Most of the time, I have little to no interest in sports. This includes the Olympic Games. However, I can tell you Michael Phelps needs to eat between 8,000 and 10,000 calories per day to fuel his body.
How is it that in just the brief bits of Olympic coverage I've digested, I know more about the eating habits of an American swimmer than I do about the results of the competition and the details of the sports themselves?
It's because the Olympics are more than sports, at least to NBC; they're a single endless story, with myriad smaller stories playing out inside. Each athlete does not rise or fall so much on what they do, as much as they are carefully crafted into a soundbite, or a feature story, or a one-liner for an announcer to deliver as a competition begins.
I was stunned Sunday afternoon to see a male swimmer fully fleshed out with a three-minute video package detailing his past, his upbringing, and his training, including cute pictures of him when he was a baby. This was not one of the name competitors that even Olympic neophytes have a passing awareness of, and this wasn't coverage during the key prime time hours, when one would expect an expanded focus on the players. This was 4 p.m. on a Sunday, some random swim meet in Beijing, and I got to see baby pictures of a guy I didn't even know existed a few minutes before.
I certainly don't begrudge any of these athletes their moment in the sun; they've earned it and fully deserve it. I just wonder what the impact may be of their hard work and dedication and sacrifice being chopped up by TV producers into easily-digested bullet points designed to captivate an audience who is assumed to not really care very much about swimming, skeet shooting, weightlifting, and the like.
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