NBC Provides Delay of the Land

With an 18-hour delay, perhaps the Olympic broadcasts should be shown on ESPN Classic instead of NBC.

RON YUKELSON

Santa Monica

*

I really like NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. It’s a lot like “Survivor.” They taped the events a few months ago and blended them into an entertaining package along with interviews, profiles and commercials.

ROB OSBORNE

Redondo Beach

*

After struggling through the first night of Olympic coverage, I have to say the most-abused phrase is “When we return . . . “

PETER McGOWAN

Long Beach

*

Why should anyone be surprised by NBC’s coverage of the Olympics? They do such a wonderful job with all of their other sporting events. Let’s see, they lost football to CBS, baseball to Fox and ESPN, and their basketball coverage is nothing to write home about. They spend $750 million for broadcast rights and offer up $5 worth of coverage.

I guess the only thing that could possibly make this coverage worse is if NBC decided to use Marv Albert. Oh wait, they already are. And there’s always Notre Dame football.

Way to go, NBC. You make Americans proud.

MIKE McFATRIDGE

South Pasadena

*

I hope that there are others in Los Angeles and around the country who find the arrangement between the IOC and NBC appalling. Here is arguably the greatest sporting event in the world and the IOC has allowed NBC to in effect, buy it outright. In turn, NBC packages and presents the competition solely to maximize viewership and ad revenues. I understand that is what a television network does, but the extent of it and the blatant disregard for traditional sports fans is beyond belief.

BILLY SOTTILE

Lancaster

*

NBC’s refusal to broadcast live the Olympic Games and treat them merely as prime-time entertainment misses the whole point of watching the finest athletes in the world compete. What an enormous disappointment!

BILL DUBAY

Costa Mesa

*

In as much as NBC has deprived us of the excitement of live sports coverage, we are turning it to our convenience. We will tape the shows, then view them when we wish, fast-forwarding through commercials and non-sports fluff.

GEORGE McDONALD

Long Beach

*

Dick Ebersol said last week the CBC can show the Olympics live at 2 a.m., because they paid only $20 million for the rights and they do not have hundreds of millions of dollars to make up in advertising revenue.

Hell, Dick, you were the idiot who was dumb enough to pay that much.

When bidding for the Olympic television coverage comes up again, would it be unpatriotic if I rooted for another network from another country?

MARK LOPEZ

Lynwood

*

Alan Abrahamson’s behind-the-scenes story [Sept. 19] was good, but he failed to pick up what television viewers did on the NBC tape of the 200-meter freestyle.

NBC aired an unbelievable on-camera interview of Dutch winner Pieter van den Hoogenband, with the interviewer saying words to the effect: “This was an unexpected upset!” And Van Den Hoogenband reacted correctly and coolly at the comment: ‘Upset!?”

What a left-handed way to congratulate a gold medal winner, NBC.

ELINOR LYNCH

Palm Desert

*

NBC’s coverage of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games is the worst. They have once again managed to dilute the coverage to the point where only soap opera addicts would find any enjoyment in watching. This belief that the story behind the athletes is what the Olympics are about is so off base that the IOC should strip NBC of the rights to broadcast Olympic sporting events to the American people.

The commercial breaks are bad enough, but I realize the network needs to try to recover some of the money that was invested to procure the TV rights. But the soap opera stories of the athletes have taken the greatest sporting event the world has and reduced it to one long “Entertainment Tonight” broadcast.

Really, after spending all that money to get the rights, more is spent producing so-called human interest stories. Wouldn’t it save money to just show the events? I don’t need a 15-minute story on how tragic little Suzie overcame cancer and a car accident only to see her parents divorce and leave her to be raised by the homeless in a cardboard box. Please, that’s what the color commentators are for. The athletes and the events, that’s the Olympics, not the stories behind the athletes.

And we don’t want to see only winning Americans perform. We want to see all the athletes.

JOHN CALLANAN

Redlands

*

It isn’t only the delays that are turning viewers away from NBC’s Olympics--it’s the almost complete lack of sports coverage.

Here’s my stopwatch tally of a typical hour: commercials, 17 minutes 2 seconds; commentators, interviews, life stories, 26 minutes 30 seconds; actual sports events, 16 minutes 28 seconds.

So if athletic competition is what you want to see, three-fourths of every NBC hour is a total waste of time. Where is the CNN of sports that would let us actually watch the games?

JEAN MOORE

Los Angeles

*

Oh, Mike Penner, have you never covered an Olympics before? Your sarcastic review of what was a terrific opening ceremony made me laugh . . . and cringe. It is the nature of the beast to be lengthy.

Embarrassing? Were you at L.A. in 1984? I was working in the UK at the time, and watched the BBC’s excellent, uninterrupted, non-blathering coverage. One hundred grand pianos? Pioneers settling the U.S. from west to east? Jet-set space technology? Celebrities? That was embarrassing.

B.J. MILLER

Playa del Rey

*

As for the synchronized lawn mowing: It was a joke, a send-up of, among other things, La La Land’s 1984 Olympic grand pianos. No wonder most Australians believe that their trans-Pacific neighbors had their “irony bypass” at birth.

RICHARD MOORE

Melbourne, Australia

*

God forbid terrorists kidnap a country’s delegation of athletes or someone sets off a bomb in the Olympic Village, but I bet NBC would still cover it via tape delay.

TOM SCARPELLI

Northridge