The Olympics: Yappers who should quit their yapping
Okay, you guys, can we talk about the commentators at these Olympics? You know I love Bob Costas, to the point that I want a keychain of him, and I’m really enjoying the screaming from Rowdy Gaines at the Water Cube. But the gymnastics team is KILLING ME. If you haven’t been keeping up with the crazy, the booth team for both men’s and women’s gymnastics is made up of Al Trautwig, , and Elfi Schlegel. Al is notable for actually looking like a trout, and for repeating himself, à la Willard Scott. Tim was a member of the gold medal–winning U.S. gymnastics team in Los Angeles, and Elfi is Canadian.
And the three of them are a pack of shrieking idiots. Let’s start with Sunday’s broadcast, the women’s team qualifying competition, when Tim compared Chellsie Memmel’s and Samantha Peszek’s sprained ankles on the eve of competition to “a tear in your wedding dress as you’re just about to walk down the aisle.” Yes, because a catastrophic (and by the way, extremely painful) injury at the climax of a decade of training and discipline and self-deprivation that keeps you from competing to your fullest potential at the single Olympic games you’re likely to qualify for, is JUST LIKE something that can be fixed with a little seam tape and a hot glue gun.
That’s just so sexist and meaningless and stupid I don’t know where to start with it. So let’s move on to how mean they’ve been to the Romanians. On Sunday, NBC’s cameras cut to Nadia Comaneci, the first woman to achieve a perfect 10 in gymnastics, who was looking vaguely European and bored, inspiring Elfi to comment on how the Romanians at this Olympics were talking to each other rather than, like, purging. And when a girl fell off the beam and her coach had the temerity to hug her, Tim commented that you’d NEVER have seen that in the old, gold medal–winning Romanian gymnast factory. The gold medal–winning gymnast factory that saw their greatest athlete defect because she wanted to eat carbs and maybe make out with a boy rather than sleep on a four-inch-wide balance beam.
This is Jonathan Horton. He’s adorable.
Monday night the team was even more vapid, if that’s possible. From NBC’s coverage, you’d think only China and the U.S. were competing in the men’s team event, even though the French were in second place after a few rounds. As one of the American men approached the high bar, which is a seriously scary apparatus, Tim, rather than telling us something relevant about great past performances on the bar or what the Americans needed to do to stay in medal contention, simply breathed reverently, “The first thing you do in high bar is, you grab the bar. You grab. The bar.”
I am so glad this ziphead is getting paid and getting a free trip to China to say something my friend’s eighteen-month-old can say (although when he yells “ba” he means “bus”).
I’m also disappointed that we’re not hearing more discussion from these announcers about the quality of the judging. They have bitched about some substantial delays, and about the instant replay the judges are allowed to watch that would seem to offer a greater degree of scrutiny than, say, the diving judges are allowed. But on Sunday the Chinese women fell off apparatus, took big steps on their landings, and otherwise faulted, and it wasn’t reflected in their scores; in fact, regardless of what they did they got higher scores than the Americans. Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin had particularly spectacular vaults, and their scores came in lower than similarly difficult vaults performed by Chinese athletes with less perfect landings. I’m not enough of an authority on the technical aspects, but I’m calling bullshit. I would really kill to hear John Madden call these events for the next couple of days. Or Charles Barkley.
8 comments August 13th, 2008