Every two years, the world's viewing public is assaulted by that bastion of tediousness, the Olympic Games. The modern Olympics were the brainchild of Pierre de Coubertin, who believed that all the nations of the world should form a brotherhood of peace and harmony by means of boring the living shit out of each other. The whole mess would be incredibly funny if it wasn't stretched out over a painful seventeen days. It's like watching a ten-hour mini-series based on an episode of Webster.
The Olympics take themselves very seriously in a way that only something so irrelevant can take itself seriously. The USA Olympic Team pummels us with guilt bi-yearly, insisting it's our patriotic duty to make sure those shot putters and bi-athletes get to go to Switzerland or Madagascar or wherever the hell it is they go. Personally, I feel that if you have chosen to dedicate your life to the javelin, that's your problem, not mine. Especially since the Olympics have so much corporate sponsorship that the athletes may as well wallpaper themselves with stickers à la NASCAR.
NBC has the exclusive rights to televise the Olympics until more than a decade from now, garnered a few years back when NBC Sports exec Dick Ebersol crashed an IOC meeting in Atlanta and emerged with a deal to show all the games through 2012. In order to make good on their investment, it is essential to the Peacock Network that you watch every single hour of televised snooze-fodder. All summer, in incessant commercials, NBC has presented the Olympics as a vital event, something that you must tune into or be forever exiled from society. They also try to whip up some jingoistic fervor by insisting that national pride is at stake in a handball match, and hope that Americans will be jazzed to kick Luxembourg and Djibouti ass.
While I do appreciate that the Olympics will prevent any more reruns of Veronica's Closet and Just Shoot Me, they promise no more surprises than these hackneyed sitcoms. As a result, NBC's official Olympic web site, nbcolympics.com, is a lot like the games themselves: lotsa hoopla, little substance.
The NBC Olympics site certainly looks impressive. It has an abundance of polls and contests and audio files and short movie clips. All of it collected together is almost epic but still makes you wonder why the hell you should care, since none of it contains anything the least bit interesting. I am sure someone out there really wants to watch a Quicktime movie of the Olympic torch, or listen to a Real Audio file of a beach volleyball player's first impression of Sydney, just as I'm sure that someone out there really likes head cheese.
Each sport has its site, full of news and athlete profiles. This is an admirable stab at equity, but I still need to be convinced that rhythmic gymnastics needs even one full web page, let alone several dozen (I will admit, however, that I appreciate being able to view pictures of girls in impossible contortions holding large balls while at work without feeling guilty). The content is written with the sophistication and command of language displayed in an industrial safety pamphlet. Some sample prose from the trampoline page (yes, there is an entire trampoline site): "One of Jennifer Parilla's favorite things about trampoline is the ability to jump high. She often refers to herself as a bird. Other people call her an Olympian."
A disturbing number of the individual sports sites have links that do not work. For this reason, I was unable to read the story about how a member the Russian synchronized swimming team, previously disqualified for a doping offense, was "back with a vengeance," and how Kevin Han went from delivering Chinese food to becoming a worldwide badminton champion. It's as if the web designers and content producers wearied of their Nytol-esque task, said "Screw this," and spent all day Instant Messengering each other instead.
Or maybe NBC just looks on the athletes and sports and stuff as pesky interferences to optimum advertising space. Any pixels on the site not taken up by graphics or writing are filled with annoying come-ons from Visa or Ford. Each individual sports site has a clothing item manufactured by Adidas that you are ordered to buy, some of which are more appropriate for their respective disciplines than others; for example, I don't recommend wearing a fleece sweatshirt while cycling. There is a contest sponsored by Ameritrade with a grand prize of a $7,500 account with their online trading company. The procedures and rules for the contest are so confusing, however, that Ameritrade can rest easy, knowing that they won't have to pay up since no one will even figure the damn thing out.
Of course, the Olympics are essentially one long commercial for NBC. Almost all the links that do actually work will send you to news articles posted on msnbc.com, a practice that I could best categorize as "sharing the pain." If we gotta suffer through the Olympics, we're taking you with us! In one feature, Andres Cantor (best known as the guy who screams GOOOOOOOOOOAL! on Univision) gives MSNBC his predictions on the soccer match ups. I read the first sentence--"Group A gets underway with the Nigeria vs. Honduras match, and it should be an interesting one."--and immediately ran screaming from this yawn fest. The whole site has an air of superiority to it, as if only NBC could properly bring to the world something with the universal import of the Olympic Games. I'd love go to a board meeting of some of these self-important network execs and namedrop some really ripe failures from the past like Misfits of Science and Encore! Encore!
Before I slipped into a boredom-induced coma, I took a quick look through the list of sportscasters set to yammer along to the kayaking and tae kwon do. The only folks I recognized were Pat O'Brien (fresh from the set of Access Hollywood, which is a lateral move in my book), the elf-like soccer star Alexei Lalas, and Bud Collins, who has been a part of every single tennis match broadcast in the history of time. Most of the other commentators have been plucked from previous Olympics, under the mistaken impression that someone who has won a medal in a sport is qualified to talk about it, or talk at all. Yasmin Farooq, for instance, is the rowing commentator by virtue of the fact that she was the "coxswain" of the women's team for eight years. This does not seem appropriate for this Olympian site, since, in my experience, calling a woman a coxswain will get you slapped.
Thankfully, Bob Costas was absent from this list. In case you didn't know, Bob Costas is one of the worst human beings on the face of the planet. He can make a lawnmower race sound like a Sisyphean battle of wills. Even such esoteric sports as skeet shooting and curling are well within his breadth of knowledge. You know that smart-ass kid in every class who likes to correct the teacher? That's him--you figure he knows what he's talking about, but you figure only someone like him would bother to care. He has this look on his face of such pure smugness, such school tie-wearing arrogance, that I want to push him in front of a bus. I believe my hatred of the Olympics is mostly due to him, since when I think of the games, I hear his bitchy voice spouting some wounded soldier metaphors along to a picture of Greg Louganis splitting open his head slow motion.
As the Olympic Games plod on, nbcolympics.com will no doubt add breaking news and try to play up struggles between warring field hockey teams. If you know what's good for you, you will heed their warning and watch the swimming and diving or suffer the dire consequences. Just remember to brew a pot of coffee before you switch on the boob tube, and under no circumstances should you operate heavy machinery while watching the XXVII Olympic Games.
