The games in Beijing are drawing to a close, and I hardly saw anything I really wanted to see. The 12 hour time difference caused events to begin overnight for most of the US. This meant that live coverage was limited to whatever was on the schedule between eight and eleven in the morning Beijing time. It didn’t work for me.
I’d rather have seen equestrian and gymnastics on tape in prime time than the endless tedium of volleyball, diving or weightlifting. Sure there will be fans out there who were thrilled to see these before bedtime, and still more people who could watch overnight or record hours of mistimed events to watch later, but the rest of us were cheated by the choices made at NBC and its kindred networks’ airing choices. Maybe there will be a difference in another four years.
I have a question about gymnastics: why can’t computers score vaults and other events better than human judges? Computers are used frequently to measure the human body in action, so why not outfit the gymnasts with the same type of equipment and have a computer program record the best renditions of each activity to measure the Olympic athletes’ performances against the “ideal?” It would alleviate the need to pull judges from the representative countries out of the scoring pool (which leaves sometimes less efficient judges to score the events).
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