In case you are wondering what I have been doing with my life, let's just say that I am now on a first name basis with Kris, Al, and Mary. If you don't know what that means, you clearly have not been glued to NBC with your every available second to watch people people jump, twist, twirl, skate, ski, and fall.
There are three types of sports announcers on NBC. (For those of you with special fancy cable who get to watch all the sports on the zillions of NBC affiliates, maybe you can add to my classification.)
1) The announcers for sports I watch exactly once every four years (I would usually call these irrelevant sports) who announce exactly once every four years. They call things like luge, skeleton, and bobsled. They never explain anything in a way that makes any sense.
Example: The two man bobsled is going down the track, looking exactly like the previous bobsled. The split time is about seven hundredths of a second slower and they make comments like "they were too smooth in that turn" without explaining what "too smooth" means. The problem is that the runs go by so quickly, they can't explain what happened on the last one before the next one appears. I don't know. I never feel more educated after watching.
2) The announcers for sports I would watch more frequently if they were ever on (ski jump, biathlon) who have a bit more experience and could be good if given the opportunity by being able to announce more frequently.
Example: The announcers for the men's biathlon had some awesome conditions to explain - it snowed, rained, and sunned in the span of about thirty minutes. They desperately tried to explain to the viewing audience what effect the changing conditions would have on the competitors, which was interesting, but they did this at the expense of some of the basics of shooting and skiing that I was hoping they'd explain.
3) The actual, we do this for a living announcers who are good at explaining everything, but know when to shut up and let us just watch. These are the announcers who do events like snowbocross and ice skating. They make us think that dumb events (ice dancing anyone?) are judged on important criteria and we can start seeing what makes one performance different from another.
And there you have it. Don't watch bobsled if you want to learn anything, but you can learn that patterns and how close hips are together are important in ice dancing. It's my life.
In about a week and a half, I'll get back to posting more regularly about non-Olympic related items.
I would say there's a small subsection to #3, which are the we do/did this for a living announcers and DO NOT FORGET IT! They're the ones that begin every sentence with "Well, when *I* was in..." or "When I had to do..." (Jeremy Roenick, I'm looking at you.) They can provide some really helpful insight to the event that outsiders might not know, but they can't seem to forget that they're no longer in the sport and not everything relates to them. Thankfully, the population of them is small, and the rest of the announcers in that category are really quite good!
ReplyDelete