As a follow-up to the past two entries I’ve written about the Olympics, I thought I would share the following with you:

My mom e-mailed me the link to this great Time magazine article on the Olympics. See, it’s not just me. There are other people out there who think that the huge popularity of women’s beach volleyball is just a tiny bit suspicious.

The article reminded me of two other things as well. One thing is that, though it means I would have to stay up all night every night to watch all the Olympic events I would really like to see, I am glad that German television shows things live instead of feeding people snippets of pre-taped, pre-digested prime time highlights. I’m glad that I’ve gotten to see all the swimming heats and all of these rowing events and handball games that I didn’t even know were a part of the Olympics. I do have to gripe a little bit about the German coverage of gymnastics - like, there’s hardly been any. I guess this is because the Germans don’t have many gymnasts competing (I don’t think they have any women gymnasts there at all). I understand, of course, that they want to show the sports in which Germans are taking part, but I’m still kind of disappointed that I’ve only gotten to see the briefest clips of the other gymnasts doing their thing.

The other thing the article reminded me of is this: I am so, so, so, SO glad that we here in Germany are not subjected to those God-awful soft focus, piano music-drenched, pathos-dripping, tear-jerking athlete biographies of which the American television networks are so fond. I guess the sports themselves just aren’t interesting enough to people anymore. People want more emotion, people want personalities - people want tragedy, gosh darn it. Tragedy makes for good TV. Olympic sports on their own do not.

Personally, the only reason I can see for broadcasting such emotionally manipulative fluff is so that when people watch the athletic competitions, they can sit there and say, “Oh, I really hope that so-and-so wins because, after all, his dog died when he was 7 and he never recovered from the shock” or whatever. Sure, it’s nice to know a bit about the athletes you’re watching, and there are certainly athletes who have “heroic" stories in their lives and that’s just grand. But finding out about such things during the course of the games is good enough, I think. Do television producers really need to devote so much special air time to such sentimental drivel? Do viewers really need to have it beaten into them that they should feel this way about this athlete and that way about that one? I’m certainly not immune to sentimentality, but for pity’s sake…the whole thing is a bit much. I’m glad not to be subjected to it.

And one more non-article related thing: I take back some of the cranky things I said about the Germans not being happy with bronze medals. In the past day, several bronze medals have been won by various Germans in various disciplines (fencing, cycling, archery), and all of the medal winners - and the journalists, it must be said - seemed absolutely delighted about it. I’m glad to see that there are good sports (as opposed to sore losers) after all.