We were just told that the women's 1500 meter short track event would be aired at midnight, on more than two hours tape delay. Clearly this means that we won't get to see all the heats, and there probably will be some BS human interest story or unfunny humor piece in the middle anyway.
This comes on the heels of last night's decision to show 20 minutes of tape delayed women's skeleton rather than any decent coverage of the gold medal rounds. That's 20 minutes of women's skeleton coverage in 4 years. Not only is this one of the most challenging and exciting sports at the Games, but it also featured a strong American medal contender in Noelle Pikus-Pace.All this is despite the fact that NBC has four channels available to show the Games. Not once in the Olympics are four medal rounds going on. Clearly at a minimum, decent coverage would involve showing every medal round live. Basically the only time we get to see a women's sport live is when there's an attractive American athlete competing. And we're missing about 85% of those instances as well.
And of course we don't get to see women's ski jumping, women's Nordic combined, women's doubles luge, and so on, because the IOC favors men's sports. Even in the sports that have supposedly been equalized like hockey, there are fewer women's teams and fewer female athletes.The lack of coverage of women's sports is one of the rare things that's disappointing to both feminists and guys who like to see hot babes. More than half of the American audience falls into one of those categories.
One of the main points of the Olympics is to give international exposure to athletes and sports that we don't see that often. NBC has miserably failed in that mission, with the inevitable result being that fewer girls are getting interested in winter sports, leading to weaker USA teams in the future. Bravo.
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