause.

SI

The main problem with figure skating IMHO is the new scoring system in use since 2004. Basically with the new system, it limits expression and creativity by forcing everyone into a fixed series of elements that the skaters must adhere to. I thought Frank Deford had a good commentary on this a while back:

Figure Skating: The Olympics' Broken Sport : NPR

You see I much prefer the new skating scoring system to the old. In the old system, the Chinese team that skated first, would not have finished first. The judges would have saved their higher scores in case they liked a skater better in the later performances.

The current system takes a lot of the judges indivuality away-each element is rated by a technical specialist who does not score the routine. I agree that the current system takes away too much individuality and creativity, but I would rather them to be more fairly judged on their elements then leaving it to the judges opinions and biases on their expression and creativity.

The one thing they need to do is to open up the music choices much more like they do in the free program for ice dancers. Right now they are choosing the same music over and over again because the judges like that music, and I'm getting real bored with it. You get to use music with vocals in the free dance, and I find that to be much more interesting than I used to.

Golden boy of the slopes - Sport - theage.com.au

In other news, I'm going to say I'm boycotting the Winter Olympics until women's ski jumping is allowed. It's not true, but..if someone asks I'm going to say that. Truth is, I'm just not interested this year for some reason or another. I don't know if it's the way coverage is spread out, their declining relevance or what.

But, meh.

I love how the media seems to love giving Begg-Smith the cold shoulder because he won't answer their questions. But all I have to say is this - if you can find time to be one of the best skiiers in the world AND run a multi-million dollar company, do you really have to answer to anyone at that point?

Holy crap! What a competitive men's downhill!

I have two problems with the downhill skiing:

- the course warmed up/degraded after the first 20 or so skiers, which meant that the guys after that could have the run of their lives and still have no shot. Kind of dumb.

- because of the above, the whole thing was super boring for the second half. Just dude after dude skiing down the hill that everyone knew had no chance. Why even continue? You may has well have thrown skiis on some bystanders and let them have at the hill for an hour and give us something interesting to watch.

It looks like they'll be showing the downhill on tape delay tonight

SI

kinda unspectacular course though, well relatively speaking of course.
And only until you saw slow-motion, holy shit :eek: I mean, the power you need in your legs to stay low on those curves and how freaking un-smooth the course looks from up close, what seems like smooth sailing from away is just one bump after the other.



Up until when do you guys need spoilers btw ?


allways like that in the olympics. In other disciplines you start with the worst athletes built it up until the best come along, but for the reason you named (course wearing down) you can´t do that in the downhill and super G because you can´t fix the track in between.

That reason is also why the slalom and Giant Slalom are so fun though, first round the best athletes get early numbers but in the 2nd leg the best placed (mostly the ones that started early in the first leg) start last and have to deal with a seriously fucked up track.

I think the general rule with tape delayed stuff like this is until when it's being shown on the tape delay for most of the US (west coast is screwed in this, I think).

SI

Turns out that Begg-Smith's Internet company is one of the main sources of spyware.

Spyware Confidential mobile edition

heh

Anyone know if there will be an internet stream of tomorrow curling match that I can watch at work?

He doesn't talk because his business is running malware on people's computers. He ran off to a country that had little enforcement in that area and could avoid lawsuits from U.S. and Canadian companies.

His business background is extremely shady. From non-payment to publishers to hijacking computers. Sure he's a millionaire, but so are a lot of people who did a lot of bad things.

+1

SI

Ok, so if you're on some of the larger cable providers (for instance I'm with Verizon FIOS)- you can watch the feed on the nbcolympics site if you use your cable company login. Looks like it's for hockey and curling, only.

SI

I've watched many other events online besides hockey and curling.

Through "legit" means or other?

SI

nbc website

Is there some legal exception made for the Olympics that he can't be served under Canadian laws while here?

I wasn't old enough to remember, but I am a member of the International Society of Olympic Historians, (an offshoot of the IOC desire to collect data) and I have talked with many athletes from those games. Most of the athletes were sickened by it, but were so focused on their events, they didn't allow themselves to dwell on it.

The elders I talked to who were not athletes were completely stunned, and thought Avery Brundidge handled it poorly. But, there is a real belief that many groups, (think Atlanta bomber) think they can disrupt the world by causing chaos, and from what I have been told; not much would prevent them from continuing the games.

The downhill was definitely disappointing for the reasons stated above. Cuche looked like he was having a great run and even making up time and then he run into a slush pile right in the middle of the course at the end and went from 0.05 back to 0.35 back in the last segment.

It just doesn't make for a level playing field at all.

SI

I am enjoying the snowboarding tonight, however.

SI

Agreed with both points. And now the figure skating has me looking for something else to do for a bit until we get back to real competition.

kansas vs. texas a&m is about to start on espn

I'm a few minutes behind on DVR delay, but I can't believe how bad that ice looked on an indoor arena for the 500 M speed skating.

I keep switching back and forth between Olympics and Big Monday

SI

Ok, near as I can tell, for the figure skating, it was going 7-6-5... in order but somehow we went 5-3-2-4-1. Huh? Why?

Oh, and their routine seems easier than the Germans by quite a bit

SI

The skate in groups of 4 and then there is a draw to determine the order of the group. So the top 4 are together and then random.

The reason the summer Olympics is better than the Winter Olympics is figure skating. This just blows to have to deal with 3-4 hours of this crap every night.

I hate the fact that I can't participate in this thread because unless I want to watch online instead of my 50'' HD TV the stupid games are tape delay even though I live 3 hours from Vancouver.

Um... gymnastics begs to differ

SI

Good point! The Americans actually sniff a medal in that every once in awhile though.

EDIT I guess I was completely wrong. Looks like the US has done very well in ladies figure skating over the years.

Instead of cutting into my luge, mogul, and curling in the summer, gymnastics cuts into my, I dunno, fencing, water polo, and judo

SI

There's also a crapload of swimming and track and field that gets mixed into the gymnastics. They're not mixing enough skiing and speedskating to match.

I find it very interesting in that Verizon commercial the guy that "wins" is basically wearing team Canada colors and the guy that gets left behind is wearing team US blue. Doubly odd when you realize they sponsor the US team.

I understand verizon is red and AT&T is blue. But they at least could have made the loser wear something that didn't look like a carbon copy of the team USA uniform.

And yes I have given this waay too much thought

could that be because of weather issues and stuff?

Ping: Regular Thread Participants
 

Lemme know when the real stuff (i.e. men's hockey) starts. ;)

tomorrow 9am your time. Im assuming your west coast being Clipper fans normally arent Nationwide;)

Yup, SoCal baby, OC for life. :)

it was pretty great. Mind you, i´m in europe so am not exactly exposed to the X games and stuff like that, so i can´t compare. But i thought it was both highly entertaining and admireable what those guys do on that course.

Plus i really like the atmosphere they create. Overall it seems that winter olympics discipline have more close bonds between athletes than summer, propably because of the world-cup-circuit going on all winter with event every week or more often even.
Has more of a "we are in this together" feel than at the summer games.
On the ice skating 3000s for the women the winner couldn´t stop praising the 2nd placed german girl f.e. , you have main competitors like Lindsay Vonn and Maria Riesch living with each other during the summer and stuff like that more frequently in winter disciplines from what i gather.

Announcer quote of the night from Figure Skating competition:

"She just didn't stay on top of him."

Thank God we finally have some curling matches today. They were mentioning this morning on the radio that they had a hard time selling tickets for the figure skating events, but the curling competition was the hottest ticket of these Winter Games. Hope those Minnesota boys show the Canadians a thing or two on how to slide a rock.

Served for what? Operating a business that may violate canadian law in Australia?

Where do you go on the site to watch live events?

One big issue with coverage is that NBC has a ton of channels they aren't using much. I get that NBC wants figure skating in primetime, but why aren't they showing ANYTHING besides women's hockey between 6PM and 8PM? You have USA-HD, CNBC-HD, MSNBC-HD, and UniversalHD, and all I've got is women's hockey on CNBC-HD? Why not live events on the cable networks, and the tape-delay stuff on the national channel for the primetime lineup?

Well, you probably don't want to cannibalize your national audience, which advertisers are paying top dollar for, to play stuff on CNBC.

I think the bigger issue is that there just aren't as many events going on during the Winter Olympics so there really are only 3 or 4 things a night and you can squeeze them all into the 5 hour broadcast if you chop them up.

SI

That's weird.

From 6p-8p, my listings (from 2010 Olympic TV Schedule | NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA | NBC Olympics )
show Women's Hockey tonight on MSNBC and Women's Curling on CNBC

Curling doesn't start out until today so he was probably talking about yesterday.

But if you look at what is on other stations, it's curling and hockey and that's it. No "we'll show you the cross country that we only show 15 minutes of in the afternoon show" or "how about every athlete in the bobsled rather than the top competitors and the Americans".

SI

They showed an entire cc race during the afternoon show yesterday. I now fully support the decision not to show more cc during prime time.

Because Rachel Maddow & Keith Olberman discussing Hillary Clinton's penis size vs other historical figures would be more compelling television than either of the things you just mentioned.

To you maybe. I prefer watching bobsled to about 95% of what's on regular TV. Heck, this + Sunday Night Football is the only time I watch ANYTHING on any of the NBC channels, aside from the occasional hit on UniversalHD. And they are driving me away.

Well, that makes one of you ;)

Reality is that they don't want to drive the average rating for the off network coverage down showing stuff that virtually no one in the US would watch without being paid. They're already taking a $250m bath on the deal, no sense making the ad rates lower on the next go round.

Curling on USA right now. :popcorn:

I understand all of this, but on the other hand that's the responsibility you take on when you agree to broadcast the Olympics. If you don't want to reuse the existing channels, then add some new ones that you provide to the cable operators, don't use this backdoor "cable userid/password" to watch streaming stuff on the NBC site itself.

And if you're losing money, why did you go after them again?

I'm DVRing right now.

The WRONG DAMN channel. I set it for CNBC, as that is where the women come on in five hours.

:(

Curling!!!

I can't get the silverlight stream to work online. Damn silverlight :(

SI

I think a better argument than a social responsibility one is that by chopping up the coverage and packaging it neatly by time zone, you actually devalue the Olympic franchise. We are able to get results real time, so we either have to settle for watching a glorified replay or avoid communicating with others to have some sort of Olympic experience. While short term ratings may benefit, long term, you're reducing interest in the Olympics as a whole and reducing the value of the NBC Olympic investment.

Finally- couldn't get it to work in Firefox or IE but in Chrome, I got a popup saying "this might not work with your browser" and it works ;)

Probably have too high of security settings on the other browsers and don't want to mess with them just for this.

SI

You do realize that NBC is providing almost 850 hours of coverage across the various platforms? The most ever given by any US network to the winter games, and in the neighborhood of as much as the past two Winter Games combined. And that they did over 1,000 hours of coverage of sports virtually no one gives a damn about leading up to the Olympics?

And still people bitch? Damn, we are a nation with a false sense of entitlement arent' we?


Hey, stupid is as stupid does, you'll get no argument from me about that.

The bulk of the viewers aren't the hard core who will go searching for results while they're at work. The majority are regular Joes (and Janes) that see any of these events other than figure skating & hockey only during the Olympics. The less buzz about results that occur outside of primetime the better chance they'll tune in during primetime.

no commentary from you Jon about how NBC doesn't have a responsibility to show the Olympics in any particular way, but only to maximize shareholder value?