Giving up on the Olympics

what we're all struggling with is the overarching issue with american media. if we are good at a sport or event, the media makes a huge deal of it, but if we aren't in it for a win then i doesn't exist. they've televised every single one of michael phelps' trials, semis, and finals (complete with super slo-mo replays, over and over and f***ing over again), but once our boy tyson is out of the 100, they stop covering the event. they even put bob costas on there with the president to blather with about nothing (as if we haven't seen enough of that shit for the last 8 years) rather than covering the games.

people like shalane make it all the way to beijing, do us proud with a medal and an american record, and her family, friends and fans can't even watch her whole race. pathetic.

to NBC: this is very simple: PUT OUR ATHLETES ON MY f***ING TV SCREEN. if we have the biggest olympic team of all the countries in the games, WHY AM I SEEING THE SAME 5 FACES ALL DAY?

I think that if huge numbers of us e-mail, somebody would have to notice. Maybe write letters. I mean, not enough people are going to be willing to miss what crappy coverage here is, becaus they are still going to want to see whatever they can. e-mail every time you get pissed off about a race. I'm keeping the link open so i can e-mail a dozen times...just whenever i get pissed. Everybody does that somebody will notice, because think of how many of us there are.

What's not inexplicable is NBC's deciding not to show all of the women's 10000 meters. If they don't think viewers are interested in such an event, fine. But if they think that--and what other reason would there be for not showing much of it, and showing that at an ungodly time--why not make it available on-line (and even live!)? That is truly what's inexplicable. Indeed, as best I can tell every sport other than track and field will have some coverage live on-line--yes, even trampoline! NBC--No Brains Corporation

Below is a letter I just emailed. Feel free to take parts of this to quickly send your own letter. I agree that unless a large number of complaint letters are sent, this probably won’t be effective. But it can’t hurt either. You will feel better after sending such a letter. It’s kind of therapeutic.

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I am upset and angered by your poor coverage of the Olympics. I enjoy watching all the major sports and Track & Field in particular. I’m upset because there is no live coverage, and because I can’t watch an unedited event later on the internet that has been archived. I’d gladly pay $100-$200 to have been able to watch all events live on the internet without commercial interruption (or $10/event). This could have been easily set up on the internet, but wasn’t.

The first night of Track coverage, an American woman wins a bronze medal in the 10,00m race -- only the second time in history this has been done. The world’s 1st and 2nd fastest times are also run in this race. (I’m discarding the official world record which every track fans knows is a drug aided time.) But NBC doesn’t show this historic 10,000m race later that evening in Prime Time. So I stay up another two hours, until 1:45am, to watch this race at the very end of your Late Night coverage. And then I end up only being shown the first two minutes and last two minutes of this historic race. As big a sports fan as I am, I’ll never stay up late again to watch your Late Night coverage.

I am so upset by NBC’s coverage that I’m going to take every opportunity I have to talk to high level officials I work with in both business and government about this extraordinarily poor coverage. I will encourage other executives to use their contacts to prevent or lessen the change that NBC gets another chance to broadcast the Olympics.

I will never again buy any product sold by GE, your parent company. I plan to write a similar letter to GE’s chairman later today and also to the heads of the IOC and USOC. I hope there are enough people upset by this bad Olympic coverage and willing to say bad (but true) things about NBC that our combined actions end up really hurting NBC.

I’m also considering helping to organize a protest outside NBC’s New York headquarters later this week. I know my feelings are shared by many thousands of runners in the New York area. May NBC (and GE) become the next Enron Corporation.

I feel that the running community is more organized and vocal (thanks, letsrun) than most other sports. Let NBC know what you think! Call, email, protest, let your voice be heard. I really think it can make a difference.

agreed wrote:

I feel that the running community is more organized and vocal (thanks, letsrun) than most other sports. Let NBC know what you think! Call, email, protest, let your voice be heard. I really think it can make a difference.

There was similar outrage during the 96 olympics. We wrote in in such numbers that they mentioned it on air and showed Bob Kennedy's race - which they weren't going to do - as a result in its entirety. No kidding.

WILL YOU BE WILLING TO JOIN A PROTEST IN NYC LATER THIS WEEK???

What would really embarrass and concern NBC is having a sidewalk protest outside their NYC Headquarters about their poor Olympic coverage. Other networks would be thrilled to put this on their evening Prime Time news broadcasts. Millions of casual sports fans would see this protest on TV and a decent percentage might conclude that yes, much of what they are watching is crap, Many might conclude they should reduce the time they spend watching Olympics this final week. Competing networks would love to start a discussion about NBC’s poor coverage, but they need someone to start this story before they run with it.

This could also get the IOC thinking about not awarding NBC the coverage in 2012, or at least placing into the award contract some minimum requirements on type of timing of TV & internet coverage. Unfortunately, a large number of complaints on letsrun aren’t going to help here. But a protest seen by millions on TV just might get something started that improves coverage in 2012 and beyond.

If anyone wants to organize this, a friend and I would gladly show up. All we need is an organizer (sorry I don’t have the time), someone to set up a date & time, get any needed permits, contact ABC and CBS as to what we will be doing, and to provide an email address so other upset runners in the NY area can notify the organizer that they will be attending. Oh yes, someone needs to make a few large “NBC OLYMPIC COVERAGE SUCKS” banners.

NYC has ten’s of thousands of road/distance runners. I would think we could easily get 50-100 of us to join a protest, ideally around 5-7pm some weekday evening (Friday?) when NBC execs are leaving their headquarters and when CBS and ABC can broadcast live (something NBC can’t seem do) our protest on their nightly news channels.

If the organizer can’t get 10-20 people to commit to a date then this protest isn’t done. Wejo could put up a brief intro on letsrun’s home page that links to a message board thread where one is given the needed information to show up and is able to provide an email contact announcing one’s intension of joining the protest. From the NY Road Runners Club, we might be able to get an email contact for all the 100+ running clubs in the NY area and sent them an email asking them to quickly notify their members to come and join us for a few hours at 5-7pm, at xxx location on xxx date. After the protest we could go to a bar/ restaurant for dinner and to socialize.

But time is running out and we 1-3 people to step up as organizers over this weekend.

Unless you're a Nielson family, turning off your TV does nothing to affect ratings. So feel free to keep watching.

Advertisers are concerned about return on investment; ratings are a big part of that, but not the only part. If we write to the companies that advertise during prime time and inform them that we will no longer be purchasing their products and services, that will influence their perspective on their return on their investment.

So, tell McDonald's you'll be buying Burger King until track and field gets better coverage. 10,000 angry fans might make a dent in their sponsorship decisions.

Perhaps the better tact is to inform NBC that you would gladly have paid a service charge to be able to watch the Olympic track and field events live--that's a more direct and obvious revenue stream that they missed out on.

nbcolympicsfeedback@nbcuni.com

Thanks CBC. I heart Canada!

How are you able to stream at cbc.ca? I'm getting the dreaded "Sorry, this video is npt available in your area" message. I'm in NYC.

If you ever saw the "Track Revolution" on Flotrack with NBC's Joe Battaglia, then you may have seen this already, but he commented a few times below the video about how they would have all of the heats and races available online. I haven't seen anthing! This is one of the responses he posted....

"There is no relation to track's doping scandals and there being no live track on television from Beijing. You could argue there are less compelling athletes in track as opposed to say swimming. There is no Michael Phelps in track. But time difference has a lot to do with it as well. If you think back to Sydney, there was no live track then either. Was very little live from Athens either. The 12 hour time difference between China and U.S. East Coast has a lot to do with this. It makes zero sense for NBC to air live track and field at hours in the U.S. when no one will be at a TV set (a 9 pm final in China airing at 9 am in New York). There will be track on the primetime shows and for that reason, track is not being streamed live. Same goes for about 7 other sports that will be showed on primetime. COMPLETE video of all races, all rounds will be made available on NBCOlympics.com AS SOON AS the TV shows have aired on both coasts. This will be done automatically, so as soon as the clock strikes X time, the video will be made available. Gymnastics finals in the morning in Beijing were not a big deal to schedule. Michael Phelps' drive for eight golds and showing that live on primetime in the U.S. drove the decision to push for a switch of swimming finals from evening to morning, and believe me there are a lot of people in the swimming community unhappy about that. Another consideration is Liu Xiang's popularity in China and wanting him to run before an evening crowd in China. As for the partnership with WCSN, their technology is not in place with the content management system we use for NBCOlympics.com and the live-stream technology we used for Trials and what we will use in Beijing are like night and day. Don't rush to judge what you have yet to see using what you have seen in the past as a basis for that judgment. I assure you, what you will see from Beijing is unlike anything you have seen before. To touch on an earlier post about video being unavailable outside the U.S., it is actually an IOC violation for us to show a lot of our video outside the U.S. because of other broadcast deals the IOC has in various countries. That is why all of our video is GEO protected."

This is ridiculous. Here is the link if you want to see the rest....

http://www.flotrack.org/videos/coverage/view_video/285/70586-track-revolution-7-nbc-olympic-coverage

The CBC and BBC, those socialist enterprises, once again are leaving our stupid media in the dust.

Just think, if we were in the UK, we could listen to Steve Cram discuss the distance events...

Instead, there's freaking rowing on right now instead of track.

This FCC does all it can to promote monopolies. *Maybe* an FCC under Obama would be better.

If they posted the races online or allowed other to post them on youtube, I would be more forgiving for their lack of TV coverage, but this is getting ridiculous.

dbdb wrote:

How are you able to stream at cbc.ca? I'm getting the dreaded "Sorry, this video is npt available in your area" message. I'm in NYC.

It was on TV. CBC is part of the basic cable package in Washington. It appears that they've blocked the website for those outside the country.

Willing to rent my sling box cbc live-feed?!!!

NBC= NO BLOODY COVERAGE (of Track & Field).

It would be a lot less painful if the Track & Field were not covered at all, the horrific excuse NBC is producing is a total joke.

I will follow the Track & Field on the IAAF site for results and hope some of the race videos will be on YouTube in the future.

I give up for multiple reasons...

1) The coverage is awful

2) It's become apparent to me just how rampant drug use is. After swimming, seeing the Chinese clean up weight lifting, 9.69, and Ramzi walking out and running 3:31 in heats.

I feel like I just walked out of a tunnel and every single Olympic Athlete is waiting in line for an injection. Is it just me or are they trying to make it more obvious this year? What gall.

3) So much for this not being about politics. So much is being made of China Vs. the USA. Who gives a crap already, freaking Russia has about 0 medals so they have to invade a country during the games. Either make it all political and allow people to make statements, or just put a squash on it all together.

I have no clue what track and field they showed tonight because I didn't watch the Saturday broadcast on NBC. As a hugh track fan who has friends actually competing this was hard to do but very enpowering. I got the track results on the IAAF page and saw the 100m on youtube 30 minutes after it happened. My TV will be off for the rest of the Olympics.