Winter Olympics in a Sunburnt Land

    As the final wrap-ups and analyses are made of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, while the last inflatable beaver is being deflated, during this last push to finally get people out of the ice rink where Canada won the men's hockey gold medal, let me offer a few observations of my own from a vantage point below the equator.

   It's true-- Australia and the Winter Olympics  are an odd mix.  For starters, the Games occur in the dead of summer.  The incongruity of watching snowy athletics while melting in triple digit heat is lost on no one. Second, snow-based sports only occur in a small area of New South Wales (the eastern state that contains Sydney) euphemistically called the Australian Alps.  Yeah.   So the majority of the native Aussie athletes tend to enjoin the "freestyle" sports. You know, the kind where you flip into the air and do some kind of acrobatic twisting before landing on your skis/board/plank/butt.  One doesn't need long winters to practice jumping and gymnastics. The imported athletes pick up the other sports.

   Total medal count from 20 female and 20 male competitors: 3. Two golds and one silver. Two freestyle females and one transplanted Canadian guy skiing the moguls.  Channel 9 replayed the glory and re-interviewed the gals in an endless loop. Occasionally, they replayed the fading glory of their athlete-turned-commentators, but good looking faces squealing and woo, woo, woo whooping it up make good TV.  This posed a problem with the Canadian guy, Dale Beggs-Smith.  Dale abdicated from the Canadian team early on because their training system interfered with his "internet business".   Dale's "internet business" has made him quite wealthy so he can train in his own time and can afford not to smile.  He is all business on the hill as he is at the keyboard.  He barely cracked a grin when winning the silver, didn't mug for the camera when being interviewed shortly thereafter, hardly looked excited on the podium.  Telegenic he is not.  And he didn't give  interviews to media organizations outside  of Australia.  The sports show at my radio station figured out why he keeps such a low profile:  Dale has gotten rich creating spam on the internet--one very good reason for staying below the radar.

    Channel 9's coverage of the Games was a bit of a "dog's breakfast".  They also had the broadcast rights to the Cricket- which is an all day sport, not  just a couple of hours.  Western Australia gets a lot of its "live" programming tape delayed from the east coast, so much of our Olympic coverage looked like this: delayed morning chat show until 9 am, a couple of hours of Olympic action (delayed, not live), Cricket, evening news, Cricket, sitcom, and at 10:30pm a round-up of the day's Olympic action.  They frequently tapped into the BBC's or VOC's play by play announcers- a smart move when dealing with sports one knows nothing about.  Channel 9's morning anchor did a competent job and one of their announcers, Phil Liggett, does a very good job describing what he sees without overreaching his knowledge of the sport.  Their evening anchor is just plain shocking. Eddie McGuire is liked for his background story, florid face and constant smile.  A real mate at the pub type...with the same mistaken image for having an opinion that counts. The slights to people (and apologies the next day) were a fairly regular occurrence. Truly an amateur interviewer (long wind ups to four or five entirely unrelated questions in one hit; questions a kindergartner would ask) he wasn't always accurate.  When interviewing ice hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, he talked about the "ball going into the net".  Luckily, it was in the middle of one of his long spew of questions, so either Gretzky didn't notice or graciously chose to ignore it as he picked one of the questions to answer.

   Kevin made an observation at the end of it all. It seemed to him that, especially during the opening and closing ceremonies, the hosts were more inclined to say "We are not the U.S." rather than "We are Canada."  My dear northern neighbors: your slip is showing.


   Yet for all this, I hung on as much as possible to the TV coverage.  There is something so very normal about snow in February, sports played on ice skates, cross country skiers with rifles strapped to their backs, toques  and giant inflatable beavers & moose.  Same time next year?