Comments on: The Olympics: Yappers who should quit their yapping

By: sara

sara — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:00:15 +0000

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.

By: Listy Mohakken

Listy Mohakken — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 05:42:25 +0000

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.

By: Scooter McGavin

Scooter McGavin — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:07:31 +0000

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.

By: lain

lain — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:25:28 +0000

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.

By: Jen

Jen — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:34:33 +0000

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.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:29:11 +0000

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.

By: sara

sara — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:27:30 +0000

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.

By: Maggie

Maggie — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:18:48 +0000

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!