AND WE’RE BACK (but Dick Ebersol is not)

Why. Hello there.

This old billboard from Atlanta 1996 is NOT INDICATIVE of the state of this blog.

It's been a bit of a ghost town around these parts recently, but all that's about to change. There are fewer than 500 days until the London 2012 Olympics! And we have so much to talk about!

Let's get started. 

On May 19, Dick Ebersol stepped downed from NBC Sports. This is big news in the American Olympics world-- Mr. Ebersol produced several years of Olympics coverage for NBC and acquired exclusive US media rights of the Olympics. You can thank him for the wall-to-wall non-stop American exceptionalist coverage over the past decade.

It's big news for Mount Olympics mostly because of this:

Aw yeah.

Farewell, "This post has been brought to you by Dick Ebersol's sweater" tag. We will miss you dearly.

Olympic Overload!

Oh man, there is so much Olympics going on, I can't even say.

First off, we have an amazing entry into the field of sports journalism by Timothy Eagan, about Canada broadly and his fake ID specifically and national identity and all that good stuff.

And then we have some malfunctioning zambonis, that meant an intermission of about an hour for no good reason... but it gave us more time to ogle the speed skaters.

There's a good story in here somewhere about gender bias in the Olympics and why women aren't allowed to ski jump (spoiler alert: it's because they would beat all the men) but a Canadian curler could be competing while five months pregnant (awesome!!).

I've got to write more in-depth about the NBC coverage and the internet and twitter and Olympics Triple Play (and Dick Ebersol and Dick Ebersol's sweater) and why something like this can totally happen in this day and age:

Aaaaaand that's not even getting started on the incredible tales of athletic prowess, speed, precision, and artistry that are going on. So yes! I am going to get back to watching Shaun White beat the pants off everyone. In the meantime, here:

Enjoy your mind trip as you watch Quatchi watch himself WATCH YOU.

Opening Ceremony!

When I was but a wee lass, my family had an antenna system attached to the TV. Because we lived in the middle of nowhere, we had exactly three TV stations available to us: CBS, ABC, and PBS. All were grainy, but I was young and bright-eyed-- I didn't care. My friends had cable, but I didn't mind our grainy stations.

But no NBC, back in those days, meant no Olympics.

There was only one time that my dad went out and started tapping into the neighbor's cable. This was in 1992 for the Winter Olympics. For those two glorious weeks, I held my breath as Kristi Yamaguchi triple axeled her way into my heart.

Flash forward to today. I again find myself without cable, but no matter! I have a laptop with which to watch the live stream.

Only... NBC wasn't streaming. And CTV was inaccessible to Les Américains. So there I sat, refreshing three different liveblogs and reading twitter streams and imagining what it must be like.

Apparently it was a nice ceremony. I've been able to see some clips now, and I'll be sure to watch the entire thing someday soon. In the meantime, a big shout out to Kate Beaton, or @beatonna as she is sometimes known, for keeping me happy while I was not watching the torch being lit.

 

Yes.

Follow the Money: TV!

Eventually we here at Mount Olympics plan to have an entire series of posts about Following the Money in the Olympics. It's a particularly germane topic given the crazy global meltdown that basically began ten minutes after the extinguishing of the Olympic Torch at the Closing Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (Possible "Follow the Money" topic: GLOBAL MARKET COLLAPSE A DIRECT RESULT OF OLYMPICS?? What the IOC Doesn't Want You to KNOW.*)

I've been curious for a long time about where funding comes from and where it goes-- what sort of sponsorship deals exist, what being the "Official Soft Drink of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics" means. (Note: Coca-Cola. Of course.) Do Olympians drink it? (Wild guess here: No.) Does anyone actually care? What, for all that is holy, could this sentence possibly mean: "Coca-Cola's Olympic Games Sustainability Plan is designed to outline the holistic methods Coca-Cola is using to minimize its environmental impact while demonstrating to Canadians how their own small changes create an opportunity to carry the Olympic Flame"?

But first, let's talk about the proposed US Olympic Committee's proposed cable station. Basically, the USOC and Comcast decided that it would be great if they started up an "All Olympics, all the time" channel. For those of you thinking, "Wait, I thought we already had that," congratulations for putting more thought into it than anyone over at Comcast!

NBC is one of the IOC's biggest partners. It has billions of dollars invested in being the only American station that consistently covers the Olympics. It also has and a great relationship with the IOC. And the USOC is not the IOC's best friend.

I'm not an expert on this little venture, but this sentence from the LATimes blog intrigues me: "It seems clear that Comcast miscalculated the level of bad blood between the IOC and USOC and didn't realize what the blow-back would be from NBC and its sports chief Dick Ebersol, who has a lot of juice with the IOC."

What kind of juice? I'm guessing mango. But that's not a Coca-cola product.

End result: the network is "on hold." Right. That's Dick Ebersol's code for "never again to see the light of day."

*Please note: This is a ridiculous joke about conspiracy theories. The IOC of course wants you to know. For once something cost less than predicted. In fact, they have probably post it on their website, and now nobody will ever be able to figure out anything ever.