The Winter Olympics
I watched some Olympicness last night. A few things:
Ice dancing? No. I mean, it’s not like I don’t understand the athleticism it takes to pull that junk off (ON SKATES, no less) but I just honestly can’t get into something that meshes mostly horrible music with some of the worst costume design this side of the Fringe Festival.
That being said, Freestyle Aerials? YES.
Moving on… Bode Miller. Oops. How’s that whole “I don’t care what anybody thinks about me” swagger working out for you? It must suck to be Nike right now (not really, they are, after all, Nike but still…). They invested most of their Olympic marketing into Bode and he’s (thus far) gone 0-4 in the medal hunt. Granted, you can’t really predict an athlete’s performance, but that has to sting a little. Semi-related note: their whole TV campaign drives people to this Join Bode site, and so my expectations were pretty high for a stellar piece of multi-media genius. I got to the office this morning and checked it out and wondered if they want me to join Bode in being on a website that never really takes me anywhere. It’s not badly done, it’s just nothing special… mystery-meat style navigation in weird Flash environments… very reminiscent of a lot of recent web work. (As nearly as I can tell, the site was built by opus:creative under direction from
Overall, I was just a little underwhelmed by NBC’s Olympic coverage. It feels lacking in the weight and splendor and BIGNESS that the Olympics should have. Honestly, we’re talking about watching people who do what they do better than ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD and having one sportscaster in a sparse studio acting all chatty JUST DOESN’T CUT IT. Semi-related note: compare NBC’s boring, clunky, slow Olympic site to the clean, crisp, well-executed USA Networks Olympic site.
Tonight… Women’s Figure Skating. No thank you.