Now that the Beijing Olympics are in the rearview mirror and we look forward to Vancouver and London, I thought I would offer some thoughts on how NBC covered these Games. I should state off the top that due to work and other things I was mostly confined to the primetime coverage on the Peacock hosted by Bob Costas and did not catch much of the NBC daytime or cable coverage, and none of the late night with Mary Carillo. So I will be discussing primarily that. Anyhow, w/o further preamble:
1. I liked the fact they were able to incorporate live coverage of events happening the next morning Beijing time into the primetime coverage. Particularly the first week with swimming at the Water Cube and gymnastics. As for the taped coverage, I liked that they did less of the “plausibly live” style where you show a few dives, then a track race, then more diving, then a volleyball set, then more dives, etc. They generally showed the diving, then the volleyball match, and whatnot as cohesively as possible, save cutting out for events that were actually live. Made it much easier to watch.
2. I generally get bored with the “human interest” stories. For one thing, they make it seem like the only way you can get to be an Olympian is to’ve had some terrible tragedy or hardship happen in your life, preferrably when you were roughly 6 years old. They didn’t do as much of that this year. But what they did do, particularly the pieced by Cris Collinsworth, were rather interesting I thought. Which is remarkable when you consider I never used to like Cris Collinsworth overly much. To be fair, I think he has evolved into a very solid TV personality after several years of doing NFL analyst work. The Mary Carillo pieces were also generally interesting, a bit quirky and offbeat looks at Chinese culture.
3. I have always liked how Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gaines do the swimming venue, and this year was no exception. They had the single biggest task of these games; covering Michael Phelps. And I thought they did it very well. Dan Hicks is probably the best play-by-play guy in the NBC system (probably even better than Costas, honestly) and Rowdy Gaines is very informative. When he talks, its to say something.
4. I was less thrilled with the coverage of Athletics. Nothing against Tom Hammond; I don’t think he’s as good as Dan Hicks. He sounds like he’s trying to see how many paragraphs of the media guide he can read on each athlete before a race starts. For that matter, he does same thing during the post parade of the Kentucky Derby. I want a race set-up, not a biography. But mostly, I just didn’t like the way they covered the venue itself. For one thing, NBC should be reminded that “Track & Field” does, in fact, include “Field”. Did anyone see a long jump comp in primetime? Or a javelin throw? Shot put? They dropped the ball there (if the shot put can be said to be a ball). I didn’t even see much of the decathlon. But they made sure we saw all the preliminary heats in the sprint races, with a full 5 minutes of Tom Hammond media guide reading beforehand. I was disappointed with that level of focus on the track part.
5. I was very pleased with how they covered the gymnastics venue. They had the IOC schedule it just about right; qualification nights on tape so it could be heavily edited, team final and all-around finals live to the spellbinding conclusion (I fell asleep during the men’s individual final though as it didn’t end until real late), and event finals on tape so it could be somewhat edited down, if for no other reason than to boil down the interminable waits for the judges to create scores. Now if we could just get Al Trautwig to not talk when he obviously has nothing to say. Some on the internet have criticized Trautwig, Dagget, and Schlegel for complaining too much about the judging. I would agree somewhat. They fell victim to a media tendency to pick up a theme and harp on it ad naseum. Alicia Sacramone got screwed out of a bronze medal in the vault final. I consider that inarguable. No screw job happened the next night on the uneven bars. It was totally unnecessary for Trautwig to ask if He thought she earned that gold medal. She knew she had. You can complain about the tiebreaking scenario that was in place, but it was correctly administered.
6. I liked Ted Robinson and Cynthia Potter at the diving event fine, though it did become apparent that Ms. Potter cares more about flat feet than the judges do.
7. I didn’t catch a ton of the basketball event, but Mike Breen and Doug Collins did a good job. Perhaps a bit cruel to make Doug Collins watch Americans get gold medals in Olympic basketball, though.
8. Tim Ryan did a good job doing the rowing & flatwater kayaking venue. My only complaint is I can only watch those races for a short while before I become exhausted just sitting in my chair.
9. As per usual, Costas was a good program facilitator in the studio, both in setting up events, transitioning, and in-studio interviews. But they needed to do something to get Bela Karolyi more worked up 
10. Perhaps he has refused, but NBC should send Al Michaels when they go cover an Olympic Games. He is one of the best play-by-play men in my functional lifetime. I would suggest they have him do Track (and Field), bump Tom Hammond over to gymnastics, and demote Al Trautwig to a 2nd tier event, like he does in the winter games when he has generally covered freestyle skiing.
Overall, I give NBC a very solid grade of a B or so. They had a great first week with Michael Phelps, Shawn Johnson, and Nastia Liukin. The 2nd week was not as good.
