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Australia's only biathlon competitor Alexei Almoukov heads from the shooting range. AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Andrew Vaughan
As the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games are consigned to history, the Australian public’s brief fascination with winter sports comes to an end, relieving us of yet another free-to-air sports coverage disaster.
Just like Channel 7 managed during the Beijing Summer Olympics and recent Australian Opens, Channel 9’s Winter Olympic coverage became a major talking point that overshadowed the Games themselves.
Sadly, Belinda Noonan has been discussed as much as Torah Bright, Eddie McGuire talked about as much as Lydia Lassila.
It’s become a familiar tune for Aussie sports fans as free-to-air networks fail to adapt to the changing technologies, viewing habits and expectations from audiences who in turn have grown tired of the commercial networks’ apathy and excuses.
What’s remarkable about watching this trend unfold in recent times is how the commercial networks seem so oblivious to the errors of their ways.
The catalogue of errors began well before the Games when Channel 9 and Foxtel assembled their teams of commentators and presenters.
The cult of personality, or, to be more accurate, the cult of celebrity that infatuates the Australian media, particularly television, has increasingly wormed its way into sports coverage.
How else could we explain the presence of Mick Molloy, Eddie McGuire and Ruby Rose (famous for reasons I cannot fathom) as the faces of the Games!
When you get people like Molloy and McGuire commenting on something as foreign to them as figure skating, they resort to banality and, in their cases, having to resort to appalling homophobic comments.
The fact that such comments were made on air in this day and age is shameful.
In other cases, the commentators seemed amateurish.
James Brayshaw, for example, did more howling than actual commentating in the snowboarding and mogul events.
Too often the Aussie commentators showed a lack of knowledge in the sporting events they were commentating on, let alone the athletes competing.
As Ed Wyatt, best known as the former face of SBS’s Super Bowl coverage, blogged: “Whatever happened to actually learning the names of competitors and how to pronounce them properly? How many times do we have to hear about ‘the Slovak,’ ‘the Chinese,’ or ‘the Canadian’.”
The athletes do have names, which deserve to be broadcast.
Thankfully Channel 9 relied on local experts for the ice hockey rather than the likes of McGuire who, let’s remember, in an interview with ice hockey’s greatest Wayne Gretzky, asked what it felt like to put “the ball into the net?”
They should have done this for the majority of the events that they, frankly, knew nothing about.
We, as Aussies, like to think of ourselves as sporting doyens. But when events such as the Winter Olympics come along, where we are far from the pacesetters in events that are largely foreign to us, our Australian-centric view of the sporting world is exposed.
Rather than rise to the occasion, accept their deficiencies in these sports and attempt to learn and expand their knowledge of them, media organistaions are found lacking and fail to rise to the occasion.
The media, therefore, watch as outsiders, inevitably making incorrect judgments and resorting to assumptions and generalisations.
So we are increasingly told things like: the Australian Open tennis is suddenly boring, unbearable to watch and irrelevant because there isn’t a competitive Australian; Mark Webber must be crap because he hasn’t rattled off F1 titles; and Cadel Evans must be a choker ‘cause he can’t win the Tour de France.
If Australia is going to increase its funding to winter sports, as has been discussed, then we should start embracing and understanding the Winter Olympics so at the next Games we don’t have to put with such rubbish coverage.