olympics Archives - Page 7 of 10

Summer Olympics: All About Table Tennis

All About Table Tennis

We all know table tennis or ping pong. It’s that game we played with our grandparents in Florida or with our friends in their basement. Forrest Gump was good at it. It’s become a mild hipster/tech favorite. No! You do not know table tennis until you watch world class table tennis, like the table tennis in the Olympics. Casual ping pong is to Olympic table tennis as a school yard fight is to World War I.

How Does Table Tennis Work?

For as different as I just described Olympic table tennis being from recreational ping pong, I have to admit the rules are basically the same. There are a few interesting wrinkles though. First, the rule of hitting the ball across the table on a diagonal during serves (like the tennis rule about serving) is only present in doubles table tennis, not singles. In singles table tennis, the serve can go anywhere once it crosses the net. That’s sneaky! There have also been a bunch of equipment changes to slow down the game so that people can enjoy it more as a spectator sport. The ball was enlarged, the paddles restricted. Games are also played to 11 with who serves switching every two points instead of the casual standard of 21 and five.

Why do People Like Watching Table Tennis?

Well, tennis is fun to watch, isn’t it? So why wouldn’t you want to watch tennis as played by GIANTS?! That’s basically what table tennis is like. It’s surprisingly athletic, but instead of running around on the court, these athletes run around the court. Shots force an opponent to lunge from side to side and sometimes even run backward or forward or dive. The mixture of speed and control required to get the paddle into the right spot but not hit the ball too hard is amazing.

Check out some highlights from the 2012 Olympics:

What are the different events?

There are singles and doubles events for men and women.

How Dangerous is Diving?

Table tennis is safe!

What’s the State of Gender Equality in Diving?

The simplicity of the events (singles/doubles) make this an easy event for gender equality. What’s more, the rules are set up such that there are exactly the same number of men and women competing. Nice job table tennis!

Links!

Bookmark the full Olympics schedule from NBC. Table Tennis is from Saturday, August 6 to Wednesday, August 17.

Read more about diving on the official Rio Olympics site.

Summer Olympics: All About Diving

All About Diving

Once you’re done with the truly elemental sports — running, jumping, swimming, fighting — you get to the next level of sports. These are sports that add or combine parts of elemental sports. Diving, jumping from land into water, has its roots in that type of combination, but it’s become much, much more. Plain diving, was first an Olympic sport in 1904. By 1908, a second form of diving, called “fancy diving” had gained Olympic status. Fancy diving added acrobatics to the mix. These two forms of diving stayed separate until 1928 when the two were combined. These days, the whole transitioning from land to water thing seems like merely a footnote in the sport of diving. Divers do so many incredible, eye-catching spins, flips, and tucks in mid-air, that it seems as if they’ll never actually hit the water!

How Does Diving Work?

Diving is one of the many Olympic sports that combines aesthetics with athleticism. Dives are scored by a panel of judges who evaluate each dive based on how well executed they are. A dive has three distinct elements that are scored: the approach, the flight, and the entry. An easy way to think about this is that each phase represents the diver in a single element: land, air, and water. If the diver has to deal with fire, something is very wrong. Of the three, the easiest to watch as a casual observer is the entry. The bigger the splash a diver makes, the worse they have done. This usually corresponds with another element of the entry — how vertical they are when they enter the water. Because it’s hard to know what a diver is trying to do in the air, it’s harder to know how well they have performed in the flight. The eleven judges don’t have this problem, both because they are experienced and expert viewers of the sport and also because all the divers must submit their dives before-hand. There is no free-lancing allowed. As in other similar sports, there is a balance between execution and technical difficulty. A well executed very difficult dive may score better than a perfectly executed easier one. In synchronized diving, where two divers execute a dive simultaneously, a fourth element is added into the mix — how closely one diver mirrors the other.

Why do People Like Watching Diving?

Grace in the air, precision timing, tumbling athleticism, chiseled minimalist bodies, and even more minimalist swim suits. What’s not to like? Plus, it’s the only sport where competitors get to chill out in a hot tub before and after their performances!

Check out some highlights from the 2012 Olympics:

What are the different events?

Diving has two different apparatuses, a traditional semi-flexible diving board, like the kind you see at your local pool. In olympic competition, this is called a springboard and is three meters off the ground. There is also a concrete platform to dive off of which is 10 meters (more than three stories!) high. Each apparatus has an individual event for each sex and a synchronized event. Although the individual events are more high-profile, the synchronized events may be more impressive. As hard as it is to believe anyone can perform tumbling acrobatic olympic dives, it’s even more amazing that two people can do it simultaneously.

How Dangerous is Diving?

Despite involving leaping and tumbling in such a way that a diver’s head passes within inches of the diving board or platform, diving tends not to be particularly dangerous for international quality athletes. Even the 10 meter platform, which would be horrifying to leap off of for most of us, is not normally a problem. When injuries do happen, they can be very scary. No one who was watching Greg Louganis’ famous head injury (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5nqeFWufrE) will forget it.

What’s the State of Gender Equality in Diving?

Quite good. Countries may bring up to sixteen divers with no more than eight of them being mon or women. The diving events are the same for men and women and they are judged identically. Plus, the men’s swim suits are as or more skimpy than the women’s!

Links!

Bookmark the full Olympics schedule from NBC. Diving is from Sunday, August 7 to Saturday, August 20.

Read more about diving on the official Rio Olympics site.

Why are the semis bigger than the finals in Olympic qualifying?

Dear Sports Fan,

Apparently the two semifinal games in the women’s soccer tournament to qualify for the Olympics are tonight and they’re a big deal. It seems like they’re a bigger deal even than the finals on Sunday. Why is that? Why are the semis bigger than the finals in Olympic qualifying?

Thanks,
Joy

Dear Joy,

You’re absolutely right – the two semifinals of the CONCACAF (North and Central American plus the Caribbean,) women’s Olympic soccer qualifying tournament tonight are a very big deal. When Canada plays Costa Rica at 5:30 p.m. on NBC Sports Live Extra and when the United States plays against Trinidad and Tobago at 8:30 p.m. on NBC Sports Network, each team will be playing for a spot in the Olympics. Win and they are in, lose and they’re out. This is because the CONCACAF region gets its top two teams into the Olympics.

Not every region gets the same number of teams into the Olympics, nor do they all use the same mechanism for choosing teams. For example, Europe, which gets three teams in, uses results from the most recent World Cup to determine which teams get in. Germany, which placed fourth, and France, which made it to the quarterfinals, automatically get in. (England, which came in third, cannot play in the Olympics because the Olympics recognize Great Britain as a competing entity, not the component nations, like FIFA does. Competing as a unified team would, apparently, risk FIFA revoking England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland’s right to compete separately, so they regrettably don’t compete. It’s a mess.) There were four other European teams that made the Group Stage of the World Cup, so those four play a tournament to see who qualifies for the Olympics.

With the stakes as high as they can get in the semifinal games, it’s worth wondering what is going to happen. The game between the United States and Trinidad and Tobago is unlikely to be close. Trinidad and Tobago is a tough team with speed but they’re unlikely to pose a problem for the world champions. The United States is at least as fast and physical as Trinidad and Tobago and many times more well-organized on the field. The bottom line for the U.S. when it plays most teams in the world, and certainly almost every Caribbean nation, is that they have an incredible resource advantage. The American team is able to train together for large parts of the year in very good (although not good enough and not equal to the men’s team) circumstances. They also all play competitive professional soccer in the NWSL. None of these things are true for the women of Trinidad and Tobago and it will show on the field. The second semifinal, between Canada and Costa Rica, should be more interesting. It’s the one I’m most excited to see. Costa Rica, led by coach Amelia Valverde, are the Central American or Caribbean team closest to erasing the resource gap that the U.S. and Canada have had over them for decades. Costa Rica fell to the United States 5-0 in their first match of the tournament but then took out their frustration on Puerto Rico, 9-0, and outplayed Mexico in a 2-1 game to qualify for the semifinals. Canada is still probably the better team, but anything can happen, and if it does, it will signal a massive shift in the soccer landscape.

Why the CONCACAF qualifying tournament has a final game is a mystery to me. As far as I can tell, it is completely meaningless. The two teams that win the semifinal games will have qualified for the Olympics and there’s nothing else at stake in this tournament. If, as is expected, the game matches the United States and Canada, it will at least probably be a good game. The U.S. and Canada have been rivals for so long that even their friendly matches are often contentious and competitive.

Enjoy the games,
Ezra Fischer

What is the sport of athletics?

Dear Sports Fan,

My family and I just got back from a trip to Europe. We spent several days in Iceland where we were regaled with stories of Icelandic sports, including their country’s four Olympic medals. Two of the medals are in a sport called “athletics.” What is the sport of athletics?

Thanks,
Mia

Dear Mia,

Athletics is an umbrella term that refers to a number of sports, many of the Olympic ones. It’s primarily a British term. The American equivalent is “Track and Field.” In the current Summer Olympics, the sports that fall under the general term Athletics include: running (everything from a 100 meter sprint to a marathon), hurdles, the steeplechase, relay races, race walking, the four jumping sports (high jump, long jump, pole vault, and triple jump), the four throwing sports (javelin, shot put, discus, and hammer throw), and the decathlon.

As for Iceland’s two medal winners, here is their story. Vilhjálmur Einarsson won the silver medal in the triple jump during the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. Vala Flosadóttir won the bronze medal in the pole vault during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Oddly, it seems that Icelandic athletes do well in Australia.

I mentioned before that “athletics” and “track and field” were basically the same term but that there are slight differences. Track and field, the predominant American field, refers only to sports that take place in a big stadium that includes both a track and a field. Athletics also encompasses sports that are like the sports that would take place in that arena but that need a little more space or different terrain. The three main sports that are included in athletics but not track and field are the marathon and race walking, which usually take place on roads, and cross-country running which takes place on grass and mud. In general use though, particularly pertaining to the Olympics, they’re the same thing. One is just a Britishism and one an American term.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

News Clippings: The Business of Sports

One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from some of the articles this week that inspired me. Sports can be followed on many levels. For some fans, only the action that takes place during the games matters. For most fans, following sports means watching games, learning the personalities of players and coaches, and following the business of sports attentively. For most of this fall, the leading story in the business of sports has been the mishandling of domestic violence by the NFL. Bryan Curtis of Grantland argues that, although the focus of the storm, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, is still standing, the public uproar has had some positive impact. Despite the storm, the NFL is still eyeing potential expansion to London. Jenny Vrentas writes about how the NFL might work in London in The MMQB. Meanwhile, established international sport organizations are receiving their fair share of criticism as well. Dan Wetzel and Tom Ley wrote wonderfully about the International Olympic Committee, rivaled in its corruption and general crumminess by the international soccer organization FIFA.

The Goodell Blackout

By Bryan Curtis for Grantland

By blasting Goodell in print, sportswriters acted as pulling guards for the government officials in Washington, who are now torturing the league by threatening to revoke many of its long-standing perks.

Since 1975, a Federal Communications Commission rule has given the league an imprimatur to remove games that don’t sell out from local TV and cable. If it’s 15 below zero when the Packers take the field, the FCC’s chairman recently noted, then Packers fans have to buy all the tickets or find a TV in Chicago. That sounds like extortion.

For years, the NFL has also protected its federal tax-exempt status. The exemption dates back to 1966, and although it has been a perennial talking point for politicians of all stripes, it has also been considered inviolable. “Revoking the tax exemption isn’t in the cards,” the Washington Post argued on September 15. “The NFL doesn’t lose games on Capitol Hill.” Well, that was before Goodell’s lousy press conference and two more weeks of heavy shelling from the press.

Finally, pressure from sportswriters forced action inside the NFL, too. When Goodell was still staggered from the release of the second tape, the NFL suddenly got serious about revising its drug policy.

Why London and Can it Work?

By Jenny Vrentas in The MMQB

The International Series has been a testing ground for the logistics of basing a team abroad.

Teams scheduled to play in London begin planning for their trips in February. They take two reconnaissance visits overseas in the spring. In August they send a shipment of bulk supplies by boat to save money and space on the team plane. Included in the Raiders’ shipment: 10 cases of 8.5 x 11-inch computer paper for play sheets (standard paper is a different size in the U.K.), a couple hundred cases of Gatorade (teams are superstitious about flavors) and 600 outlet plug converters.

“As long as they get their paychecks,” Bills Hall-of-Famer Andre Reed assured the forum of local fans, “players would play in Alaska.”

Steve Smallwood, 49, of Eastbourne, on the Channel coast, sees the growth of American football in the U.K. as a good thing, the same way he views the growth of MLS in the U.S. “And,” he offers, “I’d rather watch American football than rugby.”

Why no one wants to host the 2022 Olympics

By Dan Wetzel for Yahoo Sports

Essentially the only places interested in hosting the 2022 games are countries where actual citizens aren’t allowed a real say in things – communist China and Kazakhstan, a presidential republic that coincidentally has only had one president since it split from the old USSR in 1989.

“The vote is not a signal against the sport, but against the non-transparency and the greed for profit of the IOC,” Ludwig Hartmann, a German politician said when his country said no.

The IOC has billions of dollars laying around and billions more coming because to most people the Olympics is just a television show and the ratings are so high that the broadcast rights will never go down. The IOC doesn’t pay the athletes. It doesn’t share revenue with host countries. It doesn’t pay for countries to send their athletes. It doesn’t lay out any construction or capital costs. It doesn’t pay taxes.

Top Female Soccer Players Sue FIFA Over Bullshit Artificial Turf

By Tom Leyfor Screamer

After weeks of pleading with FIFA to change its mind about playing the 2015 women’s World Cup on field turf instead of grass and being met with nothing but stubbornness, a handful of women’s soccer’s biggest stars have filed a lawsuit against FIFA to try and force the organization to put the upcoming games back on grass.

Turf sucks, everyone knows it, and there’s no way FIFA will force it upon the men’s game if it continues to cut up and piss off players around the world. But that won’t stop the organization from crapping all over the biggest tournament in the women’s game by forcing women to play on it. The only thing that sucks worse than turf is FIFA.

What are the Asian Games?

Dear Sports Fan,

When and how did the Asian Games start and how are they different from the Olympics?

Thank you,
Jeehae

— — —

Dear Jeehae,

The Asian Games are a lot like the Olympics. They’re held every four years and they are an international multi-sport event. Right now they are happening in Incheon, South Korea, where they will continue until October 4. They vary from the Olympics mainly because they only welcome competitors from Asian countries instead of the whole world. They also have some very interesting different sports.

According to Wikipedia, the Asian Games were born after World War Two out of a desire to find a non-violent way of expressing “Asian dominance.” The first games were held in 1951 in New Delhi and consisted of fifty seven events in six sports: “Athletics, aquatics—broken into diving, swimming, and water polo disciplines—basketball, cycling—road cycling and track cycling—football, and weightlifting” although there was also a non-medal event that crowned the “Mr. Asia of 1951” based on “physical development, looks, and personality”. From the beginning, the competition was modeled on the Olympics. People even called the first Asian Games the, “First Asiad” similarly to how an Olympics may be called the “14th Olympiad” or “26th Olympiad.”

The Asian games are not alone in being an Olympic-like international sports event restricted to some smaller group. There are many other similar events, including the Francophone games, the All-Africa Games, and the Islamic Solidarity Games. There’s even a Bolivarian Games for “countries liberated by Simón Bolívar.” There are 45 countries eligible to compete in the 2014 Asian Games and all have sent teams. The two biggest teams are the Chinese with 894 participants and South Korea with 883. The smallest are Brunei with 11 and Bhutan with 16. Saudi Arabia is the only country not to send any women as part of their team.

One of the key differences between the Asian Games and the Olympics are the inclusion of some sports more popular in Asia than in the rest of the world. Here are some examples:

Wushu — a form of martial arts that includes a solo performance judged sort of like figure skating and an opponent based sparring component.
Soft tennis — which is just like tennis but played with (wait for it…) “soft rubber balls.”
Sepak takraw — which is Volleyball with a woven rattan ball where players are not allowed to use their hands, just like in soccer.
Kabaddi — a sport that sounds totally fascinating to me. It seems to be a combination of capture the flag, tag, wrestling, and holding your breath.

If you’re anything like me, or even if you’re not, you might be wanting to watch some of this now, especially the Kabaddi! I can’t quite tell if you can watch events live anywhere (and even if you could, you’d have to wake up in the middle of the night to do so from the United States,) but you can get highlight packages at eversport.tv. The official website for the 2014 Asian games is here and you can also follow them on Twitter.

Happy rooting,
Ezra Fischer

Six Months Later the False Sochi Media Narratives Continue

I had the great luck of being able to attend the Winter Olympics games in Russia this past year. I blogged about it extensively which you can see here if you care to browse. In one of my final posts on the subject, after I had returned to the United States, I wrote about how I felt the media had done a disservice to the Olympics and to Russia by pushing the narrative of how messed up things were way too far. Here’s what I wrote:

I’m disappointed in how the Western media portrayed Sochi in the lead up to the games. Before I went, I was concerned and scared from what I had been reading. The hotels were unfinished, radioactive shitholes. There were suicide bombers on every block and even if the Russian Army were somehow able to deter or demolish them, the people living in the area would be overwhelmingly resentful because of having been forced to live under martial law for months before the Olympics even began. Oh, and any food in the area would have been in storage for at least three months because that was the last time any shipments of anything were allowed into the area.

With the possible exception of terrorism, this simply wasn’t true. None of it.

Six months after the Olympics, the disappointing narrative continues. Gizmodo.com reblogged a photo essay by Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy under the headline, “Just Six Months After the Olympics, Sochi Looks Like a Ghost Town.” This is misleading at best and intentionally, journalistically yellow at worst. Now, I will admit to not speaking Russian. So, when I look at Belenkiy’s photo essay, I have to rely on a combination of just the photos, my memories of the Olympics, and Google translate. Google translate does its best, but… well, lemme just quote the opening paragraph accompanying the photos:

Just six months ago, at the Olympic stadium cried chubby teddy bear. He did not fall, as his ancestor from the eighties, but also among us can not see it. Hiding in the woods?

Setting humor aside for a minute, here’s what angers me about this coverage. All those photos are of Krasnaya Polyana not Sochi. Krasnaya Polyana was where the alpine and cross country skiing events and the sliding events were held. The Russians ambitiously developed an almost completely brand ski resort town up in the mountains to host these events. Their hope was that, in time, this resort would become a national and international ski destination, pulling some of the business away from Europe’s alp resorts. Whether or not that comes to pass, I can’t say I’m surprised to see it virtually abandoned in August! Compare the mountains in Belenkiy’s photos with what the mountains looked like in February. Here’s one of my photos from the Olympic games:

Olympic Mountains — When the snows return, my guess is that the people will too.

Send some photographers to Jersey shore towns in January and see what they look like or even Colorado mountain towns in Summer. Meanwhile, back to Sochi. Sochi is a coastal city that, although it was the city name used as the host of the Olympics, didn’t actually have any events in it. None of these photos are of Sochi at all! Sochi is a bustling small city of over 300,000 people. I promise it’s not abandoned today!

What Sounds are Real in Sports?

Have you ever watched a sporting event on television and thought, “what sounds are real in sports?” What about the squeaking of basketball shoes on a wood court? How about the grunt of a boxer taking a blow to the ribs? The sound of a hockey puck hitting the boards? Is that really what the game sounds like? Are they real sounds just amplified to be heard over the crowd or are television sound engineers playing tricks on us by adding sampled sounds in? Would it matter if they were?

Horse-racing-1 — And they’re off! But what is that sound?

This is the subject of an episode of 99% Invisible called The Sound of Sports. 99% Invisible is an independent podcast about “design, architecture, and the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.” It’s a great podcast and I enjoy a lot of their work. This episode is actually a rebroadcast of a show produced for the BBC by Peregrine Andrews. It delves deeply into that 99% to explore how sound designers shape our experience of sports on television.

The first two thirds of the podcast cover how sound engineers have revolutionized the sports experience over the past thirty years or so by cleverly miking and then mixing different sounds of sporting events into the television feed. I particularly loved hearing from one engineer about how his childhood desire to amplify an acoustic guitar came back to him when approaching the problem of how to convey the sounds of gymnastic in the olympics. Like with his childhood guitar, he took a contact mic and slapped it right onto the most resonant part of the event — the balance beam. As you might expect, the show is lushly illustrated with clips from sports broadcasts. My favorite is a thirty second clip of two coxswains from the biggest rowing race of the year in England, an annual race between Oxford and Cambridge known just as “the boat race.” Coxswains are people who sit in the back of the boat facing the eight rowers and SCREAM. Their job is to set a rhythm, inform the rowers of how they’re doing, to know tactically when to speed up and when to stay steady and to motivate through a mixture of enthusiasm and intimidation. It’s amazing to hear just the sound from the two coxswains in this race, a man and a woman, scream their hearts out.

Things really get moving in the last twenty minutes or so as the show explores the aspects of sports sounds that are fake or “enhanced” as the engineers like to say. For me, the most important message in the segment came from an engineer who was explaining how the familiar sound of a basketball swishing through a hoop is real but never heard in person. He says “Most of us involved in sports sports try to… enhance the experience. We tread the middle road between what’s real and what’s unreal.” What I love about this line of thought is that the more I learn, the less clear what’s right and what’s wrong. At first, it seems wrong to change how the game sounds so materially. Does it matter if the basketball swish is real or sampled if its amplified so far out of proportion to reality? Maybe a little. But then you hear about the challenge of mixing the sound for a rowing race in the olympics. The course is long and winding. The rowers move fast. Worst of all, in order to capture video of the event for television, the race is surrounded by four motor boats and a helicopter, each of which makes enough noise to drown the sounds of the race out. Together, they produce a cacophony of sound to depress even the most truth-devoted sound engineer. So, what do they do? They go out earlier in the day, when the river is quiet, and record the sounds of a few random people rowing. Then they mix the sound, layer it with some cheering, and off they go.

By far my favorite story of fake sounds in sports is that the familiar sound of hooves hitting the ground in a gallop during a horse race is actually a slowed down clip of a herd of buffalo stampeding. The sound engineer who spilled that trick of the trade chuckled and said he thought everyone had probably been using the same clip for the last thirty years! I just love that. It reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons my friends and I loved to quote in high school. Some guys are filming a movie (yes, within a cartoon television show) and they need to film a cow. They use a horse. Someone asks, “Uh, sir, why don’t you just use real cows?” The reply is “Cows don’t look like cows on film. You gotta use horses.” Another question comes, “What do you do if you want something that looks like a horse?” And the payoff is “Uh, usually we just tape a bunch of cats together.”

Usually, when cats get taped together (metaphorically, of course) in sports sound engineering, it seems to be to heighten the reality of the sporting event for far away viewers. Towards the end of the podcast, another possible reason surfaces and it’s what I was left thinking most about after the show. One of the key interviewees in the show is a sound engineer who works for EA Sports on sports video games. Doing sounds for video games, he’s totally free to use whatever fake sounds he wants, and he takes full advantage of that. For example, in a boxing video game, he layers in the sound of celery snapping to evoke ribs breaking when a video game boxer takes a body blow. He points out that televised sports are actually competitive with his games. This is true. As a sports fan and a sports video game fan, there have been times when I’ve switched off a boring game to instead play a sports video game. Part of this competition is a sound effects arms race. The fake sounds in video games sound more “real” than the real sounds of miked sporting events. To keep their viewers, television stations must match the reality of its fake competition!

99% Invisible is a good show to subscribe to and this episode in particular was a great hour of listening. Check it out today!

Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals

2014 Paralympic Winter Games - Day 4 — Nikko Landeros shields the puck from a Russian opponent

The Paralympic Sled Hockey Finals will be televised at 1 pm on NBC! The United States will play host country Russia in what’s is invariably going to be an exciting rematch of their preliminary round game from earlier in the tournament. For the Russian fans, it will likely also have some revenge-factor for their team’s Olympic defeat to the U.S. in the Olympics last month.

In case you’ve never seen sled hockey, here’s a highlight reel of hits to get you pumped up. The action is fast and inspiring. Nikko Landeros, pictured here, is one of two Coloradans who lost their legs seven years ago when they were high school classmates. They were changing a tire on the side of the road when a passing car hit them. Now they are both representing the United States in the Paralympics.

The Denver Post has a wonderful profile of Landeros and Tyler Carron which I highly recommend reading. NBC always markets the Olympics by focusing on stories of athletes overcoming obstacles but the Paralympic stories trump them by a mile. I can’t wait to watch today. Go USA!

Winter Olympics: Post-final Thoughts About the Media

I know, I know, you thought I was done writing about the Olympics. I thought I was too but something has been bothering me in the nether-reaches of my brain. I’m disappointed in how the Western media portrayed Sochi in the lead up to the games. Before I went, I was concerned and scared from what I had been reading. The hotels were unfinished, radioactive shitholes. There were suicide bombers on every block and even if the Russian Army were somehow able to deter or demolish them, the people living in the area would be overwhelmingly resentful because of having been forced to live under martial law for months before the Olympics even began. Oh, and any food in the area would have been in storage for at least three months because that was the last time any shipments of anything were allowed into the area.

With the possible exception of terrorism, this simply wasn’t true. None of it. There were reasonably fresh tomatoes and cucumbers at breakfast every morning that clearly had not been stored for three months. The people I met and even those I passed on the street seemed generally happy to show their neighborhoods to the world. I did sense and enjoy a little bit of, how do I describe it, self-deprecating humor in their enjoyment? Sochi and the surrounding area isn’t a perfectly curated resort, indeed, it’s probably not even all that well run, and I think the people who I ran into we’re a little amused that the world had descended on them. Either it took a Jersey boy to identify this in them or I was projecting.

I am certain that some of the hotel accommodations did have serious issues. By no means am I saying that the journalists and athletes who were there before the games began were falsifying their tweets and pictures showing yellow water, oddly designed toilet facilities, and other bizarre oddities. There were some hoaxes (apparently Jimmy Kimmel had something to do with the photo of a wolf inside a hotel) but the larger problem was twofold. First, people have a really hard time understanding that something that happens to one person in a large group is as rare as it is. This is one of the reasons why an act of terror that kills a few people can scare so many (more on terrorism in a minute, but this is equally true of a traffic accident, a murder, a lightening strike.) Second, the media clearly benefited from exaggerating or embellishing these stories and encouraging people to take them seriously. There’s an old saying in newspapers, “if it bleeds it leads.” In this case the most direct approach to driving general interest in a group of sports with only fringe followings was to gleefully project disaster.

Before the games, I took the terror threat quite seriously and I still do today. The tricky thing for anti-terrorism forces is that the only evidence of their work is negative. If they mess up, even once, everyone knows. If they succeed, the natural reaction for onlookers like me is to say that the threat was overblown and there’s simply no good way for them to advocate for themselves. Most of the time, if an attack is prevented, publicizing it will be a bad idea because it would compromise intelligence sources or gathering methods. So, let’s leave this one for historians to decide.

The problem is that people stayed home. That’s not a big deal if they were fans, (although one of the real problems with Olympic Games is that they cost so much and bring in so little, so any loss in profit is bad for the host country and eventually bad for the Games themselves,) but it is a big deal for a parent, sibling, child, or partner of an athlete to miss seeing them in person. The Olympics only come once every four years and qualifying next time is no lock. What a shame to miss out on that so that television stations can grab a few extra eyes and newspapers can sell a few more editions.