For me, it's the absolute hypocrisy of these events which turn me off. Slogan of the winter Olympics is "together for a shared future". Everyone is laughing and clapping and keeping up a facade. Meanwhile, millions in China are systematically getting physically and psychologically molested in concentration camps because they had a different ideology or religion (Xinjiang internment camps). Everyone complies with China's rules and authoritarian regime. Nobody makes a statement. IOC is silent. That future is not so shared as people make it out to be.
Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
61–70 of 151 posts
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#62The quality of the broadcast coverage in the USA is so bad. The announcers have some sob story about the US athletes and then just cut coverage from a bunch of other athletes in other countries. They delay broadcast for time zones so results are known before it even airs. Some spots that are uncool can’t even be watched it’s such a shitshow.
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Atlanta Olympics made money. The event had commercial sponsors such as Coke and McDonald's plastered everywhere, which was derided at the time. The opening ceremony even prominently featured Chevy pickup trucks [1]. Nearly all of the newly built facilities were then reused as Georgia Tech dormitories, professional sporting stadiums, local high school facilities, etc. It was a huge inflection point for the city's…
All except the Olympic stadium which was torn down.
It wasn't torn down, just modified for new uses.
It was used as the Atlanta Braves stadium from 1997 to 2016, then converted into Georgia State University's football stadium when the Braves moved outside the city to Cobb County to follow the tax incentives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Olympic_Stadium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Field
Each conversion took lots of money, but the original structure is still there.
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#64I don't know where you live, but my experience is that in the US, the network coverage just ruined the Olympics because they don't "get it." I grew up in a different country--not the US, China or Russia. We typically hope to get a half dozen medals and a gold would be a Big Deal. As a result, if you turn on the TV, you get random coverage of any of the hundreds of individual competitions. Modern pentathlon! The one w…
Non live coverage is so dumb. Nobody wants to watch the World Cup or the Super Bowl with a 12 hour delay
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#65The model of "go to a new place every four years, build an Olympic village and a bunch of athletic facilities" doesn't work economically. It doesn't make enough money in the short term, and the facilities don't get enough use in the long term to justify it either. That makes it hard for a city in a free society to want to be the host. The costs are very real but the benefits are elusive. Probably the last time the Ol…
You are disregarding the fact that there is a competition to get the Olympics, where perfectly normal democracies also participate each time. There have certainly been offers from competitors to arrange Olympics on tighter budgets too.
The question is why those locations don't win? I'm sure it's due to corruption within the Olympic organization, but who am I to judge. I just stop watching the crap.
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#66> We use to follow the stories of the atheletes The advent of the Internet made it much more widely known that the athletes are being badly exploited and forced to risk getting permanently injured or killed in order to make more money for the corporations that run the Olympics, so it no longer seems ethical to prop it up by paying attention. Especially since several do die each year while training. Also the fact that…
> athletes are being badly exploited This is all high-level sports. You just get paid less for sports no one cares about.
Then again I see no reason why sports should pay specially well or at all unless people are willing to support it each year. Same goes for art.
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#67I don't know where you live, but my experience is that in the US, the network coverage just ruined the Olympics because they don't "get it." I grew up in a different country--not the US, China or Russia. We typically hope to get a half dozen medals and a gold would be a Big Deal. As a result, if you turn on the TV, you get random coverage of any of the hundreds of individual competitions. Modern pentathlon! The one w…
I am in a similar situation, except the country where I come from usually makes it to the top 5-10. I have been surprised by how poor the coverage of the Olympics is here in the US: only sports where the US have a change of medals, don't bother to show the finale if the American contestant(s) has been eliminated in the semi, constant ad breaks and ad integrations. Almost unwatchable. And so antithetic to what the idea of the Olympics should be: bringing nations together and competing for the beauty of the sport and of the performances of the athletes. Coubertin, who founded the Olympic Committee said "L'important, c'est de participer" (roughly: "the important thing is to participate")
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#68US TV ruined it. It's entirely different coverage in at least europe, none of this editorializing, profiles, etc etc. Just coverage.
I liken it to something Jonathan Demme (paraphrasing, maybe misattributing) said about Stop Making Sense - "concert films like to show the audience having fun, but our feeling is it limits/detracts from the experience" (stop making sense shows the audience very very little in its runtime)
So, to me, this carries over in the US coverage - they make all the decisions about how I should feel about every part, rather than letting the viewer come up with their own experience.
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#69Sport should not intersect with politics.
For you it obviously does (why do you even care about democracy or authoritarism in regards to Olympics?).
And this is widespread now, and this is the root of the issue.
Re: Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?
#70One aspect is that NBC has a lock on the Olympics for the US. Their streaming service is utter trash - unreliable, bad quality video, confusing menus (couldn't even figure out how to watch live events), rewind and fast forward don't have preview (at least on Roku), so you have no idea where to stop, no overlays describing any details of the stream, no editing of recorded events (i.e. 45 minutes of a zamboni cleaning…
The US has diplomatically boycotted the Olympics this year. That doesn't have anything to do with NBC - they have a first amendment right to cover the Olympics.
You're assuming there's some sneaky stuff going on with the State Department pulling the strings, but in this case the simplest explanation seems more likely - NBC recognizes the strong anti-China sentiment around human rights abuses in the viewing public, so they know that catering to that sentiment will be best from a business perspective.