I've been following the history being made by the young lady who was the first female athlete from Qatar that they've ever allowed to compete in an international event. Unfortunately it's had a
heartbreaking end before it even really started.
I’m super bitter about stupid ol’ Roger Federer getting past Juan Del Potro to make the finals of Olympic men’s singles in tennis. If ever I needed my boyfriend Novak Djokovic to step up and beat the smug right out of Federer, it’s now. C’mon Nole!!!
My boyfriend Ryan Lochte went from looking happy like this:
To looking dejected and disappointed for the rest of his individual medal events:
Top all this with having to
deal with your mom bragging about your “playa status”; it’s been a tough week for my Ryan boo.
What no one has been able to explain to me (and I’ve actually submitted this question on both the IOC site and through Bob Costas’ blog because I’m a dork), is why when two athletes tie for the silver medal, they only give out a gold and those two silvers; no bronze is given for the third best time.
But if two people tie for bronze, they’ll go ahead and give out both bronze medals.
Except of course if it’s gymnastics, the sport with the most ridiculous and nastiest scoring rules. When American Aly Raisman tied with Russian Aliya Mustafina for the Women’s Gymnastics All-Around bronze medal, they didn’t just give them both a bronze and move on – which would have been the right thing to do.
Instead they did an archaic scoring system where they threw out the lowest score for each girl, in this case both of their beam scores, and recalculated the remaining three scores. Mustafina ended up winning the bronze because basically she got to throw out her HORRIBLE beam score, which was the worse of the night, and Raisman’s remaining scores were 6 tenths lower than hers. It was so disappointing.
One week of the Olympics is finished and while others, especially people I follow on Twitter are expressing "Summer Olympics Fatigue", I'm still just as excited for the start of the track and field events, as I was for the swimming and gymnastics.
But can we talk about all of this INSANE HATRED towards NBC for their televised coverage of the Games? Every two years the same argument breaks out - people complain about the fact that medal events happen throughout the day but are only shown by US network television during primetime hours, a long time after they finished and the results are on the internet and WAAAAHHHH! spoilers are bad!
Get over it people! First of all, NBC (or whatever network) has to make money. There's nothing wrong with that. And hey internet savvy hipsters? There are millions of people in this country that aren't on the internet all day and you know,
work, so the only opportunity to watch Olympic coverage is during primetime with tape delay.
Not to mention the fact that this particular Olympics is in a time zone where all of the events are taking place between 2AM and 7AM American time. I guarantee that NONE of the dumbasses complaining about the NBC tape-delay televised coverage would actually be willing to get their asses up at 3AM to final a gold medal swimming race. And hey, guess what? If you are inclined to do - YOU CAN WATCH IT ONLINE LIVE.
I think NBC has done an exemplary job of televising the Olympics this year. Not only do they have their affiliate networks helping out (Bravo is playing all of the tennis matches, CNBC is showing the soccer), but they've made all of the events available online with high-quality video players that haven't once clogged up with buffering nonsense or ads.
And for those who complain that they only show Americans performing in events. Guess what? That's all that most of us care about. If you want to watch a sport that isn't being televised, again you can go onto the NBC Olympics website or use their smartphone app to watch whatever the hell you want. It's all there - every heat, semifinal and final, for every sport.
And other nations' televised content is the same way. I'm privileged enough to live in a city that has access to Canadian televion. Do you think their Olympic coverage is slanted towards Canadian athletes? Damn right it is.
Okay, rant over. But seriously, lay off NBC you guys. I'd like to see any of you come up with a better solution.
