We all know my love for Winter Olympics. ?It’s not just that I love sports such as luge, bobsleigh, skeleton, or curling. ?I do loves me some curling. ?The Winter Olympics is home to gems such as snowboard half-pipe and of course… hockey.
I have been eagerly waiting for the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics since it was announced way back when. ?In 2006 I swore I was going to save my money and buy tickets for the entire hockey tournament in 2010. ?I had grand plans of living in Vancouver the whole time and living hockey. ?Then we found out that Americans couldn’t buy tickets unless we drove up to Vancouver and waiting in line. ?Even then we weren’t guaranteed to get tickets. ?Our Canadian friends even tried to get tickets. ?They couldn’t because they didn’t live IN Canada. ?My Olympic hopes were dashed.
I had (begrudgingly) come to grips with my disappointment and moved on to excitement of watching the Olympics on TV. ?That was also a huge disappointment. ?The first clue in there was when the opening ceremonies were on tape delay. ?We live 2 hours away from Vancouver, but we were watching the ceremonies on a 3 hour delay. ?Such is the rest of the network coverage. ?What’s worse is that CBC lost their bid for coverage to a station that isn’t shown here. ?So we can’t even get the Canadian coverage.
The other night the trusty husband came home to say Lindsay Vonn had won the gold in Women’s Downhill. ?Ok. ?That left me men’s snowboard half-pipe that night. ?I tuned in for the quarterfinals and the trusty husband and I got to talking about some of the hockey games. ?I logged on to NBColympics.com and the first thing on the front page, “SHAUN WHITE WINS GOLD.” ?Well shit. ?So we watched something that was Tivoed.
Yesterday I checked the listings for Sunday’s hockey games. ?WTF? ?Outside of the the gold medal game the two best games of the entire tournament were happening on Sunday. ?Russia vs. Czech Republic and USA vs. Canada. ?The Russia v. Czech game was scheduled for 12:00 p.m. ?TV coverage? ?Didn’t start until 3:00. ?3 hour delay. ?That was ok since I had a meeting at 12:15. ?I did some yard work and came in to watch the game and had planned to flip back and forth once the US v. Canada game started. ?At 4:30 it was the end of the 2nd in Russia v. Czech so I turned to the US/Canada game. ?On the screen… the final score of the Russia/Czech game. ?feck.
The only thing that is keeping me from beating NBC programming execs to a pulp is that they showed the US/Canada game live. ?However, in my opinion the West coast coverage of the Olympics is one giant FAIL!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/02/nbcs_olympic_coverage_manages.html?sc=fb&cc=fp
Wow and I thought the standard coverage was crappy – I didn’t think about you guys out West getting the shaft.
Agree with you… NBC coverage sucks BIG time… never got a chance to see anything live and the suspense was nonexistant since the winners were plastered all over the 5 o’clock news or internet first, very disappointing indeed.
Couldn’t agree with you more.
I’m just happy that I can get Swedish radio on the internet and therefore get excellent live coverage of all athletes … exactly the kind of coverage I crave.
The occasional live hockey game on MSNBC has to be a mistake by the East Coast big-wigs.
As far as I know you can check out the CTV Olympic coverage on their website even if you are in the US — we don’t have cable here so I have been streaming the hockey live as well as watching recap vids, and when an American friend bemoaned the same thing, NBC’s woeful coverage, I linked her there.
If things keep up as they are, it looks like we will be meeting you guys in TWO gold medal games!
Totally agree. I was really looking forward to being in “the time zone” and turns out everything is taped.