What a wonderful Olympics
For all the gripe people gave to NBC on their coverage, I have to say I was pretty happy with it overall. When you look at the coverage across NBC, USA, CNBC, and MS-NBC it really seemed like they air more hours of unique coverage than during the Beijing Summer games, and a large portion (at least on the cable networks) was live. We had our DVR with 2 tuners almost constantly running and gathering the games.
My love of curling was rekindled, and I got to watch a lot of it during these games. While it was a bummer that the Americans didn’t do very well, the medal rounds were just incredible. The spontaneous outbreak of “Oh Canada” before the 8th rock of the final end in the men’s gold medal match was amazing. I didn’t watch much hockey, except for the gold medal match, which was definitely the best game I’ve ever seen.
To me, the most surprising thing of the Olympics was how much x-country skiing was aired, and how much I enjoyed watching it. The men’s 30 km pursuit was an incredible race. When I saw they were showing it live, I never thought they’d stick around for the whole thing, but they did. With the snow arriving this past week, it helped inspire us to get out to Fahnestock for some skiing of our own.
No Olympics will ever be the same to me as the Sydney games, which I got to experience both in person, and with Australian TV coverage that was live 8am – 11pm every day. However, I really think that with NBC’s use of their cable networks so extensively, we got much closer to that this time around. I’m hoping that isn’t a one off, and that we see that again in the future.
