Spent some time on Friday watching the Parade of Nations. This time around, NBC didn’t seem to cut anybody out, so it was quite long, and I didn’t sit through it all. Even so, it’s the part of the Olympics I usually get around to watching. Everything else, not so much.
As usual, I’m pulling for Togo in the Games. Along with Lesotho, with their wonderful hats, and other small teams, such as Tuvalu, Bhutan, Chad, Dominica, and Equatorial Guinea, just to name a few. I’m sure the U.S. athletes will do well, and I wish them well, but any fool can get behind a large delegation.
But what about Tuvalu? Good old Tuvalu, which has sent exactly one athlete to the Games this time around, former footballer Etimoni (Reme) Timuani, who will be in the 100 m sprint. This is the third Olympics for the Pacific nation, which as yet has won no medals. Hope they win something while their country is still above sea level.
As for Togo, it’s sent five athletes to seek Olympic glory and swat mosquitoes in Rio: a couple of sprinters, a couple of swimmers, and a competitor in women’s single sculls. Does NBC pay any attention to single sculls? I suspect not so much. Why bother with someone like Gevvie Stone (who’s on Team USA just as much as a swimmer or gymnast) when you can spend hours talking about Michael Phelps?
At least NBC’s coverage of the Parade of Nations seemed to a little less annoying this year than before. The announcers’ subtext wasn’t quite so, “Golly, I don’t know where that country is! Do you? It’s so little, it’s hard to believe it’s a country. Go Team USA!”
Naturally, unheralded writers at NBC did their research, so that the announcers could tell heartwarming stores about some of the athletes. “That’s right, his family was so poor they couldn’t afford oxygen when he was growing up in such-and-such TPLAC. But he had a dream, and he began training by running up and down burning trash dumps without shoes.”
No doubt they told true stories, and I’m glad that some of the participants in the Games were able to overcome awful conditions to get there, especially the Refugee Olympic Team, which is a new thing this Olympiad. I don’t mock them. NBC, on the other hand, deserves to be mocked for the dumbed down coverage the network is sure to provide to American audiences. Am I merely being nostalgic in remember that ABC knew better how to cover the Olympics? I don’t think so. The network had better ideas about international sports coverage.