“This isn’t sports. This is sports thrown in a blender, drowned under entire tankers of schmaltz and nonsense, dumbed down to appeal to the kind of people who think the Today Show is a newscast, and then they shower themselves in celebrating their own cleverness. And the worst part is that we don’t have a choice. We have to dig like hell if we want to somehow steal an illegal stream of the BBC’s coverage, because the “live streaming” NBC claims to offer has yet to function all day for me (thanks largely to basing their tablet app around the binary abortion that is Adobe AIR)…”
That was my complaint about the London games. It’s still just as valid, maybe more so – yes, there’s a problem with being eleven time zones away or something like that, but I’m still waiting to see whether events that happen while I’m asleep are available for playback when I wake up. If the choice is between “stream this live on your iPad at 2 AM” and “wait for our chop suey coverage in prime time, three hours behind the rest of the country” with nothing in between, NBC has learned nothing. At least now I have the shady UK VPN option…because I’m going to watch. It’s the only game in town, and it’s worth it. Why? Look at what I said about London again…
“Every four years, like bloody Brigadoon, this little magic village appears. And we see some of the people we saw there four years ago, and meet some new ones, and remember some we don’t see anymore. And normal service is suspended and we watch something special, and hell, some of our basketball players even colonize it briefly. And then Monday arrives and it’s gone as if it were never there.
“It’s like Disneyland. We can’t stay. We wish we could.”
Ultimately, that’s why we’ll bear through the horrific NBC schmaltz, set up the shady streams, DVR overnight action, and even just suck it up and actually watch what we’re handed. Because once you dig down and drill through the weepy interviews and the Ryan Secrest horseshit and the pious blatherings of Pinkeye Costas, and get through the politics and the geopolitical nightmares and the unsettling corruption and legal horror, it’s still that magical winter village that only appears every four years. Dreams of racing down a bobsled run at breakneck speed, or cresting a rail on a snowboard and being seventy feet off the ground, flying, or just the whole spectacle of speed and snow…more even than the summer games, the Winter Olympics have that magical dreamlike quality that no amount of autocratic dictatorship or network malfeasance can bury.
And once again, it’s a marker for where my life has gone. Of which, as always…