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I watch the Olympics

by vroom (His Eminence)
on Sep 25, 2000 at 07:48 UTC ( [id://33892]=poll: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Vote on this poll

Incessantly
[bar] 19/6%
In my free time which means never
[bar] 124/37%
In my free time which means all the time
[bar] 24/7%
When I'm not training for the 2004 Olympics
[bar] 39/12%
When they show real sports like trap and skeet shooting (ie never)
[bar] 65/19%
Other
[bar] 66/20%
337 total votes
Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: I watch the Olympics (but alas no Fencing)
by Adam (Vicar) on Sep 26, 2000 at 01:02 UTC
    What little of the Olympics I have watched have been from my Parent's place, or from one of the many local watering holes. My TV still doesn't get any channels and I'm too lazy to buy an antennae of pay for cable. The coverage has been pretty poor too, hardly enough to convince me to get cable or anything. I mean, they didn't televise half the sports, including my favorite: Fencing.

    Which especially surprised me since the US did so well. We took 10th place in Individual Men's Foil (out of I'm not sure... but at least 64 competitors, probably more.) He (Cliff Bayer) did remarkably well, and in fact was eliminated in a bout with the eventual gold medalist... by one point. We also took 4th place in the Women's Team Foil (We missed the medal by a mere two points... Thats hard to compare to something like football or baseball, but perhaps a basketball score of 99 to 98 comes close.) And given NBC's pention for Athlete bios and personal stories... two of our competitors were sisters.

    But I'm ranting. And I did enjoy watching some of the competitions. (missed the trampolines though...) I guess I'll just have to save up some money and go see the Fencing live in 2004 (Athens or bust... donate to the fund now!)

    Update: Ok, I need to vent a little more. I don't like the abuse of the tape delay either. I was watching an Olympic baseball game roughly a week ago, and they edited out an entire inning! I mean, they had just finnished the top of the 12th, went to commercial, came back and it was the bottom of the 13th! Granted, it was overtime, but still...

RE: I watch the Olympics
by Maclir (Curate) on Sep 25, 2000 at 22:50 UTC
    Well, as an Aussie currently on vacation in the USA, from the coverage I have seen one could believe that the only country competing is the USA . . .
      Americans who want to see actual competition (instead of endless human-interest stories and taped highlights of US competitors) have to resort to watching CBC. The excellent live coverage from Canada almost makes up for Celine Dion.
        Don't blame us for Celine Dion. She's from Quebec. As for the CBC, Olympic coverage may be good, but the constant reruns of old sitcoms is boring. How about Olympic keyboarding???
      Ah, how true! It's good to know I'm not the only one to notice. As an example, during men's gymnastics the other day, they would only show the U.S. team, even when they weren't competing! They would show the U.S. team taping their fingers or chatting with their coach rather than show the other events going on at the same time. How upsetting!

      Oh, they would show other teams, sure - only when they made mistakes.

      I mean, it's one thing (and OK) to vouch for your team, but this is absolutely shameless!

      Arggggghhhhhhhhh.....

      --ZZamboni

      if you are lucky, in a northern state, you might catch the CBC channel on cable.

      Unlike NBC in the states, the CBC shows actual events as they happen.

      This is the worst coverage ever in the US. coming on the heels of the previous worst ever, which followed the previous worst ever.

      It's a national embarassment IMHO

        Ahh, the CBC, the only thing they are good for is olympics, hockey and This Hour has 22 Minutes ;-) They do sports very well. Not only are they showing the events that have Canadians in them, they also show all the major medal events (meaning, basically no Canadians ;->). I have never been disappointed in there olympic coverage
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RE: I watch the Olympics
by wombat (Curate) on Sep 26, 2000 at 08:34 UTC
    So I was watching it last night, waiting for my pizza to cook, and my experimental uber-coffee drink to brew (And waiting for Star Trek Voyager to come on) And it showed one of the races. I think it might have been the 500 meter or something. So anyway I noticed that one of the racers was the representative from Mozambique. Now whenever I'm offered a chance to name something, I always pick weird, strange names. I named my plant "Mozambique" a few years ago, and as such, I decided that I'd root for her over the American. My roomate, a non-geek who watches incessantly is American through and through. She says she LIKES NBC's coverage. (I pointed her here)

    Anyway, the race got started, and for a while the Mozambique runner was in fourth. She then dropped back to sixth, and I despaired. But then I kept cheering her on, and my roomate kept cheering the American. She pulled ahead and won the gold! I had never felt better! My roomate asked me why I wanted Mozambique to win so badly, and didn't seem to accept the answer of "Because I named my plant after their country, and have always liked that name". The announcer then came on to say that this person had competed in four olympics before this, but hadn't won anything. They also went on to say that this was the first time the country of Mozambique had ever won in this event. I smiled and went to hack more perls in the other room.

    What does this teach us? That being a perl monk / geek / madman gives you reality warping powers and that you can make anything happen with enough willpower.

    Well enough of this babble. I'm long winded even when I'm recounting anecdotes that nobody wants to hear.
    ~W
      That was a SUPER story! Reality Warping Powers are just the BEGINNING though! Among the advantages to coding Perl:
      • The ability to eat any vegetable without chewing.
      • Being able to look up entries in the encyclopedia WITHOUT OPENING IT!
      • Sex Rays...lots and lots of Sex Rays (kind of like pheromones, except with alot of built in functions).
      • Time control. If you ever run into that problem of going too far back or something, you can use select(undef, undef, undef, $exactTime) instead of sleep($time).

      Yup...that's what you can do.

      redmist
      redmist.dyndns.org
      email::redmist
RE: I watch the Olympics
by neophyte (Curate) on Sep 26, 2000 at 12:48 UTC
    Admittedly, I do watch the Olympics every day ... for half an hour while having breakfast. Which means I don't really watch the the competitions I'd like to watch. Cycling for example ... or chess ;-) The world is incessantly beeing greetet by novices.
RE: I watch the Olympics
by pschoonveld (Pilgrim) on Sep 26, 2000 at 18:23 UTC
    I am boycotting the olympics because it isn't about amateur athletes anymore. It is all about the money. lousy ioc.
      "isn't about ameteur athletes anymore..."

      How true, pschoonveld.   The Olympics aren't even about athletics anymore, but are simply one more avenue for consumer-targeted marketing, like most (all?) professional sports.   8^(

      At least that's how it looks from my recliner.
          cheers,
          ybiC

        pschoonveld: "isn't about ameteur athletes anymore..."

        When was it? Throughout the cold war, practically every athlete in the Soviet Bloc was either a policeman or a military officer, with no duties other than to train. And the sick and twisted "amateurism" in the US did much more harm than good. The people running the profitable sports simply used it as an excuse to keep all the money for themselves (as the NCAA still does). Heck, one of my older friends, who won in '60, was barred from the '64 games because somebody gave him a watch. I think your sentiment is quite right, but you've got to make a distinction. The IOC really does suck... as, by the way, does the USOC. But the fact that athletes are allowed to make a (usually meager) living training now isn't the problem.

        ybiC:The Olympics aren't even about athletics anymore, but are simply one more avenue for consumer-targeted marketing, like most (all?) professional sports.

        *sigh* Problem is, the Olympics have been a business for quite a long time now... before '84 they were just a very poorly run business.

        Not that I'm against business. But there are good businesses and bad businesses. I think the Olympics really had to start marketing themselves properly to survive. They didn't have to totally sell out de Coubertain's vision, and start screwing over the athletes. Scumbags.

RE: I watch the Olympics
by kael (Monk) on Sep 26, 2000 at 06:35 UTC
    Where's the during the comericials during Babylon 5 option?
RE: I watch the Olympics
by japhy (Canon) on Sep 25, 2000 at 16:09 UTC
    I'm just far less motivated to watch them this year. Maybe because I'm at college, and my family isn't around, so I'm not watching it in the family room with them...

    Oh, but I did watch women's volleyball...

    $_="goto+F.print+chop;\n=yhpaj";F1:eval
RE: I watch the Olympics
by BigJoe (Curate) on Sep 25, 2000 at 22:06 UTC
    I am still waiting for Olympic stock car racing too. But until then I have better things to watch and do.

    --BigJoe

    Learn patience, you must.
    Young PerlMonk, craves Not these things.
    Use the source Luke.
RE: I watch the Olympics
by nuance (Hermit) on Sep 28, 2000 at 03:55 UTC
    If someone's nailed me to a chair and glued my eyes open then I might just conceivably watching that boring pile of ...

    One of my favourite things about satelite tv is that they've taken all that "sport" crap and stuck it on encrypted channels which means I never catch a glimpse of it even when channel hoping - which is nice.

    Nuance who strongly believes that ALL sport sucks

RE: I watch the Olympics
by puck (Scribe) on Sep 25, 2000 at 09:08 UTC
    Well, I've been enjoying watching the olympics (watching the men's Basketball between NZ vs The Dream team was entertaining) as much as I can. We have a TV setup in the corner of our lab (the joys of a post grad lab) which while it hasn't been on today has been getting a lot of use...

    Tonight I have to watch the women's Hockey, NZ vs Spain...

    (Yes, I'm from New Zealand...)

RE: I watch the Olympics
by Jonathan (Curate) on Sep 27, 2000 at 19:27 UTC
    Until Quake is recognised as an Olympic sport I will have to boycott it

    (Ohhh, except for Steve Redgrave and Denise Lewis :-)


    "We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure." - Samuel Johnson
RE: I watch the Olympics
by TQuid (Sexton) on Sep 27, 2000 at 21:26 UTC
    I'm so massively disgusted with the corporate virtual ownership of the Olympics, I'm not bothering. Fortunately, this is easy, as I don't actually get broadcast TV anyway.

    I hear you can't take a can of Pepsi in, as Coke has bought this nauseating privilege. What happened to competing by producing a better product? Why don't they just start blackmailing, killing and buying people to force their choices? Oh wait, they already do that in poorer countries, at least as far as manufacturing goes.

    Not that I'm bitter or anything.

    --TQuid

      Did you just compare companies advertisting, to them killing off innocent people for corporate gain? I'm guessing (and hoping) that you made a very long typo....
RE: I watch the Olympics
by Mork29 (Scribe) on Sep 27, 2000 at 06:01 UTC
    Ok, well, the olympics are pretty boring in my mind. However i do find both female gymnasts and pro beach volleyball players to be entertaining....and you all know why. Now, the only question is, which ones are "More Entertaining".
RE: I watch the Olympics
by She-wolf (Sexton) on Sep 29, 2000 at 12:42 UTC
    Never.

    Why? several reasons:

    Sci-fi channel wide-screen Babylon 5
    5 hour Anime parties every night
    Deciphering friend's hard core tech talk

    She-wolf
    "Wha? I don't get it."

RE: I watch the Olympics
by princepawn (Parson) on Sep 25, 2000 at 21:01 UTC
    I will watch the Olympics when they finally value mental effort as much as physical effort... ie, when they have some mental challenges.

    In the Perl "Olympics" (Wizard's tests), I think England is the Gold Medalist due to the Canon Research Group, which has Andy Wardley, author of the Template Toolkit (cpan://Template).

      <laugh> I agree. I was very annoyed at the coverage from NBC in the US. They only show events if Americans are particularly good at them or athlete who has overcome some fantastic difficulty is competing. This left out most of the more interesting events (in my personal opinion) such as fencing and judo.

      Perhaps there's no corresponding "mental olympics" because the mental 'sports' that we engage in are more suited to cooperation than competition - and cooperation is bad for ratings. :)

        On the topic of mental olympics, didn't anyone else (in the US only, I think) compete in 'Olympics of the Mind' as a kid? I think they later changed the name to 'Odyssey of the Mind' (OM).

        As for the 'real' Olympics, I haven't really watched them since '84 (when I was too young to notice a lot of the things that may well have been present then but are certainly present now), for a number of reasons:

        • Splitting the winter and summer games into different years makes it too frequent to be noteworthy.
        • I think they are used as an excuse to promote nationalistic fervor, which I think encourages viewing other countries as the enemy (I'd prefer it if people just competed against people, with country being irrelevant).
        • Such serious competition isn't good for the participants anyhow. I seem to recall hearing reports of them dying a few years later while still fairly young from the damage caused by training/fluid deprivation/drugs/whatever. By the time you compete at that level, you don't have good, balanced health. It can be argued that anyone who would do that to her/himself for a medal has the kind of personality that would do it regardless, but why should such people be encouraged and admired?
        • The advertising has become more prevalant and the 'exclusive' concept further reduces viewers into not just consumers, but infant consumers who need protection from the big, bad world.
        • Watching sports bores me.
        • The reported corruption of the Olympics committee in determining location and in reacting towards drug use just adds to the silliness of the whole thing.
        • The limitations imposed on coverage don't help to credit the concept of a world coming together to celebrate blah blah blah... It just reduces interest in the event.
        • The coverage in the US is pathetic, from what I've heard. I haven't watched any coverage so I can't really rate it myself. In attempting to pull heartstrings to increase interest--by telling about someone who overcame paralysis, cancer, bad breath and ebola to come in second-to-last in the 800 cm sprint with a time of 2 hours, 45 minutes and 4.3 seconds, bravely beating her arch-rival (since the '76 games) due to said arch-rival (who is also the hero's second-cousin twice removed) being disqualified because she fell over the line before the gun went off due to a drug-induced heart attack--all the network does is desensitize people to the point that impending nuclear war wouldn't rouse some from their apathy.
        • I've never understood why professionals are barred from participating. Either it should be about the 'best', in which case they should allow professionals, or it should be about amateurs, in which case it shouldn't be possible for some countries to put lots of money into training. Maybe they should just pick participants randomly.

        It might be hard to believe that I dislike anything more than the Olympics, but I vastly prefer them over the European football games earlier this year, which had the added disadvantage of 'being in my backyard', which meant I had to witness the insanity.

RE: I watch the Olympics
by AgentM (Curate) on Sep 26, 2000 at 19:11 UTC
    Olymp-what?
RE: I watch the Olympics
by tye (Sage) on Oct 06, 2000 at 06:53 UTC

    ...on video tape. (:

    (ducking and running) update: boy, make one little joke about the outdated poll question and vroom just goes and puts up a new poll question in mere minutes. Impressive. :)

            - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
RE: I watch the Olympics
by Bourgeois_Rage (Beadle) on Sep 25, 2000 at 20:36 UTC
    I've been watching while I work.
    I've got a pretty cool setup, where I have a PC a server and a television all on the same desk at home. Usually, I just listen until something good comes on, then I stop to watch.
    -Bourgeois_Rage
    Did anybody else check out women's trampoline? :^0

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