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Olympic-viewing marathon leaves you irritated
By JOHN DOYLE
Tuesday, August 17, 2004 - Page R2
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I've got a message for that kid in the Tim Hortons commercials. You know the kid -- Jeff or something, and he's backpacking around Europe with a plastic Tim's mug hanging off his rucksack. He writes home to mom and dad and says that, thanks to the Tim's mug, he's met so many nice Canadians.
Here's the message: Meet some foreign people! I mean, the geek's going around Europe getting excited about meeting Canadians who recognize his coffee cup. How dorky is that? Enough with the coffee mug. Go have an espresso and chat up some Italian girls.
Obviously, watching the Olympics on TV drives you mental. The commercials are endlessly repeated and you start to get very, very irritated. Here come mattress commercials again, and you're waiting for the one with the synchro swimmers because that's the only funny one.
And here's the thing: After the first days, it's possible that the Olympics are on the cusp of utter irrelevance. The IOC is an absurd organization. The athletes cheat. The venues in Athens are often almost empty. It's hard to care. If you choose to watch, you end up doing a marathon of viewing, hoping for gripping drama, and you only get irritated.
Everything inspires grumpiness. You watch the men's synchro diving event for 20 minutes and you think you've got the thing nailed. Then two guys do an apparently perfect dive and get mediocre points. You realize you've missed the point entirely. Either that, or the judges are dimwits.
The commentary often sounds like the work of idiots. Oh, I don't mind Brian Williams. He's turned his notorious penchant for detail into an endearing shtick. He's telling you that coverage is going over to the rowing and telling you that the rowing venue is northeast of where he is, and how many kilometres it is from central Athens. And he keeps going on and on until you're surprised he hasn't told you what number bus to take, where to get off and that if you get lost, there are very nice people living at number 53 who will give you directions. Brian Williams in fine.
Colleen Jones isn't fine. Now, I adore Colleen Jones, but her Athens gig needs to be tweaked, you might say. Her specialty is the weather. It's hot in Athens, every darn day. Okay, we get it. In fact, we knew that already. Also, in her round-up reports, everything is "big" or "huge," sometimes both. Give the gal a thesaurus if she's heading into the hot sun to do her job. Her vocabulary obviously shrinks in the heat. And, what's with her makeup? She looks like her face was done by Guido's Drywall and Concrete. See what I mean? Watching the Olympics makes a person irritated.
While I'm ranting, a lot of the commentary on team sports events is particularly irritating. It's complete codswallop. Watching the Canadian women's softball team on the weekend we all heard, countless times, that "this is a team with heart." No, it isn't. The softball team is aggressive, ruthless and shrewd. Anyone who sees Kim Sarrazin step up to the plate and glare with that murderous look knows that these women want to win. It's not about "heart;" it's about playing a fast, hard, furious game. Larding it up with nonsense about "heart' is an insult to our intelligence.
Call it Soccer Boy bias on my part, but there is a real story emerging at these Olympics: the men's soccer team from Iraq. These guys -- unheralded no-hopers who should be content with merely arriving in Athens -- have hammered Portugal and Colombia. As their country is torn apart, something unearthly is driving those players to astonishing victories, Of course, we just hear about those victories. So far, in Canada, we're not getting soccer at the Olympics.
Of course, there isn't a lot of room for commercials in soccer games. And it's all about the commercials, isn't it? The Olympics make a person very skeptical and me, I'm as cross as two sticks. Don't mention the little blue cow to me.
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source:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/serv...tertainment/Idx
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kewl!
so that's too bad.
That's one more thing that pisses me off with Canadian broadcasting...they hype up the athletes all the time, and then they take a huge fall, lose, and get competely deflated, and then the stupid commentator will ask..."WOW WHAT HAPPENED"?...FCUK 
I feel sorry for the guys
China and Russia slightly behind 
