THE INSIDE STORY Olympics, Brought to You By NBC

Author: David Lindholm

The suspense is building. How do we know? Well, Bob Costas tells us that the suspense is building. The National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) is leading up to the final of a competition by running a few human interest stories, interviews and plenty of commercials. It's sports as the execs at NBC love it: pre-packaged, manipulated and sent to viewers, tugging on their heartstrings, with a bare minimum of content. It's also sports in its least pure form.

The Canadians have a definite advantage on the Americans in this respect. For years, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has shown events in their entirety and live (who knew it was possible!). The off-camera personalities provide quick filler as a supplement to the events, instead of NBC's policy of breaking up the monotony of their reporters' endless, droning stories by showing a small part of an actual Olympic event.

Earlier today, I watched the United States' women's hockey team's game against Russia on CBC. I simply watched the red-hot team take another victory, without listening to any human interest stories (this skier has recovered from cancer, a terrible childhood, a dog bite, two bad dreams and the death of a friend's uncle's ex-girlfriend's cousin! And he's expected to finish around 50th in the competition!) and no commercials during the action.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if NBC is behind the whole pairs figure-skating "incident." Haven't heard? Well, Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier lost the gold medal to Russians Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze despite skating, to all accounts, a better run. The International Skating Union is now going to probe the judges of the event, but I think something bigger is afoot.

Here's the plan: since Russia has won every gold medal in the event since 1964, NBC is making sure (with illegal monetary compensation to the judges, if you know what I mean) that nobody but Russians win until the USA has a pair capable of winning the gold. Then they'll get their tape-delay crap machine out, add in a few hours of stories on the skaters, NBC will show the Russians skate, then the Americans and play very dramatic music as the judges' marks are displayed.

Of course what will follow (and it will happen this year too) is endless post-event recaps, where more dramatic music is played as we go over some American's "heroic" victory, showing the athlete clinching her fists, arms raised to the sky, tears pouring out of her eyes, with the American flag draped on her back (don't forget slow-motion). Some of us will cry upon viewing this, yes, but most of us will throw up, which seems to happen quite often while watching NBC.