Rate the Olympic Trials TV Coverage on a scale of 1-10

The video was farily good: 8/10. The commentating was quite poor. There is no excuse for not having splits. It's irrelevant that the tracker was broken. That's why there's a on course vehicle that drives past each mile marker. Lewis just has to jot down the time at each mile marker and the guys in the booth should have a constant video feed as well that can be used by one of the workers to also record times for each mile.

The announcers did not identify barely anyone for the first half of the race. I did not have a very good picture and couldn't tell who was taking the lead early other than 2-3 of the bigger names. That's what the announcers should be doing. Johnson was the worst. I don't think he knows anything about distance running and didn't provide any useful information. 2/10 Commenting.

Agree with the post about Ritz. Not only was he not mentioned the entire race (despite being one of the favorites), but there was no mention of what had happened to him when he wasn't in the lead pack. Typically if a contender falls off the lead pace, the commentators would explain what happened (shoe lace, portopotty break, cramp, etc). I asked a friend what happened to him because he just disappeared for about 6-7 miles and then we found out "he dropped out" with no mention of when that happened...mile 8? mile 15?

I would give it an 7. I think they did a very good job.

Good camera work, commentary was knowledgeable and had thankfully few up-close-personal video segments.

It would have been great to have had Joan Benoit on the broadcast.

I wish they had more early coverage of the chase pack, men and women. Even more Desi and Ward coverage and real-time splits would have added to the ending.

Only saw about 10 minutes but it only showed the lead runners.

noway wrote:

Hutchings made several mistakes...plus he pronounced Houston as Hoooston

I noticed this then realized "Well...there isn't an E or a Y in Houston so why pronounce it Hyuston?"

Same thing with how Canadian hockey analysts pronounce Offense as "Oh-fence" instead of "Awe-fence". Closer to the actual spelling of the word.

2/10 What about the middle guy's, you know the workings stiffs.

I'm glad it was televised. Disappointed that I watched the entire coverage and have no idea who was 5th for either race, not to mention top 10, top 20, etc.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that after the long delay in covering the women's race for the men's finish and the interviews with the top-three men, the sole issue was the relationship between Linden and Goucher. When they returned to the women's race, they said that Goucher was gaining on Linden. But the ORC OT thread said the opposite, i.e., that Linden was opening it up. Eventually NBC said that, yes, Linden was moving away from Goucher and aiming for Cragg and Flanagan.

I thought the coverage overall was good once we got rid of the front-loaded commercials. But I wish they'd stop with the cliche "the worst possible place".

fisky wrote:So Rupp beat a guy almost old enough to be his dad, so what?

Where do you live that 11 year-olds are having children?!?!

Better quality than I'd expect wrote:

I'd give it a 9. There were mile splits but they were announced. If you wanted projected finish times you can do the math youself.

Yes. I can go to LA myself abd watch the thing live

4/10

No mile splits. Once rupp and meb pulled away no updates on what was happening in 4th. How far was puskedra? The Kara/desi battle could've been more exciting. Just overall so many ways to keep the race exciting. Once #1 spot was locked up it seemed Hammond just got bored.

The first half interview with the mayor was unbearably long. They don't realize that people watching actually want to watch the race. We actually like watching the sport, not just seeing the results... So show the race! It's like if an nfl game cut to the announcers for 15 minutes while plays were happening.

Lastly, Hammond clearly wasn't a fan. He said Darren Ritzenhein and speculated that Rupp could break Salazar's debut record of 2:09:40 when he was at 2:09:20 and had over 400m to go... Wtf

8/10 overall.

I'd add that I liked the helicopter cam. Those giant overhead shots provided visual scale not seen from a typical lead-car camera. Really helped the viewer during those late-race surges & breakaways.

Chase pack wrote:I'd add that I liked the helicopter cam. Those giant overhead shots provided visual scale not seen from a typical lead-car camera. Really helped the viewer during those late-race surges & breakaways.

99% of the helicopter views were terrible. They were so far up and too wide angle to make anything out. With most of them you couldn't even tell people were running on the roads.

The ONLY time I like the helicopter's view was with about 6 minutes to go in the woman's race and they showed a relative close-up of Amy Cregg from above and then panned out really really wide until Desi was in view and they they zoomed relatively close to her. THAT really showed just how far back she was after passing Shalane. From the front truck cam it almost looked like Desi was very close to Amy and could catch her, but the heli showed otherwise.

Anyone catch Hammonds goof at end? Rupp nearing final mile, 2:06-7ish, Hammond said "he might just break his coaches (Salazar) debut record of 2:09". Not. He finishes 2:11. Funny.

They didn't give much color on lead pack, no splits. 5/10.

American tv coverage sucks no matter what. They have been trying for over 30 years and still can't get it right. First, why is a Brit commenting? Where is Frank, Bill, Dick, Tony, or some other American? With all the technology out there why can't they have splits? Heck, even the homepage of the event couldn't get that one right...live results, yea right, the race was at the half and they were just coming up with 9m splits. Too many commercials, not enough field reporting, well if it was football, it would matter.

1

Coverage went out for us after 30 minutes and in those 30 minutes, we must have seen 10 commercials for Pandora jewelry and Cadillac, each time one of those two commercials cutting off commercials by Brooks or Sketchers. I hope those two shoe companies were credited for there interrupted paid commercial time.

asfadds wrote:

They don't realize that people watching actually want to watch the race. We actually like watching the sport, not just seeing the results... So show the race!

This

Simply embarrassing. Childish.

Yes, I agree with all of the positives and the fact that NBC showed it all, live. The positives outweigh the negatives so I also give them 8/10.

I actually believe that Carrie Tollefson could've been used *more* rather than less. I know that they had a communications issue with her at one point. As far as color people are concerned, they used to use Marty Liquori as well. He was pretty good but Shorter was always the best.

I agree that it would've been nice to have seen a few of the other competitors and to watch more of the top people finish. By the time the women finished, they were running out of time.

There are the immediate things:

Camera positioning/cinematography 9/10

High Quality Video 10/10

Split Screens for men and women 10/10

Misc 10/10

Far better than anything flocasts or runnerspace could do because that's just how the cookie crumbles when you're a major broadcasting company.

Then there were the less immediate things:

Commentary 6/10

Underground knowledge 4/10

Historical references 4/10

Headlines, names, places, relativity 4/10

Overall I'd give them a 7.5/10 which is still a whole 2 or 3 points better than anything flocasts or runnerspace could produce.