2024 Olympics

The Olympics have come and gone. In this case, I'm talking about the games, not the mountain range. My thoughts about these games haven't changed too much, but there are definitely improvements since I last vented.

I am a morning person living in the Pacific time zone. On the surface, that might sound like I could get up and watch these games in the morning. In reality, I frequently have plans in the morning. When I go for walks, when do you think that happens?

In the past, I typically watched CBC because they gave us live coverage compared to NBC's three-hour delays of East-coast feeds. Ultimately, I decided not to even try to watch this form of coverage. Although I could have watched some events live, I took a very different approach to watching this year. I stuck to replays that Comcast made available through Peacock.

There are two enormous improvements that we have seen that have been made to Olympic coverage, streaming services and the world feed. Peacock has given me a lot more flexibility to watch what I want to watch. Although bias is unavoidable, the world feed got rid of the over-the-top approach to shove nationalism down our throats.

Not everything I watched qualified as the world feed. You can tell that components of the world feed remain intact, but NBC-ified coverage is still garbage. In all honesty, I wish Comcast would let us select the world feed when they develop their NBC-ified version. To make matters worse, one of the replays I was going to watch was covered by Universo. If I live in a country that primarily speaks English watching on a streaming service that has been set up for English, I should at least have the option to watch in English.

As for the games themselves, they came off as typical. I like being able to watch sports that are not normally available, but I don't like that doing everything all at once effectively means they are competing with each other. I like the idea of an international event rather than a league controlled by the United States, but I would prefer to leave the nationalism out of it.

This goes to something I keep saying about sports. I can enjoy watching sports, but I don't like how sports are run. This is obvious if you have paid attention to my comments about the NHL. I will watch games, but I have openly stated that I wouldn't mind if the league folded. What ends up happening with sports is that I try to find the best opportunities to watch sports within context of a model that I don't like.

Since I'm writing about my views on sports, perhaps I should say what I would actually like to see. The biggest sports events in the world should be global, not national. These events should showcase the best athletes, not countries. I am open to coordination between different sports, but that should be to reduce problems with sports competing with each other rather than finding a way to run a lot of sports all at once. For neutral purposes, I don't want teams connected to cities, but I don't want to restrict the opportunity to watch the best in the world to one city for every sport every four years. I want more variety in sports viewing opportunities than we get from our sports leagues. Actually, I also want more variety than the Olympics have to offer.