Friday, August 29, 2008
Olympic Update (a little late)
In the interest of fairness, CCTV’s coverage of the second week of the Olympics was much better than the first. Was it because there were more team sports? Critical articles like the one in Slate? I’ll never know, but it doesn’t really matter. I only have one complaint/ question for CCTV. As beautiful as the closing ceremonies were, and as cool as it was to have all of the athletes out in the center of the stadium, would it have killed you to show one person from the US amongst all those athletes from all over the world?
Friday, August 15, 2008
CCTV 2008
I have been caught off guard. Before last week, it did not even occur to me that culture shock would be an Olympic size problem when trying to follow the Olympics themselves. It might seem obvious, but I feel justified in lack of foresight.
First of all, the one thing that I can reliably watch on television in English is sports. Of our ten or so English language channels, sports stations make up more than half. I have enjoyed two years of Masters Series tennis and Premier League football (I have even come to prefer using the term “football” over “soccer,” enjoying the verbal slight in favor of my preferred sport). Before moving to Thailand, I am sure that I had never watched an entire tennis match on TV. I have now progressed from learning how to keep score (which I am embarrassed to admit I did not know before moving here) to having my own list of favored athletes. My housemates and I even have nicknames for our most loved and hated tennis players, and I can explain the linguistic misunderstanding behind the etymology of love. I still wouldn’t call myself a fan of watching sports on TV (I would always rather play), and it’s fair to say that my recently acquired interest owes more to my desire to watch TV in my mother tongue than a true and lasting interest in the sports themselves. The Olympics, however, are an entirely different matter.
Who can resist the Olympics? There’s something for everyone: pageantry, underdogs, drug scandals, sappy back stories, conspiracy theories, unnecessary quantities of statistics, and the quest for world domination. On top of all that, there is one more essential ingredient that makes the Olympics palatable to the uninitiated masses: commentary. Herein lies the rub. None of my English language sports channels are covering the Olympics. I am stuck with CCTV, China Central Television. I am watching the same coverage as the nation of China, and I don’t understand a word of Mandarin. Without the commentary, it took about 3 hours of watching weightlifting before I began to grasp how one wins a medal. You think it’s just who can lift more weight? You, my friend, are sadly mistaken.
Although I didn’t anticipate the language barrier, I did assume that my 2008 Olympic experience would differ from previous years in other ways. I knew coverage of certain sports would be favored over others. I knew I would be watching a lot of badminton. I did not anticipate watching a lot of weightlifting. I have now watched enough of both of these two sports to last the rest of my life. Despite tuning in almost every day, I have not seen one swimming race. Not one. I also expected US athletes to have less screen time. I did not expect (nearly) none. The coverage of the US team walking into the stadium during the opening ceremonies was longer than the rest of the times I’ve seen US athletes on screen combined. Here is a guesstimate of the percentage of time I have spent watching athletes of various countries on TV.
China 97.5%
Brazil 25%
Japan, Korea, Belarus, Russia combined 2%
Nations other than those listed above .5 %
Yes, I realize that adds up to 125%, but that’s because I watched the entire Brazil/China Men’s football game. As hard as the camera men tried, they could not stop the Brazilian players from getting between the Chinese players and the camera (or the goal, for that matter). Should I have given China double points for the badminton match last night that was China (in red) vs. China (in yellow)?
Now I understand and expect a preference for the home team, but I kept asking myself, “Is our coverage really this biased? Do we literally exclude as much of the rest of the world as possible from the most international of international competitions?”
Attempting to watch the Men’s team gymnastics created such a combination of all of the above frustrations that Joe became irate. At first, we didn’t understand the scores. We knew a perfect 10 was no longer possible, and that a 16 was a good score. However, without the commentators explaining why certain moves were easy or difficult, or why you could practically fall and get more than a 16 while what looked like a perfect received a 15.2, we were lost as to what was going on. We also were not able to see more than four routines that were not by Chinese gymnasts. I think we saw 2 from Korea and 2 from the USA. We also saw a few members of the Japanese team when they were standing in front of team China. What I did see a lot of was the Chinese team sitting around, moving from station to station, changing from their shorts to their pants, chalking the parallel bars, etc. The final frustration came from a lack of statistics and updates. We always were informed when China was in the lead, but other than that, who knows what’s going on? For one brief moment about halfway through the competition, they put up a table that gave the current rankings: China 1st, USA 2nd, Korea 3rd. There were no more updates. When it was all over, we knew China had won, but we had no idea who got the other medals. We had to wait 25 minutes for the medal ceremony to see USA receive the bronze and Japan the silver. Japan?? What happened to Korea?? I went online and saw that they came in 5th. Germany came in 4th? I didn’t know they even had a team competing! What I wouldn’t give for a 7 minute fluff story about how the USA team lost their top two twin gymnasts and overcame unbelievable additional unknown obstacles to get their team medal, even if it is bronze!
Today I felt that my frustration was justified when I read this account about a journalist watching the exact same gymnastics event on CCTV. (“CCTV is like NBC on steroids … and growth hormone, and EPO, and albuterol.”) She too, noticed the lack of non-Chinese athletes. I’ve now about given up on watching the Olympics in favor of the online coverage. It’s not live action, but at least it’s in English and I’ll know if a country other than China wins a medal.
First of all, the one thing that I can reliably watch on television in English is sports. Of our ten or so English language channels, sports stations make up more than half. I have enjoyed two years of Masters Series tennis and Premier League football (I have even come to prefer using the term “football” over “soccer,” enjoying the verbal slight in favor of my preferred sport). Before moving to Thailand, I am sure that I had never watched an entire tennis match on TV. I have now progressed from learning how to keep score (which I am embarrassed to admit I did not know before moving here) to having my own list of favored athletes. My housemates and I even have nicknames for our most loved and hated tennis players, and I can explain the linguistic misunderstanding behind the etymology of love. I still wouldn’t call myself a fan of watching sports on TV (I would always rather play), and it’s fair to say that my recently acquired interest owes more to my desire to watch TV in my mother tongue than a true and lasting interest in the sports themselves. The Olympics, however, are an entirely different matter.
Who can resist the Olympics? There’s something for everyone: pageantry, underdogs, drug scandals, sappy back stories, conspiracy theories, unnecessary quantities of statistics, and the quest for world domination. On top of all that, there is one more essential ingredient that makes the Olympics palatable to the uninitiated masses: commentary. Herein lies the rub. None of my English language sports channels are covering the Olympics. I am stuck with CCTV, China Central Television. I am watching the same coverage as the nation of China, and I don’t understand a word of Mandarin. Without the commentary, it took about 3 hours of watching weightlifting before I began to grasp how one wins a medal. You think it’s just who can lift more weight? You, my friend, are sadly mistaken.
Although I didn’t anticipate the language barrier, I did assume that my 2008 Olympic experience would differ from previous years in other ways. I knew coverage of certain sports would be favored over others. I knew I would be watching a lot of badminton. I did not anticipate watching a lot of weightlifting. I have now watched enough of both of these two sports to last the rest of my life. Despite tuning in almost every day, I have not seen one swimming race. Not one. I also expected US athletes to have less screen time. I did not expect (nearly) none. The coverage of the US team walking into the stadium during the opening ceremonies was longer than the rest of the times I’ve seen US athletes on screen combined. Here is a guesstimate of the percentage of time I have spent watching athletes of various countries on TV.
China 97.5%
Brazil 25%
Japan, Korea, Belarus, Russia combined 2%
Nations other than those listed above .5 %
Yes, I realize that adds up to 125%, but that’s because I watched the entire Brazil/China Men’s football game. As hard as the camera men tried, they could not stop the Brazilian players from getting between the Chinese players and the camera (or the goal, for that matter). Should I have given China double points for the badminton match last night that was China (in red) vs. China (in yellow)?
Now I understand and expect a preference for the home team, but I kept asking myself, “Is our coverage really this biased? Do we literally exclude as much of the rest of the world as possible from the most international of international competitions?”
Attempting to watch the Men’s team gymnastics created such a combination of all of the above frustrations that Joe became irate. At first, we didn’t understand the scores. We knew a perfect 10 was no longer possible, and that a 16 was a good score. However, without the commentators explaining why certain moves were easy or difficult, or why you could practically fall and get more than a 16 while what looked like a perfect received a 15.2, we were lost as to what was going on. We also were not able to see more than four routines that were not by Chinese gymnasts. I think we saw 2 from Korea and 2 from the USA. We also saw a few members of the Japanese team when they were standing in front of team China. What I did see a lot of was the Chinese team sitting around, moving from station to station, changing from their shorts to their pants, chalking the parallel bars, etc. The final frustration came from a lack of statistics and updates. We always were informed when China was in the lead, but other than that, who knows what’s going on? For one brief moment about halfway through the competition, they put up a table that gave the current rankings: China 1st, USA 2nd, Korea 3rd. There were no more updates. When it was all over, we knew China had won, but we had no idea who got the other medals. We had to wait 25 minutes for the medal ceremony to see USA receive the bronze and Japan the silver. Japan?? What happened to Korea?? I went online and saw that they came in 5th. Germany came in 4th? I didn’t know they even had a team competing! What I wouldn’t give for a 7 minute fluff story about how the USA team lost their top two twin gymnasts and overcame unbelievable additional unknown obstacles to get their team medal, even if it is bronze!
Today I felt that my frustration was justified when I read this account about a journalist watching the exact same gymnastics event on CCTV. (“CCTV is like NBC on steroids … and growth hormone, and EPO, and albuterol.”) She too, noticed the lack of non-Chinese athletes. I’ve now about given up on watching the Olympics in favor of the online coverage. It’s not live action, but at least it’s in English and I’ll know if a country other than China wins a medal.
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