NBC: 1, Olympic Spirit: 0

The Vancouver Olympics have officially ended, closing out with an unfortunate defeat of team USA in men’s hockey. This isn’t all too entertaining in its own right, but I was inspired to write about the Olympics after reading a pretty belligerent post I wrote four years ago about Bode Miller.

Living in Dublin during the Games has completely changed my perspective on the affair. I say this not because I watched them and was disappointed, but rather because I could not watch them and was disappointed.

During the entirety of the 2010 Winter Games, I think I watched less than one hour. I caught about five to ten minutes of slalom skiing at a bar one night by accident and I watched period two of the USA vs. Canada game in between doing homework. The only reason I was able to watch the hockey is because my friend’s parents (he/she will remain nameless for fear of intellectual property infringement by NBC/IOC) provided a live feed of their living room TV via Skype.

I can safely say that the degree to which NBC locked down the footage was despicable. Probably the only event I really wanted to watch was Snowboarding Half-Pipe, if only because the US/Australian girls are awesome and Shaun White is a legend. In fact, Shaun White became even more of a legend when he became the first athlete to complete a double mctwist 1260 on his gold medal victory run. Or so I hear. I haven’t seen the run yet – or any of the 2010 Vancouver snowboarding because NBC/IOC are being a copyright-Nazis on every possible video website on the Internet.

Shaun White and his tomato-colored mane getting some serious air off of the pipe.

I get it. NBC is in this for a big contract. They paid a lot of money to get exclusive rights. I’m a business student, not an idiot. But that’s just it – it’s all about the networks and has been for the last 10 years. Events are scheduled during American prime-time TV, not because we have more Olympic pride, but because it’s about advertising. It’s not “Olympic pride”, it’s manufactured pride. And if it isn’t, tell me why I can’t even watch one of my favorite athletes’ gold medal winning run just because I’m not in the USA.

I’ve been living for two months among friends from all over Europe. During the Winter Olympics, I think I heard them mentioned three times, and only one of those was by a non-American. There are Austrian, German, and French people here – none of whom mentioned the games once (all countries among the top 10 in the medal count).

Hating on the Olympics is not my intent here. I love having them on constantly for two weeks straight, watching the snowboarding, skiing, bobsledding, hockey… but the oversaturation of advertising and blatant commercialism has all but ruined this legendary affair. It’s no longer about the “Miracle on Ice”, it’s about whether Shaun White will endorse Campbell’s soup (his former nickname was “the flying tomato”).

In this age of information, NBC should not be putting up content walls and forbidding people in countries outside the US from watching clips of final events. They either need to make it open, or put it on YouTube under an official NBC Olympics banner. It’s unacceptable and frankly unfair to do anything less.