Author’s note: This is a guest blog by former World Cup skier and Dartmouth graduate, Roger Brown.

To the Olympic Producers at NBC,

Please stop sucking.

Your coverage of the Olympics is unspeakably bad.  Really, really bad.   Not only are you taking a beautiful, emotional event and nauseatingly distilling it down to a series of made for TV clips, but you seem to be doing it in order to milk the maximum possible profit out your TV rights.  (Of course, NBC isn’t alone in greed as the driving force behind their Olympic production – in selling to the highest bidder, the IOC knew exactly what they were getting into.)

I have been thinking for a few days about how exactly to express my displeasure, and after not watching the women’s downhill at all, and listening to the combined DH on a Eurosport feed, I think I have put my finger on the thing that really pisses me off (and makes me sad) about the way NBC has been covering the Olympics for the last decade – since I can remember anyway.

The competition is the story.

Stop building the story out of every other angle you can get think of.  Stop breaking it down into little bite-sized pieces where all we get to watch are the medalists (they know who it is since it is tape delayed), the Americans who have a shot at medaling, and the pre-race favorite who choked in the end.  Stop ruining sports for everyone.

The charitable explanation you have no experience broadcasting individual sports; you have no concept of what makes it exciting, what good announcing sounds like, who to shoot.  I pin it on greed though – you have decided that you have the right to commercialize it as much as you possibly can, and you have no responsibility to the American people to honestly show the world’s best athletes competing against each other, live, in real time.  Why?
The competition is the story – your job is to report it as accurately, quickly, and honestly as you can.

What an exciting event yesterday was.  Julia Came down and took the lead pretty early, Lindsey bumped her out, and the rest of the best skiers in the world got to come down and take their shots at bumping her out.  The U.S. ends up with those two on top, Stacey Cook in eleventh – good day.  Except that no one in the U.S. could watch it live.  I didn’t watch last night, but what I saw in the men’s downhill was Bode, Svindal (2nd), Defago – the winner, and Cuche (the pre-race favorite).  And I heard Todd Brooker and Tim Ryan doing some pretty terrible commentating.

But those four are only part of the story.  If you already know the results maybe they are, but the real story is them AND the other 50 guys who worked hard, qualified to race, and took their best shots, live – as it happens.

NBC should recognize the opportunity they have to show full events, virtually uninterrupted, live, and have millions of people across the U.S. be hanging on every thread.  Watching it at work, around TVs at lunch in restaurants and bars, in schools, the way LIVE sporting events are meant to be watched, and save the tape delayed, edited, scripted, sensationalized events for comedy shows, sitcoms, and wrestling.

An the IOC should work with their TV provider in their biggest market, to make sure that they are staying true to the “olympic spirit”.

One last thing – Lindsey Vonn’s dad watched her run on the internet in Minnesota (http://www.nbcolympics.com/news-features/news/newsid=427005.html#estranged+vonn+watches+internet)?  What pirated feed did he use to do that?

-Roger Brown

Tags: NBC, Olympics coverage

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