The Olympics: Yappers who should quit their yapping
Posted by sara
August 13th, 2008 at 11:24am
In The Olympics
Okay, you guys, can we talk about the commentators at these Olympics? You know I love Bob Costas, to the point that I want a keychain of him, and I’m really enjoying the screaming from Rowdy Gaines at the Water Cube. But the gymnastics team is KILLING ME. If you haven’t been keeping up with the crazy, the booth team for both men’s and women’s gymnastics is made up of Al Trautwig, Tim Daggett, and Elfi Schlegel. Al is notable for actually looking like a trout, and for repeating himself, à la Willard Scott. Tim was a member of the gold medal–winning U.S. gymnastics team in Los Angeles, and Elfi is Canadian.
And the three of them are a pack of shrieking idiots. Let’s start with Sunday’s broadcast, the women’s team qualifying competition, when Tim compared Chellsie Memmel’s and Samantha Peszek’s sprained ankles on the eve of competition to “a tear in your wedding dress as you’re just about to walk down the aisle.” Yes, because a catastrophic (and by the way, extremely painful) injury at the climax of a decade of training and discipline and self-deprivation that keeps you from competing to your fullest potential at the single Olympic games you’re likely to qualify for, is JUST LIKE something that can be fixed with a little seam tape and a hot glue gun.
That’s just so sexist and meaningless and stupid I don’t know where to start with it. So let’s move on to how mean they’ve been to the Romanians. On Sunday, NBC’s cameras cut to Nadia Comaneci, the first woman to achieve a perfect 10 in gymnastics, who was looking vaguely European and bored, inspiring Elfi to comment on how the Romanians at this Olympics were talking to each other rather than, like, purging. And when a girl fell off the beam and her coach had the temerity to hug her, Tim commented that you’d NEVER have seen that in the old, gold medal–winning Romanian gymnast factory. The gold medal–winning gymnast factory that saw their greatest athlete defect because she wanted to eat carbs and maybe make out with a boy rather than sleep on a four-inch-wide balance beam.
This is Jonathan Horton. He’s adorable.
Monday night the team was even more vapid, if that’s possible. From NBC’s coverage, you’d think only China and the U.S. were competing in the men’s team event, even though the French were in second place after a few rounds. As one of the American men approached the high bar, which is a seriously scary apparatus, Tim, rather than telling us something relevant about great past performances on the bar or what the Americans needed to do to stay in medal contention, simply breathed reverently, “The first thing you do in high bar is, you grab the bar. You grab. The bar.”
I am so glad this ziphead is getting paid and getting a free trip to China to say something my friend’s eighteen-month-old can say (although when he yells “ba” he means “bus”).
I’m also disappointed that we’re not hearing more discussion from these announcers about the quality of the judging. They have bitched about some substantial delays, and about the instant replay the judges are allowed to watch that would seem to offer a greater degree of scrutiny than, say, the diving judges are allowed. But on Sunday the Chinese women fell off apparatus, took big steps on their landings, and otherwise faulted, and it wasn’t reflected in their scores; in fact, regardless of what they did they got higher scores than the Americans. Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin had particularly spectacular vaults, and their scores came in lower than similarly difficult vaults performed by Chinese athletes with less perfect landings. I’m not enough of an authority on the technical aspects, but I’m calling bullshit. I would really kill to hear John Madden call these events for the next couple of days. Or Charles Barkley.
8 Comments Add your own
1.
Maggie | August 13th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I’ve developed a lot of opinions on this new scoring process. Basically I think that while of course people should get higher scores for doing harder things, the current system makes it so that if you even ATTEMPT more challenging shit there’s no way you can score badly even if you totally screw up on something easy (eg, all the Chinese girls wobbling the crap out of their balance beam routines). It means that everyone’s routines are eventually going to be jam-packed with hard stuff and mistakes on the easy stuff won’t matter because of the base level of difficulty. Isn’t there some value in doing a (still extremely challenging) routine beautifully? Like in diving, they have the initial rounds where people just dive, no fancy twists. It seems like it should be important to be able to do that stuff, too, and in gymnastics it seems like less weight is being given to the overall effect of a beautifully executed routine.
Ack, I just re-read that. I have become an Olympics crazy person!
2.
sara | August 13th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
So in other words, it’s going to look like the figure skating competition. Boo! That sucks.
Since I wrote this on Monday, it doesn’t include how disgusted I was with the swimming announcers last night, who totally called Michael Phelps’s gold medals basically before he got in the pool. Roommate and I were knocking frantically on every wooden surface in the house (even though we weren’t watching live), terrified that that idiot Dan Hicks was going to jinx the Greatest Olympian of All Time, Ever. Luckily, he did not.
3.
Dan | August 13th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
The one point where I said “fuck off!” aloud to the television (to the assent of my roommate) was during the gymnastics competition. One of the Japanese vaulters stumbled on his landing and he kind of giggled to shake it off. The announcer said “I don’t like that. I know that’s some people’s way of coping, but you don’t do that at the Olympic games.”
What a douche.
4. Jen | August 13th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Re: The announcer said “I don’t like that. I know that’s some people’s way of coping, but you don’t do that at the Olympic games.”
I’m so glad someone said something about this! I was horrified. God forbid any of these gymnasts be allowed to be happy! It really hurts their performances, so it must be bad. Between that comment and the stuff about the Romanians (/gasp! she was texting between performances!), I found myself muting the commentators a lot.
5. lain | August 15th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
dan and jen, that was the exact comment i thought of while reading this post too! railing on the poor kid for having the audacity to be able to smile after he messed something up…
in all of the gymnastics so far, one WOULD think only the chinese and americans were competing–just as you said, sara! i mean, yeah they throw a bone to the japanese every once in awhile and the french, romanian, and russians…but really.
i understand that this coverage has americans in mind and the host country in mind, but there’s a TON that we aren’t seeing. i got fed up finally and headed to the much-touted nbcolympics.com last night so i could finally see ALL of the japanese performances. i watched the feeds for individual apparatus’ (?). lemme tell you that those are commenter-free, for those of you that are having some of the issues expressed here.
however, when watching the men’s team medal ceremony (on the above mentioned website), they showed the U.S. getting their medals…started to go over to the japanese, then wham…skipped over them receiving their medals completely and cut to the chinese getting their’s.
6. Scooter McGavin | August 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I know I shouldn’t be watching gymnastics because the guys are a little too homoerotic (but, hey, I thought 300 was a great film, and nothing is more homoerotics than that movie) and watching the woman is like a precurser to meeting Chris Hansen, I have to admit I did watch and those commentator is what I imagine being a fly on the wall in a female high school bathroom in how catty they all are.
7. Listy Mohakken | August 19th, 2008 at 1:42 am
What bugs me the most is how Tim Daggett kept trying to justify and convince us, viewers, why the US men’s and women’s gymnastics team were getting consistently low scores i.e. bad landing, bad form. He was wrong in the end, the conclusion given by the media was that the judges were ” less competent” and were biased by the host country crowd…at team USA’s expense.
Tim’s comments ultimately support incompetency and corruption in the olympics by excusing these judges. But what I find more infurriating than having incompetent Olympic judges, is having an incompetent commentator like Tim. I hope enough people complain to NBC and have him removed from commenting on future games.
8.
sara | August 19th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Yes, he’s an incompetent idiot, but that’s no reason to talk ugly. And really? You find incompetent talking worse than incompetent judging? Because I’d like to bitchslap someone on behalf of Nastia Liukin right now. The judges can’t hear Tim Daggett, remember.
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