Some random thoughts on watching the Winter Olympics
I'm up with a sick cat and starting to hallucinate with fatigue. A perfect time to blog about watching vast amounts of sport.
Yes, Vladimir Putin is a Bad Man and obviously GLBT**** folk should be able to go about their business unhindered, but I saw absolutely zero protest value in refusing to watch people on skis and in shiny leotards do their best to fall over with or without musical accompaniment.
Fast forward is the key to a successful Olympic campaign, so I set the tivo to record a good 6-7 hours worth of programming each night. It took me a couple of days to figure out why I wasn't getting any of the fun outdoorsy lethal stuff - Ch10 only broadcast the night time events, so I had to look to ChONE for extra daylight hours. But the sessions overlapped and the events never matched the schedule blah blah blah. The usual. One thing I had learned from the last Summer Olympics is that my tivo will fall down and go boom really quite quickly if the hard disk gets close to full, and the automatic recovery of space from deleted items didn't happen quickly enough to free up space in time to prevent strange corruptions.
Long story short - I recorded a hell of a lot of footage, fast forwarded through the bulk of it pretty much each day, and manually deleted (DIE! DIE! DIE!) the recordings to ensure ongoing peak performance. If I'd actually cared who came when and what their times/distances/points/lunches amounted to I'd have been compelled to watch far more of it, and I couldn't afford the extra commitment.
Things I skipped without question:
- Talking heads behind desks.
- Taking heads in the field.
- Athlete profiles.
- Athlete interviews.
- Highlights packages (until the very end).
- The ten gazillion ads.
- Magazine pieces about Russia.
- Medal ceremonies.
- Instant replays.
- Shots of athletes waiting for results.
- Warm-ups and practice runs.
That took care of quite a bit.
Things I skipped or skimmed at varying speeds, with the possible exception of a few minutes to check if I found it unexpectedly compelling:
Luge/Skeleton/Bobsled/Sundry Temporary-Citizen-In-A-Tube events. Hard to get excited unless someone's life is actually threatened, so really not best to get excited by these. Apart from the baseline threat of doing foolish things at high speed, the results are pretty much in the lap of the gods of gravity and tiny chunks in the ice. i.e. insufficiently sporting for my taste.
Ice hockey. Skipping this saved me many hours of viewing. I had hoped to catch some amusing violence here and there but sadly it all seemed irritatingly sportspersonlike.
Speed skating. See ice hockey, above. Spent a few minutes admiring the freakish quads, hammies and glutes, then moved on.
Moguls (aka bumpity bumpity bumpity wheee! bumpity bumpity bumpity wheee!) Spent a few minutes admiring the freakishly well-oiled knees, then moved on.
Cross-country skiing. Actually I'd probably have watched more of this but it took a bit of time to get into the groove (no pun intended). Most interested in large groups of people going uphill looking like a crowd of water-striding insects if water were ever at a slope...never mind.)
Ski-jumping (see Luge etc) Not a great deal to see unless someone fails spectacularly. Spent a few minutes admiring freakish pursuit of scaring the willies out of oneself, then moved on.
Curling. A few minutes of obsessive concentration took care of my desire to watch the curling this time around. With less competition for my attention I might have appreciated the drama a bit more.
Things I watched a reasonable amount of but then skipped the rest because all pretty much the same:
Alpine events. I really like the wooshy noises and high speed and exciting cornering, but there's only so much of that you can watch.
Things I watched quite a lot of, or at least as much as I managed to record:
Roy and H.G. Because of course I did, and it was only in small snippets on free to air which allowed them to get by without dragging.
Half pipe, Downhill freestyle, jumping, doing things backwards, anything on a snowboard, stuff out of the X-Games. Plenty of thrills and spills for the sadistic viewer, and much impressive human activity. Was more than a bit surprised how much of it was done switch (backwards). Remind me not to try a switch unnatural goofy-footed double cripple anything before breakfast, ok? Was also pleasantly surprised by the quality of the commentary.
Ski-cross and Snowboard-cross are now my favourite sports ever. The camera work was also excellent.
FIGURE SKATING!!!!!!!!!!! (and to a lesser extent ice dancing)
I confess I was a bit disappointed with much of the figure skating - unlike other sports where it's fun to watch people fall over and shatter their dreams and/or major bones or organs (go on, you know it's true) - in the case of figure skating I actually prefer it when people land their jumps and couples are perfectly co-ordinated. So there was a certain amount of disappointment in churning through the qualifiers and pretty much anything involving a male competitor. They went down like poorly counter-weighted spinning flies. Stop trying those quadruples lutzes boys. (Or is that a kind of pastry?)
The women's figure skating was something else and involved far less arse-ice contact. Sure there were a fair few also-rans, but the really good ones were sublime. Also the costumes were far shinier than the boys'. Excellent deployment of the bedazzler, ladies.
I found myself curious about one competitor who ranked somewhere in the middle of the field, and came from somewhere in the middle of Europe. Her costume was basic, her hair dragged less-than-perfectly into an ordinary bun and secured by what looked like an off-the-shelf scrunchy and an aggressive hedgehog of pins. She wore only a smear of inexpertly-applied lipstick for makeup, and her eyebrows had never seen a professional in their lives. She stood out amongst the largely glittering and slickly made-up field and I wondered what sort of struggles she might have gone to get there to compete. I wondered if her coach was her Mum. Hollywood would have had her win at least the Silver, but I reckon she fought hard for her 14th-ish finish. (It's possible I might have learned exactly what her story was if I had listened to the commentary but I wasn't *that* keen.)
There was probably more, but out of spoons now.