A few more...

observations about the Winter Olympics, in particular NBC's coverage of it, before the whole thing retreats from our memories.

° Most of my most ardent feelings come from figure skating, because that's the winter sport I've followed the most closely. My brother and I used to watch it with our mother, and now I watch with my wife. When I refer to the broadcast team of Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic as a "train wreck," I do so based on some decades of watching figure skating.

I don't have the same points of reference for other winter sports. I really enjoy the biathlon because of its juxtaposition of cross-country skiing (a sport which, as a marathon runner, I can relate to) and shooting (which I can't relate to at all). To me it's like running as hard as I can for 15 minutes, then stopping to thread five needles as fast as possible, then running some more. (I also have to admit to a fondness for sports that are abstracted out of real things. One can see where the biathlon simulates something a soldier might have to do. Similarly, I have a great affection for modern pentathlon. Until figure skaters can shoot lasers out of their sequins, it's difficult to find the real activity there.)

But I don't "get" biathlon well enough to determine whether NBC's Chad Salmela is doing a good job. There's no obvious screeching about the mundane, no crying, and a reasonable amount of information (most of it about ski wax), so I'd guess he's doing OK. But I'm not really sure.

With skating, however, I know enough to know that we're being poorly served by the current analysts. Bezic and Hamilton offer almost nothing in the way of insight; it's just their emotions spilling out the airwaves, and I'm honestly not very interested in how they feel about things. As I wrote before, I want either information to help me understand the event better, or a sense of what it is to be there experiencing it for myself. I get neither from the screaming and the crying and the rampant self-indulgence.

The saddest thing is that NBC has better people on staff. Tom Hammond, a generally competent play-by-play guy in many sports, sinks to the level of his co-commentators. He could easily be replaced by Andrea Joyce (who's done a fine understated job hosting the Grand Prix events televised on NBC's Universal Sports) or Terry Gannon (who did figure skating for 14 years on ABC, understands the sport, and knows a lot of the players).

The Universal Sports coverage has been illuminating, as we have heard Joyce working with a few different color commentators, each of whom has surpassed Bezic or Hamilton. I only caught Michael Weiss once, but he, while unpolished, did a nice job and shows real potential. Paul Wylie gives a nice analytical look at what's going on. And Peter Carruthers, Joyce's most frequent partner, has become quite good. (Just a few years ago, he wasn't particularly good at all, talking way too much about a skater's "lack of concentration," but he's rounded into someone who can emphasize the important aspects of a routine without hyperbole or Hamilton-esque screaming.) Any of them would be better choices than Bezic/Hamilton.

º A lot has been made about the new skating scoring system. Very simply, they replaced a system in which each judge gave a mark for technical execution and another for artistry, with a system in which each element (jump, spin, step sequence) gets a value, then is judged as +3 to -3, and includes five presentation areas for which scores are given a 0 to 10 ranking. There are various weights given, the numbers are added together, and the score rolls out. (A more detailed treatment can be found here.)

[A word about the usual description of the system. It's often termed "mathematically complex." It's not. The system is based on multiplication and addition, and any reasonably smart 4th-grader could handle its complexity. What's complex is how the numbers are arrived at, and the motivation behind the calculations.]

What's odd is that they took a system which was faulted for a lack of accountability and transparency and replaced it with a system that has almost none of either. The scores that are used are not identified by judge, and the numbers they put down seem arbitrary.

The system does, however, replace two numbers per judge with a whole lot of numbers per judge, and demonstrates what I like to call the "false certainty of more data." Anyone who has seen a work performance evaluation system in which there are weights and measurements and defined criteria, all of which are used to come up with one number that reflects an employee's performance for the year, knows what I'm talking about. Each skater ends up with a whole bunch of numbers to look at, but that specificity doesn't imply greater accuracy. Any judge can still show systematic bias; instead of being clear ("The Russian judge only gave 5.2?"), that bias is buried under a mass of GOEs and base values and factors, but it can still easily be there.

º There was a lot made about the "world record" performance of Kim Yu-Na in winning the ladies' gold medal. Unfortunately, the code of points changes each year, the required elements change, and so forth. World records, national records, personal bests, all are meaningless within a system that revamps its rules each year. It's as if high jump records were kept, but the length of an inch changed each year. The records would be irrelevant, just as they are today in figure skating.

º Also in figure skating - there were some comments on the under-rotation of jumps, especially when it turned out that US hopeful Rachael Flatt had been marked down twice in her long program for failure to complete her triple flip. Bezic and Hamilton were indignant, arguing that the judges were "tough" on Flatt (indignation which seemed to come mostly from their inability to see it).

Here's the rule: if, upon slow-motion review, it is decided that the skater was more than a quarter-turn away from completing a revolution, the skater gets credit for the next smaller jump (a triple loop becomes a double loop, for example). The points are correspondingly less, so the skater will not score as high.

This debate is ludicrous. My feeling is that there shouldn't even be a quarter-turn leeway. If you complete three revolutions (not 2-3/4), you've done a triple. Anything less, it's a double. It's the only way figure skating can be considered a sport, not a dance on ice. There's no "almost" clause in any other real sport.

º Listening to NBC's coverage, one would think there was a new nation called "North America." Especially as the first week full of United States success gave way to a second week dominated by Canadian gold, there seemed to be a push to appropriate Canada's victories as, somehow, ours. This was particularly true in the ice dancing final, as a lot was made of the "first gold medal in ice dance earned by a North American team."

It may be noteworthy that Russia lost what was once a lock for a gold medal (only two exceptions, 1984 and 2002, versus 7 golds for various incarnations of Russia), but it isn't clear that "North America" has finally found the magic. The gold and silver medal-winning teams were coached by skaters who came up in the Soviet system, so it's not as if we've found some kind of capitalist magic. It hardly constituted a "Miracle on Ice."

And it isn't clear at all that, NBC notwithstanding, we in the 50 states should take a huge amount of pride in the victories of a non-entity called "North America."

º In general, I think that many of the problems NBC has in covering the Games is their omnipresent hope of finding a transcendent moment. We're supposed to believe that these athletes come to the Olympics and do the impossible (and NBC's there to capture it for us). Michael Phelps wins 8 gold medals in swimming and, despite the essentially repetitive nature of what he's doing, is instantly touted as the greatest Olympian of all time. Usain Bolt sets sprinting world records - because he happens to do it at the Olympics, he's an instant immortal.

In most cases, however, success comes as a result of long hours of mastering skills. Evan Lysacek wins an Olympic gold not by transcending human performance, but by strategically simplifying his program (by omitting an attempt at a quad jump) and executing it in a way he has hundreds of times before. You can respect his ability to perform under the exaggerated pressure of an Olympics, but you can't argue that he's doing something unprecedented. The same is true of pretty much every sport. Biathlon is impressive, but success is the result of untold hours of hard training and genetic fortune, not in willing one's self to ski faster and shoot better simply because it's the Olympics.

This is where commentators get themselves into trouble. Scott Hamilton (yes, him again) is fond of talking about "muscle memory," in which a skater does something almost automatically because they've trained the move again and again in practice. But, if that's true, then what accounts for Scotty's ecstasy at the landing of a "TRIPLE LUTZ...TRIPLE TOOOOE! Ohhhhhhh!" combination? These athletes do that every day, it just isn't that amazing.

Which brings us to Joannie Rochette (whose case I've already commented on). Her mother passed away two days before Joannie was to start competing, and NBC treated it like the most remarkable thing possible. How can she possibly skate? How can she go out there?

Here's how. She's done these routines many times. She's jumping and spinning using her "muscle memory," so her performance does not depend on being in the right frame of mind. If anything, her two routines constituted seven minutes in which she didn't have to think about her mother. It's NBC which needs to portray her performances as impossible.

I don't mean to minimize Joannie's pain. I lost my mother a few years ago; while we had an oft-contentious relationship, the pain I felt was still real. And now Joannie has to go through that, and, despite its being something most of us have to deal with eventually, I wish she didn't.

But we shouldn't ignore the context. Had she dropped out of the Olympics, no one would have blamed her, but NBC would at best have treated it as a footnote and moved on. Joannie would not have received thousands of texts and messages of support, she would not have become the icon of the Olympic spirit (and, of course, not been overscored in her long program). I'd suggest we take a moment and consider the kind of coverage an Estonian biathlete would have received in the same circumstance: pretty much none.

NBC has decided that the Olympic Games needs these kinds of over-arching narratives, these personal dramas writ large, and, as long as they arise in certain sports and from certain countries (how much attention did Petra Majdic receive for winning a bronze in the cross-country sprint immediately after falling and breaking four ribs and puncturing a lung?), they'll get the full focus of the network. And maybe they're right, maybe they do need the Tonya-Nancy kind of stuff to sustain interest as they grub for ratings.

But, occasionally, I find it kind of wretched, that we can't just be left to appreciate the effort and the training and the performance, that everything has to be augmented by heaping servings of bathos. Because it's a pretty fine line between admiring the pluck of a Joannie Rochette and shamelessly using her heartbreak to pull in the Nielsens.

NBC's lost weekend

I have commented before on what a big fan of the Olympics I am (I'm sure I wrote a few posts about it in August of 2008). The Winter Games are no exception, and I watch pretty much every minute that I can. That watching is, of course, all on the big network, as I don't have cable TV, but one certainly gets one's fill from the flagship.

And the coverage was pretty much what we've come to expect. I'll probably have a post or two over the next few days about specific quibbles, but there really were no surprises. The pre-selected stars (Vonn! Ohno! White! Lysacek!) were given far more than their share of attention, and the network left some time to accommodate the stories that actually grew out of the events (Mancuso! Miller! That big bobsled guy!). Naturally, these were all Americans, as someone needs to be really special in a marquee sport to be noticed if they aren't from the 50 states (Kim Yuna! Joannie Rochette! Alexandre Bilodeau!). [Note: it really helps if they are from or train in Canada.]

This is all pretty standard stuff. What I don't understand is the series of odd decisions NBC made in their final weekend coverage. I could chalk some of it up to having to give 3 hours to a hockey game that they had not anticipated (do we really think they would have given most of Sunday afternoon to the Czech Republic vs. Finland?).

The problems actually started Thursday night in the coverage of the ladies' figure skating final. This is one of the major events of the Games, there's a massive amount of hype, and NBC gave it surprisingly short shrift. They showed a total of 9 programs, and, other than the final group of six, made curious choices as to who they showed. We "got" to see Tugba Karademir, who finished last (I wonder why NBC finds her so compelling, as they featured her four years ago), Cheltzie Lee, who finished 20th (and we saw her short program as well), and Elene Gedevanshvili, who finished 14th. Why they picked these three is beyond me.

[By the way, who finished 4th in the free skate? Laura Lepisto of Finland, who jumped from 10th after the short to 6th overall. As far as I can tell, she was never mentioned once, and was omitted from the graphic showing the final scores - we saw 1 through 5, then 7th.]

On Saturday night, NBC showed six programs in the figure skating exhibition gala. I personally don't care too much for that, but I would think it a big draw for the audience, and NBC kind of threw it away. Of course, if you had cable, you could have risen at 5:30 AM (Central Time) on Sunday and watched it on MSNBC, but I still don't grasp the rationale.

Then, Sunday afternoon, they showed almost every minute of the Men's 50K cross-country race. I like endurance athletics; had I grown up in a place with recreational skiing, I'd probably be out there myself. But watching it was not all that interesting; NBC could have cut it by about half, had a perfectly exciting event to show, and left time for other things.

Finally, there was the bizarre decision to cut abruptly from the Closing Ceremonies to Jerry Seinfeld's new show. There was almost no warning before Bob Costas told us to come back in an hour. As I get older, I find the Closing Ceremonies to be less interesting - I mean, Nickelback? Avril Lavigne? - it's like watching video of a party to which I wasn't invited. Nevertheless, it seemed like an odd choice to move so quickly from one to the other.

What a shame NBC had to end that way.

There is an "I" in Olympics

“What a gift she's given us.” - Sandra Bezic, NBC, 2/23/2010

Joannie Rochette's story is truly sad. She comes to Vancouver as a potential medalist in the ladies' figure skating event, in an Olympics held in her home country. And her mother arrives to see her skate, then passes away before the competition begins. The juxtaposition of what should be the greatest moment in this athlete's life with one of the greatest personal tragedies one can endure makes for an almost unbearable poignancy.

Rochette chooses to skate, and, in last night's short program, skates very well and ends up scoring enough points to put her in third place at this point.

As she comes off the ice, Sandra Bezic, one of NBC's skating experts, utters the quote above. I'm willing to cut her some slack, in that stupid things can be said in the excitement of the moment, but later, during the post-competition wrap-up, she essentially repeats herself.

I could spend some time unpacking this quote, but, if you can't see the fatuousness of it, no amount of explaining is going to help. To suggest that Rochette skated for us, rather than for herself, or her father (misidentified by NBC, corrected only far after they had milked the pathos out of it), or for the memory of the mother who had supported her through her quest for a dream, strikes me as amazingly inappropriate.

But I'm not surprised.

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There are, I think, two schools of thought as to how sports commentary should work. There are those who believe that the role of the analyst is to, well, analyze and explain and teach. The audience should gain insight into how these accomplishments are done, into what distinctions are made by judges, into what separates mediocre from good from excellent. The analyst, who was a practitioner or teacher or both (Bezic herself was an excellent pairs skater with her brother, then became a top choreographer), can lead us through even unfamiliar sports and, while not necessarily deluging us with minutiae, lead us into a greater understanding and appreciation of these feats.

I'm reminded of the great Al DeRogatis, who called football for NBC in the '60s and '70s. He had been a fine player, and, in the booth, broke down football in great technical detail, allowing the viewer to understand some of the intricacies of the game. One could learn a lot from DeRogatis. But after 1975, he was out, because the new breed of broadcaster had come.

The other kind of commentator is the one who attempts to create excitement, who tries to convey a picture of what it feels like to be there. He or she might sprinkle in the occasional technical term to prove their bona fides, but that's mere seasoning in the stew of emotion that they're trying to cook up. (In football, they might mention a Cover 2 defense, but they'll never take the time, or risk viewer boredom, by actually explaining what that is.)

There are some who can play both roles. John Madden, particularly in his early days as a broadcaster, could convey with a kind of verbal shorthand what the game felt like ("Boom"), but also provide some real insight broken into 15 to 20-second chunks.

But that's all gravy, especially in something like the Olympics where we thrill to events to which we'll pay absolutely no attention until 3 years and 50 weeks from now when the next Winter Games come along. I'm certain that NBC is making a concerted effort to provide us with 99% feel, 1% information, and that's the way they're going to do it (and perhaps they have research to indicate that they get higher ratings when they handle it that way).

The problem is, of course, that facts can get in the way of the narrative excitement. Snowboardcross and skicross are the two newest additions to the Winter Olympics, and they can be exciting in the final rounds when four athletes are on the course at the same time, jostling for position.

However, qualifying for these sports is really, really boring. A course that presents numerous challenges when two competitors are an elbow shove away from each other seems to be of little interest when only one person is going down. But, in NBC terms, these sports are NEW! EXCITING! THRILL RIDES! So we're not told that the men have 33 skicrossers competing for, yes, 32 positions. The women, 35 for 32. The announcers were careful to stay away from mentioning that nothing much is at stake.
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So we end up with powerful incentives to "go surface," to hype and emotionalize everything instead of explaining. NBC hires nominal experts, then has them ignore their expertise in favor of creating a word picture of the experience.

But what happens when they hire people who can't do that, who have impressive resumes but no ability to convey the ambiance of the competition?

We know what happens - we the viewers are subjected to the train wreck that is the team of Sandra Bezic and Scott Hamilton. Hamilton, a man I think very highly of for his personal story and his charitable work, is possibly the worst "analyst" working for any major sports network. Bezic is better only because she shuts up more often (with execrable lapses like the quote above).

The problem, I think, is that they don't the narrative gifts to deliver to us a sense of what it's like to be there. Instead, they substitute their own feelings. So we don't get, "Triple lutz, triple toe loop, well done with a small turnout on the landing." We get Hamilton's "TRIPLE LUTZ...TRIPLE TOE...OH, HE FOUGHT FOR IT, BUT HE GOT IT!!!" And that's actually a high point in content for our Scotty.

Everything is filtered through the prism of their emotions. To some, it might seem more vivid, but it far more often comes off as information-free blather that appeals neither to our brains (because there's no content) nor to our hearts (because we really don't care how Sandra and Scott feel about things).

One might have thought this reached its peak in the 2002 Olympics, when Bezic told us she was "ashamed for our sport" when her favored fellow Canadian pairs team was, in her opinion, underscored. National jingoism aside, this was the apotheosis of her self-importance, as scandal, duplicate gold medals, and a new judging system followed. It's hard to avoid feeling that Bezic began to overestimate her impact after this, leading her to think that she really was a major mover and shaker in figure skating.

So we end up with the most subjective look possible, one which asks us to think more about the announcers than about the event. And we get fatuous quotes like the one from Bezic, which tells us nothing except that she feels that Joannie Rochette skated for the good of Sandra Bezic. And the "we" just makes it worse, as this hack "analyst" attempts to include us in this most inappropriate feeling possible.

NBC really needs to take a look at this team and see if there isn't some talent somewhere that could do a halfway-competent job.

First the Cubs, now the Olympics

I'm going to admit upfront that I love the Olympics. The idea of athletes from all countries and all sports getting together and competing is easily over-sentimentalized, I know, and the problems of the world don't go away for 17 days every four years, but it still represents an ideal that is good and noble. Maybe it's become cluttered with commercialization and politics and greed and all the other human sins, but there remains a purity behind the intent that I appreciate and admire.

Perhaps that's why I, while leaning toward wanting the Games in my home city of Chicago, retained some very real ambivalence about the whole thing. The politics of Chicago and Illinois is so corrupt, so subject to cronyism and cheating, that I feared, I suppose, that the Olympics would be tainted by the sweetheart deals, the opportunities of resource diversion to cronies of Mayor Daley, the ram-it-through mentality that would make the actual people of Chicago an afterthought.

Yet...it still would have been really cool to see the Olympics come to Chicago, to be here for this oft-wonderful city to be highlighted on the world stage. Perhaps Bob Costas could do his show overlooking Daley Plaza with a big picture of Da Mare over his shoulder (having set the precedent of honoring local dictators by allowing us to spend 17 days appreciating the lovely mass murderer Chairman Mao).

Alas, it is not to be. Chicago got blown away in the first round of a competition that everyone in the city figured was in the bag. The media coverage was laughable, of course, including Olympics "experts" who, before the vote, confidently told us all the reasons Chicago was the front-runner, then did a 180 after the vote and confidently told us about the many flaws in the plan.

[To offer a minority-in-Chicago opinion: The voting results tell me that Chicago had no chance. Had we squeaked by Tokyo in the first round, I doubt things would have gotten any better. One has to suppose that the Asian bloc would have gone to Chicago instead of Rio, and I know no reason to think that would have been a lock.]

But here's the most important flaw, in my eyes. Chicago is simply not perceived as a world-class city by, well, anyone who doesn't live in Chicago. I wish it were true, certainly, because I love a lot of things about this town, but it simply isn't, and all the boosterism in the world isn't going to change that.

Look at a Chicago Tribune editorial from this past Monday:

No, Chicago doesn't need the Olympics. This is already a world-class city. Has been for decades. During its rich history, Chicago has scrapped its path to world-class stature in manufacturing, finance, retail, professional sports, academia -- on it goes. An Olympiad would be wonderful, but certainly isn't essential.

The paper cites five areas in which Chicago is world-class.

Manufacturing - largely gone to cheaper places in the country and out, and most of the headquarters of those companies have left for greener pastures.

Finance - guess the largest bank headquartered in Chicago. Go ahead, I'll wait. That's right, it's the Northern Trust, an institution that exists primarily to manage the assets of rich people. It has no place in the nation's top banks.

Retail - we need only look at the replacement of Marshall Field's with Macy's, but we can also walk down Michigan Avenue and see all the national chains to understand that retailing is no longer a primary industry.

Professional sports - even if we grant that field an influence it doesn't have, it's hard to make a case that we're any better at that than other world cities.

Academia - the tendency to overrate Northwestern, which comes from looking around newsrooms and seeing all the Northwestern grads, is irritating enough. When one looks at the deplorable condition of the once-proud economics faculty of the U of Chicago, one gets a sense that perhaps all is not rosy on the local quads.

The "on it goes" might include financial markets, but the Board of Trade and its ilk are rapidly moving to T1 and T3 lines coming in from all over the world, so they aren't the source of employment they once were. It might include tourism and conventions, but a lot of that business is being lost to cities with more to offer in the way of entertainment and food (it seems clear that any industry with a strong Asian presence is going to put their conventions in Seattle, San Francisco, or Vegas; Europe, New York or Orlando).

What Chicago has not done is establish any particular presence in anything with a future, in technology or bioengineering or alternative energy. That we aren't Detroit stems mainly from bigger size and greater diversity of industry, but it's not difficult to see us following that path eventually.

And Mayor Daley knows this, which is why he pushes tourism and splashy parks and big events, because those are the only ways he can think of to extract money from other places to prop up an obviously unsupportable infrastructure.

I hate to write this, hate to believe it, but it's hard for me to see a great future for Chicago. Getting the Olympics might have delayed the day of reckoning, but it wouldn't have changed the fundamentals. Not getting them, I don't know what's going to happen. But, at some point, the boosters and hucksters are going to have to realize that a very different Chicago is coming down the pike, and we're better off planning for that than we are trying to hit the big home run to "put us back on the map."

Coming up...Costas! Phelps! Mao!

I'll have more to say about NBC's coverage of the Olympics in a day or two, but I wanted to call out one thing in particular: for NBC to display the Tiananmen portrait of Mao Zedong right next to the head of Bob Costas was unconscionable, and perhaps their greatest violation of integrity while in China. (One wonders if perhaps it was a dig by the production team at big-dog Costas, but I can't prove that.)

Providing local color is one thing, but to have one of the major images of the Games be a huge rendering of one of the greatest mass murderers in the history of the world shows remarkably poor taste. I don't recall Jim McKay, during the Munich Games in 1972, sitting with his face perched next to a picture of the spritely Adolf Hitler.

Some will say that many of the Chinese people still hold Mao in awe, that he is admired, that at worst they call him a great leader who made a few mistakes. But you have to ask yourself, if the majority of the people decided they didn't want the picture there, would it come down? Surely our acceptance of China as a sunny happy place doesn't extend to the fantasy that democratic action would bring down that picture.

I think, though, there's something larger at work here than just the cravenness of the division of a large multinational shying away from casting aspersions on any aspect of the society of a major customer. It is, rather, a tendency to collapse history into a single, easily-digested, safe point of reference. We have taken the sadly large and messy history of "Evil in the 20th Century," and collapsed it down into the person of one badly-mustached Austrian. We've taken the most unambiguous exemplar of evil, Hitler, and turned him into the sole member of his class.

It certainly makes it easier to learn history. We don't have to make judgments on Mao or Stalin; oh, they made their mistakes, but Evil = Hitler - nice, neat, and tidy.

We, as exemplified by the too-often lazy media, do this time and again. Bill Gates (no, I'm not comparing him to Hitler) is seen as the creator of the PC, when of course he was no such thing. Vinton Cerf is called the father of the Internet, which omits the reality that the American taxpayer actually is responsible for it.

I can understand why we do this when history is remote or murky. We focus our attention on a small number of Founding Fathers, on Washington and Jefferson, when there were so many more who contributed (I've been amused by the reactions to McCullough's book on John Adams, then to the miniseries; it's stark surprise that anyone else was actually around and doing stuff - perhaps Madison will be "reborn" next). We look at only a small number of British kings as being significant. Attila's the only Hun who retains serious street cred.

But Gates and the many other people who were part of the amazing rise of the computer are still around, and we don't set the record straight. Mostly this is pretty benign; I actually find Gates-worship fairly amusing for the most part. Occasionally, though, this becomes harmful, as we expect Gates to have all of the answers for our labor problems, and we let him spew self-serving poppycock to a worshipful Congress.

And it's especially harmful when we use this tendency in order to rewrite history. You can put Mao on a T-shirt, or put his poster on your dorm wall, or use him as a backdrop for Olympics coverage, but that just shows your ignorance. He was a loathsome, horrendous killer, one of the worst in the history of this planet. That he may have been slightly less loathsome than Hitler, an arguable point, doesn't mean that we should happily participate in his rehabilitation. I really think NBC blew it here.

Come on, we know what she means

Fire Joe Morgan is probably my favorite snark site, out relentlessly probing the newspapers and airways of our "sports journalists" to prick holes in their pomposity and just-plain-wrongness. And I certainly have my problems with NBC's coverage of the Olympics, out of which I will likely get at least one more post before it's over.

But laughing at Mary Carillo for this:

"Anyone will tell you how hard it is to come back from behind, but coming back from ahead can sometimes be even trickier."

is just plain wrong. In the context in which she said it, the meaning was clear. Being ahead, relaxing, letting the other team get back into the match, then having to regroup to establish momentum can indeed be harder, and that's what she meant. "Coming back" can mean returning to the prior good groove.

Michael Phelps and H-1Bs

So let's say you have to hire someone for a programming job, and here's how you go about it. You put an ad in the paper stating that you have such a job, and then 100 people come in. You don't talk to them in any depth, don't consider whatever experience or aptitude they might have, but you put them at 100 workstations and put them to work on various problems you have. You don't pay them anything, but, over time, maybe a great deal of time, you realize which of them is the best one, and that's the one you hire.

There are big problems with this, which is why we don't use this method. First, who's going to go for this? I enjoy programming, but I wouldn't sit in a room solving problems for free, waiting to see if I'll get hired. More importantly, there's no guarantee that you'll end up with someone even minimally competent. You might, you might not. Since you probably won't, you're wasting your time.

What you do, assuming you're trying to find the best person for the job, is to recruit in places that might have potential employees who know what they're doing. You screen resumes, conduct interviews, possibly give a programming test. You try to maximize the probability that you're selecting from a pool of high-potential candidates, then you try to select the single best person out of that pool. And this is such a natural way to do this that we rarely think about it.

But we select our Olympic athletes the first way. We open a pool, or a gymnastics school, and, if we're lucky, Michael Phelps or Shawn Johnson wanders in. A lot more luck later, they become Olympic champions. We allow private enterprise to determine where the school is located, and we let fortune dictate whether or not the individual ever gets there.

And, since we fundamentally don't care if we get a Michael Phelps (no, we don't; we may thrill to his accomplishments, but, if he didn't exist, we would feel no loss - five gold medals, six gold medals, what's the difference?), this system works fine for us. It demands nothing from us. If the Johnsons want to mortgage their house to keep Shawn on the balance beam, they can go ahead - means nothing to me one way or the other.

If you did care, however.... Let's say you were given the job of increasing the number of swimming medals the U.S. wins. Your livelihood and your children's future depend on seeing gold, silver, and bronze draped around wet Americans. Would you:
a) Work hard to encourage people to build swimming pools at random places around the country, then just sit back and hope that kids who are genetically blessed wander in and start to take lessons, or;
b) Go out and try to identify kids who have the makeup to become great swimmers, have the requisite shoulder and ankle flexibility and other qualities, then send them to existing training facilities that could enhance and hone their skills?

Of course, you would choose b), you would have to. But that's what the Soviets and East Germans did, and that's what the Chinese are doing now, and we all feel a little queasy about that. It goes against the American ideal of individual choice, of allowing everyone to do what they want regardless of ability. "You can be whatever you want to be" is a far better motto than "E pluribus unum." There might be 10 or 100 more Michael Phelps out there in the U.S., and we'll never know it. They're off cooking or knitting or mountain biking, fulfilling their desires rather than maximizing their gifts.

It's fairly clear, however, that, for things we truly value, for which we're accountable, we take a more proactive approach. China's done so with respect to the Olympics, and they're winning medals left and right, and they've also done so in training engineers, just as India has chosen to work toward dominance in software and call center jobs.

What does this have to do with H-1B visas? Here in the U.S., we take approach a), where we just allow in a clump of workers who've demonstrated little more than the ability to earn a college degree, and assume that, out of thousands, some number of them will have the entrepreneurial bent necessary to build the companies of the future.

Grandpa John not only doesn't see a problem with that, he supports more of the same. From his campaign website:

John McCain will expand the number of H-1B visas to allow our companies to keep top-notch talent – often trained in our graduate schools – in the United States....For every foreign worker hired, corporations generally hire five to ten additional American workers.

[Link pointed out by the invaluable Job Destruction Newsletter.]

I'm not sure what's more disheartening here, that McCain believes that the H-1B visa program is geared around the desire to find "top-notch talent," or that his staff is inflating the results of a flawed regression study, which found that each H-1B application generates 5 to 6 new jobs (a ridiculous result, implying that we only need to apply for visas in order to employ the entire country, and ignoring the reality that the largest H-1B companies are Indian outsourcing firms).

Sure, it's possible that by letting thousands more immigrants into the country, without any additional screening other than "got a college degree," we will find the next founder of a Microsoft or an Intel, creating industries that will generate millions of jobs. But setting this up as a crapshoot, praying that the person is out there who will bring untold wealth to the U.S., is as quixotic as building a pool in the middle of South Dakota and just praying that the next Michael Phelps will wander in.

Stupid rules

1. Shawn Johnson, United States
2. Nastia Liukin, United States
3. Yang Yilin, China
4. Ksenia Semenova, Russia
5. Anna Pavlova, Russia
6. Ksenia Afanaseva, Russia
7. Jiang Yuyuan, China
8. Steliana Nistor, Romania
9. Deng Linlin, China
10. Ekaterina Kramarenko, Russia
11. Bridget Sloan, United States
12. Jade Barbosa, Brazil
13. Sandra Izbasa, Romania
14. Oksana Chusovitina, Germany
15. Shona Morgan, Australia
16. Anamaria Tamirjan, Romania
17. Koko Tsurumi, Japan
18. Georgia Bonora, Australia
19. Elyse Hopfner-Hibbs, Canada
20. Marine Petit, France
21. Vanessa Ferrari, Italy
22. Laetitia Dugain, France
23. Lia Parolari, Italy
24. Becky Downie, Great Britain

This is the list of the top 24 qualifiers for the all-around competition in Women's Gymnastics at the Olympics, and the top 24 get to move on to the competition. (I recognize this isn't very timely. What can I do, I've got a life, of sorts, too.) Now if you watched the NBC coverage of the all-around, you didn't see all these women (OK, if you watched NBC's coverage, you saw seven or eight of the 24, but there were others).

In particular, you might be wondering what happened to Bridget Sloan. Since she's American, you would think that NBC would have been putting their cameras right in her face, but you didn't see her at all. That's because she wasn't there.

The rules state that only two gymnasts from each nation can compete in the all-around. This was done in the past to prevent the Soviets from taking the top six places. (There are similar rules for the individual apparatus finals.) I have crossed out the names of top 24 qualifiers who didn't make the all-around because they happened to have two teammates who did better. Here's the list of the five who got in, along with their qualifying position:

Ariella Kaslin, Switzerland (25)
Kyoko Oshima, Japan (27)
Kristyna Palesova, Czech Republic (26)
Ana Silva, Brazil (28)
Gaelle Mys, Belgium (31)

In other words, we got to enjoy the 31st-best gymnast in the world, while the 6th-best sat back in the Olympic Village. Bridget Sloan, who got short shrift from NBC because she had the least-exciting back story (she wasn't one of the two glamor girls, wasn't the one who just missed the 2004 team, wasn't the gutsy team-leader grandma, and didn't have the "tragic" last-second injury; she was just kind of there), was done with the Games despite being 11th-best.

Here's why this story resonates with me. When I was in high school, I finished second in the region (I think it was four states plus Ontario) on a national mathematics test. The top three received plaques commemorating their achievement. You probably want me to include a picture of my shiny plaque in this blog post, right?

But I can't. I was second to a teammate, and the rules were that they only gave plaques to one person from a school. So "my" plaque went to someone else, and the third-place plaque...hey, that's funny, too, because it was another one of my teammates who finished fourth, so that went to the fifth-place finisher (how do you put that up in your rec room? Someone asks, saying, wow, you finished third?, and you have to explain that, no, you finished fifth, but they gave you the one for third.).

Everyone claims they want less jingoistic nationalism in sports, then we ignore rules that elevate the team over the individual, even in an individual event. Similarly, we allow only two swimmers from each nation into each event, so the third-best butterflyer can be left at home.

I understand the counter-argument, that we can't have the USA going 1 through 8 in the 200-meter freestyle, that it would hurt the reputation of the sport and make it hard to build interest in other nations.

But these are supposed to be the fulfillment of individual dreams, and a celebration of the best in the world. It isn't Ksenia Afanasyeva's fault that she came in behind Semenova and Pavlova, she should get to compete, and the viewer shouldn't be prevented from seeing her.

(I accept that this argument, taken to its fullest, would imply that the basketball tournament should be made up of the 12 best NBA teams. To me, this argues more for eliminating basketball from the Olympics, not for supporting the inclusion of a terrible team from Angola, simply because they're the best in Africa.

And, obviously, the Olympics can make up whatever rules they want to, can try to achieve goals that are not about fairness. If the powers that be believe that the sport of gymnastics is bettered by allowing Gaelle Mys into the all-around over Afanasyeva, that's their business. But then we need to stop pretending that's it's all about extolling the best in human endeavor, because that's clearly not all it's about.)

Two suggestions for beach volleyball

I, like so many, have thrilled to the excitement of Olympic beach volleyball, in which two people flail about an uncertain surface, hitting the ball in fairly predictable ways. I'm not sure why water volleyball and snow volleyball have not also been added - snow to the Winter Olympics, of course, so we wouldn't have to endure four long years between recitations of every biographical detail of the lives of Misty May and Kerri Walsh.

But I have two suggestions that will improve the women's version of the sport, taking it beyond its already wild popularity.

1) Every team should have the foresight of the Brazilians. They are smart enough to label one part of their uniforms as to its purpose, because I imagine it must be difficult to distinguish between the two halves, as they are both so small. But the Brazilians, canny veterans of beach volleyball that they are, save valuable preparation time by putting B R A right on their tops - very smart, indeed.

2) When you have a nearly unbeatable team like May and Walsh, the tension is quite diminished. After two weeks of pretty repetitive action, even the most ardent fan can get dulled. So here's what they can do.

In the first match, the women wear shorts cut like those the men wear. Beach shorts, to be sure, so the less-athletically interested fan can enjoy the sculpted legs. Then, for each subsequent match, a half-inch or so is cut away. By the finals, the women are wearing thongs, giving the viewer some reward for sitting through the tournament (ooh, Sandy Thongs, and you wonder where the great adult-film actresses of the future will get their names). That's gotta goose the ratings.

Redemption

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our mind.
Wo! have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them-a can-a stop-a the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look?
Yes, some say it's just a part of it:
We've got to fulfill de book.
Won't you help to sing
Dese songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever had:
Redemption songs -
All I ever had:
Redemption songs:
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom. (Bob Marley - Redemption Song)

I said yesterday (I'm not sure if my wife heard it, I may have been talking to myself - I do that a lot while contemplating Olympics coverage) that it would take no time before Al Trautwig said that Alicia Sacramone would be looking for redemption in the vault finals in gymnastics. (Alicia's the young woman who fell off the balance beam while competing in the team qualifications, possibly costing the American "women" the team gold medal.)

As it turned out, I didn't even have to wait for Al, as the announcer promoted the event by intoning, "Alicia Sacramone looks for redemption in the vault final."

Let's look at the definitions for the word "redemption" (we'll actually look at "redeem").

• To recover ownership of something by paying a sum.
• To set free, rescue or ransom.
• To save from a state of sin (and from its consequences).
• To restore the reputation or honour of oneself or something.

(By the way, these are all transitive, so Alicia can't really look for redemption, she can only hope to redeem herself.)

Neither of the first two seems to apply here, though one does wonder if the Chinese team might favor one of these ("Win gold, or your family disappears under the Three Gorges Dam!"). So we're left with one of the latter two definitions.

"Redemption" is actually one of my pet peeves, as it is a word used to describe any opportunity to do well after having done poorly. Sports announcers use it all the time now, in their usual effort to create drama where the actual drama likely suffices. I don't come from a particularly religious background, but "redemption" has, at least to me, always carried fairly strong religious overtones, one of the reasons the Bob Marley song I quoted above has such resonance.

That leads us to the third definition, that of saving someone from a state of sin. The wide receiver who drops a ball, the slugger who strikes out, Sacramone, they probably aren't being given the opportunity to do that. Given the false importance with which we weigh down our fun and games, we can't rule this out as the relevant definition, but I prefer to think we're not that quite gone.

So we come to the last, "To restore the reputation or honour of oneself or something." (Yes, it's a British definition, but it's the most concise and complete I found.) This is very likely the one that the commentators intend to use, but it is at least as irrelevant as any other.

To anyone other than gymnastics fans, Alicia Sacramone had no reputation until the NBC cameras first focused on her in Beijing. Yes, she's wearing a USA uniform, but that, in and of itself, doesn't give us the right to assign any particular expectations to her.

If she has no reputation, then there is no need for her to restore it. She owes us nothing, save perhaps an honest effort, certainly not a certain score on the balance beam. I've done nothing for Alicia Sacramone, so my job is simply to admire what she does without placing the burden of my hopes and dreams on her.

If Sacramone feels she needs to redeem herself in the eyes of her parents, who have supported her all the years of her life, or for her coach, who has given untold hours toward her success (but was paid for it), that's between her and them. My guess is that this Brown student who has also found the time to pursue a world-class gymnastics career has already paid them many times over, but that's their business.

To trot out a word of such importance and serious import, and misapply it so casually, actually makes me a bit queasy when I hear it. Alicia's accomplished more "for" the United States than most 20-year-olds, and she has a right to fail or succeed without feeling as if she's let 300 million Americans down, the vast majority of whom never heard of her before a week ago.

(By the way, there are a number of articles on the Web implying that there should be some consolation for Sacramone in being Googled for her hotness. I don't know her, of course, but I'm guessing that she's not quite so shallow as to see the search histories of adolescent minds as replacement for a lifelong dream that didn't turn out as she had hoped.)

Ownership

One thing the new Web 2.0 world has brought us is the ability to take in other people's opinions as we never have before. We read blogs, comments on blogs, comments on comments, comments on newspaper articles, and on and on. I don't know that we have any greater insight into one another than we did before, as this mass of opinion, mostly uninformed, washes over us, but we at the least gain appreciation for the stark differences that happen inside our respective heads.

I've had some opportunity to think about this since I started writing this blog, as the act of expressing my thoughts has required a sharpening of those thoughts. That said, I have also developed a greater appreciation of which things I would term core beliefs, and those which are not so firmly held. Sometimes that's in response to a challenge, a comment on the blog perhaps, other times that comes out of my own thought processes. I admit there are times I will write something that I am not 100% behind, mainly to see how I really feel about it.

There are only a very few things I believe that could not change in response to convincing evidence to the contrary; I like to think I'm at least that open. I'm loath to take personal ownership of an idea unless it comes out of my core. When I wrote last week that I hesitate to regard Michael Phelps as the all-time greatest Olympian, I certainly believed that (and continue to do so). But that is not so strong a belief as to get me to desert other core values; if I were at a dinner party, and someone contended that Phelps was the greatest, I wouldn't storm out in a huff, as politeness dictates respect for others' opinions. (On the other hand, if someone espoused infanticide, I probably would leave as quickly as possible. I am far more opposed to baby killing than I am to the idea of Phelps as greatest Olympian.)

Apparently, others don't see it that way. Phil Hersh of the Chicago Tribune, one of the most respected international sportswriters around, wrote a story last Friday along the same lines as my above-referenced post, that Phelps is not (yet) the best Olympic athlete ever. Hersh picks Phelps #6, with Carl Lewis 1st, Paavo Nurmi 2nd, and so on. (He also quotes David Wallechinsky to the effect that Nurmi and Lewis are co-#1.)

Hersh has covered international sports for the Tribune for 21 years, and has covered 14 Olympics. He makes it clear that these views are his opinion, that Phelps still has a chance to move up in his estimation if he extends his achievements. But others see it differently, as expressed by a couple of letters in the Saturday Tribune:

Shame on Philip Hersh and the Chicago Tribune for reflecting on a superior athlete like Michael Phelps this way. Phelps is the best athlete who ever competed in the Olympics, and the best the U.S. ever brought up. This is acknowledged by millions of people. (George Aygar, Chicago)

With all that Michael Phelps is accomplishing, the training this young man has experienced, the sacrifice, the dedication to his sport - and all Phil Hersh can do is write a column saying how poorly he ranks among other athletes?
Poor taste, Phil. And poor judgment by the Tribune for running it.
Get a grip, Phil. Find the good in this man's accomplishments and write an appropriate column. (Maddie and Jack Smith, Wheaton)

Leaving aside the specious logic of the letter writers, I wonder at the passion. Calling such an article out for "shame" or for "poor taste," does this not demonstrate a complete lack of perspective from the writers? The sense of ownership these people feel about an issue that can have no real effect on their lives is remarkable.

Are these just two examples of people trying to make themselves heard by yelling louder than anyone else (and it works, their letters were published)? Or do they really feel Hersh is tasteless in picking Phelps as the sixth greatest Olympian ever? Either way, it makes one fear for the future of intelligent discourse.

Setting expectations

The Olympics have me ruminating on the extent that a superior performance conditions us to expect even more in the future, to the point where we miss great accomplishments. Mark Spitz won seven swimming gold medals in 1972, and that became the standard by which we measured all subsequent Olympians. Win four gold medals, and you're called "good, but no Mark Spitz." Let someone hit 68 home runs in baseball, which would be absolutely fantastic, but five short of Barry Bonds, and it will seem ho-hum.

I suppose this is natural, and even one of the ways we encourage people to do better in the future, but it relegates some pretty great feats to seeming insignificance. And it can put inappropriate pressure on people who have done great things - do we look at Michael Phelps, after he puts away his 18th gold in London in 2012 and ask, "Michael, since Dara Torres swam until she was 41, will you be back through 2024?" Maybe we will.

We make comparisons, it helps us put things in perspective and appreciate the truly outstanding (I do it myself). But we should try not to get so carried away that we ignore some marvelous events around us. The guy who wins five golds in London won't be a disappointment because he didn't match Phelps or Spitz; he will have done something remarkable, and, not out of fairness but because we need a sense of awe in our lives, we should enjoy it, and appreciate it, and feel good about it.

Truth

Truth is very much in the news this week, with numerous reports coming out of the Olympics about misleading aspects of the Opening Ceremonies and questions about the ages of Chinese girl gymnasts. There is a new book out about Barack Obama; it's going to be a bestseller even though it states things that are demonstrably false, and the author admits his "goal is to defeat Obama." Every day, polls come out, and the media dutifully reports on them in the most misleading way. The Chicago Tribune (and I'm really not trying to pick on them) prints a letter today:

The term "recession" is well-defined and leaves no room for debate:

It is two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the American economy.

Letter writers and the many columnists and pundits who write for the Chicago Tribune should be reminded of this fact.

They should realize that no matter how often they write it or say it or repeat it, a recession hasn't happened.

Their dislike of the current administration doesn't justify falsely portraying the facts of the economy.

As a semi-frequent reader of this blog will tell you (and I'll agree; my contention is different, and I'll not repeat it today), this is absolutely wrong. It is not a matter of opinion, and the Tribune should not be publishing this under the guise of presenting a point of view.

The Obama book is beneath contempt, and has been written about well by other writers (by Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast, among others). What is appalling is that this book has been published by Simon and Schuster, under the auspices of political whore Mary Matalin. (Timothy Noah at Slate does a good job of dismantling this here, and Joe Klein has some interesting comments here.) I've written about Matalin before, my objections to her are not political (I find her husband equally odious). It shocks me that she continues to be a respected part-time pundit, when her connection to the truth was severed the day she fell in love with Dick Cheney.

I'm sure I've had something to say about polls before, but a quick search didn't turn up anything. The media tends to mischaracterize poll results, it is clear that they don't understand them, and the public deserves better. First, there is a confidence interval attached to polls; it is not impossible that the pollster just happened on 418 people who all rabidly support Obama (just as it is possible for a coin to turn up heads 418 straight times). It isn't likely, but it can happen, which is why even the plus or minus 4 points you hear only represents a 95% probability.

Second, the increasingly irritating trope that any result within the margin of error is "a statistical tie." Kevin Drum has an interesting post on this. To sum up the post, if Obama leads McCain by 2% and the margin of error is 3%, this will be reported as a statistical tie. In truth, Obama has a 74% chance of being ahead.

But which of these does the public get exercised about? Of course, it's the revelation that the Opening Ceremonies featured a little girl singing who really wasn't, because the actual singer wasn't cute enough. And the Chinese gymnastics team may have faked ages of their "women's" gymnastics team to let fearless and flexible youngsters compete in contravention of the rules.

Which of these do you object to? Are these all wrong because they represent untruth, or does your opinion depend on your nationality or political party? We easily accept that Natalie Wood didn't sing in West Side Story (she looked more like a Maria than Marni Nixon, I guess). We ignore Bela Karolyi's solution to the age problem, even though he made it front-page news (he doesn't think there should be limits at all).

I don't have anything profound to say here. Once we start regarding the truth as relative, we open the door for all kinds of things. As long as we let each person determine where the line of "acceptable truth" is, we're going to have numerous versions of it. And that makes communication difficult, for if you define your truth, and I define mine, and they're far enough apart, we won't have any basis to talk at all. And that's what we see more and more in public life.

Coming up on NBC...

we hope, really really hope, that Michael Phelps will sign our yearbooks!

Phelps, the greatest?

I marvel at the accomplishments of Michael Phelps; he's doing things that are almost unimaginable, taking on the best in the world and beating them in world-record time. As of this writing, he is at five gold medals in Beijing, eleven overall, possibly heading toward eight during this week.

The eleven golds are the most ever won, beating the old record of nine, and has led to NBC's incessant touting of Phelps as the greatest Olympian ever (and any and all associated superlatives the announcers can think of). We're now free to forget about Mark Spitz, American swimmer, Carl Lewis, American sprinter and long jumper, Larissa Latynina, Soviet gymnast, and Paavo Nurmi, Finnish distance runner.

But, can we say that Phelps is the greatest Olympian ever, that he has exceeded the accomplishments of every single great athlete who has ever gone to the Games? I don't think we can say that, and I don't believe it's even a meaningful question.

Karch Kiraly won two gold medals in indoor volleyball in 1984 and 1988, then won another in beach volleyball in 1996. Every time he went to the Olympics, he won every gold he had a chance to win. What more could he have done? Unless the rules of volleyball are changed to permit the potential winning of eight golds in a single Games, there is no way to compare.

In so many sports, there is no opportunity to win multiple golds. In swimming, if you are good, it's almost impossible not to. The multiple events which differ only slightly in terms of skills needed to succeed, added to the existence of multiple relays, there's no way to compare any other Olympic sport to it.

100 years ago, Ray Ewry won the last of his eight gold medals over three Olympic Games (ten if you count results from the not-quite-official 1906 Games). All of them were in standing jumps, the kind of thing we did in gym class, but they're no longer contested in the Olympics. However, what if there had been team standing high jump, long jump, and triple jump? Ewry might well have won eight more. What if there had been medley jumping, another competition I just made up that adds together results of all three? Ewry could have won three more. What if there had been team medley jumping? Another three. It is not inconceivable that Ray Ewry, if track and field were organized like swimming, could have won a career 22 gold medals.

So let's just enjoy the exploits of Phelps, who is by any measure one of the greatest athletes ever. But any short list of the greatest Olympians of all time would not be short at all (no one even mentions Bjorn Daehlie, the Norwegian cross-country skier who won eight golds). It might be fun to sit around and debate, but let's not passively accept NBC's decision in the matter; after all, they please none of their sponsors if they contend that Ray Ewry is the greatest Olympian ever.

Back to the pool

Another Olympic post. I really haven't heard anything about swimming pool technology during these Olympics. It used to be that there would be a quick piece at the beginning of coverage as to how modern science was finding ways to make faster and faster pools. I may have missed it, but I haven't seen that piece during the current coverage (nor do I recall it at Athens or Sydney).

Is it possible that someone feels the magnificence of the athletes would be diminished if it was pointed out that Olympic and world records were being broken as much due to engineering as to the heroic sacrifice and effort of the young men and women? We've heard about the new swimsuits because the issue bubbled into controversy, but I do wonder: Are pools as good as they can be, or are records falling because everyone is, in effect, swimming downhill in both directions? It would be nice to know.

Zhingle all the way

[Note: I wrote the following before I did my research. I'll put another note at the end with some links.]

It is a source of enduring irritation to me that the large majority of commentators, whether NBC's or on local news, persist in calling the Olympic host city, Bei-zhing. Because that's not how it's pronounced at all; just as it's spelled in the pinyin system, it's Bei-jing. Jing, as in "jingle," not zhing, with the sound of the second 'g' in "garage."

I know that older systems like Wade-Giles confused Westerners, as the notation was often not reflective of the actual Chinese sounds. But pinyin is far superior, and can be taken in most cases (not all - the name "Mo" is pronounced more like "maw" than like the Stooge) as accurate, leaving aside the unpleasantness of the tonal system.

So it's Bei-jing, with a 'j.' And what is really odd to me is that 'j' is far more common in English than "zh," which tends to show up in words that came from French like "garage" or "measure." We should greatly prefer Bei-jing, but we don't. Is it a desire for faux foreignness? A tendency to assume that nothing in Chinese is pronounced precisely as it's written? I just don't know.

[End note: It turns out I wasn't the first to notice this. Language Hat has an item here, with interesting comments. There are comments on MSNBC about this. If you want to see several more, Google "beijing beizhing."]

Notes from the Olympics

I am, of course, over-watching the Olympics. Without the cable, I am consigned to watching only what the big NBC wants me to see, but that seems like plenty. Every time, I rail at the ever-declining quality of the coverage, but this is the first time I've had a blog to express that. So bear with me.

First, the Opening Ceremonies. I found parts of the artistic presentation remarkable, other parts tedious. It would likely have been better if Zhang Yimou, the film director who was in charge, had directed the television coverage as well. I couldn't help but feel that we as viewers were missing things that we were supposed to see. The gushing over it, even through today, by the NBC people, both national and local, seems excessive. But it fits into a pattern that I plan to mention later in this post.

It seems quite clear that NBC has decided that people don't watch the Olympics for any numbers or results at all. The coverage of the men's gymnastics preliminaries were devoid of context, simply showing routine after routine with the (very) occasional comment that the U.S. looked good to make the top 8 teams going on to the team final. It took a quick end-of-show mention by Bob Costas to confirm that, and an almost throwaway line that two Americans qualified for the all-around and only two qualified for individual apparatus finals. It was actually a pretty disappointing performance for the U.S. team.

And the curious obsession of NBC with gymnast Raj Bhavsar, so obvious at the Olympic Trials, continued. His story is mildly interesting; he just missed making the team in 2004, came up short again in 2008, getting on the team only because Paul Hamm was injured. Realistically, however, he's the seventh or eighth best American gymnast, which is not at all unimpressive, but it hardly merits coverage that slights the young men who originally beat him out.

One has come to expect the laser-like focus on American athletes, ignoring virtually every other person except as he or she is a foil for the U.S. But it is incredibly boring to hear about a very few ("It's Michael Phelps and 7 other guys in the water...it's Phelps...Phelps is leading...there's another guy, but Phelps can beat him...Phelps...Phelps...Phelps!"). I know the production team pre-scopes all the stories they plan to cover, and everything revolves around that, but, you know what, even the most casual viewer knows that Dara Torres is 41, has a child, and is swimming well. There must be other things to talk about.

What I mentioned earlier, something that has been running throughout the coverage so far, is the gape-mouthed attitude towards China and the Chinese people. It's an amazing story to be sure, the rise of China on the world stage, but that doesn't consecrate every single person or place in the whole country. I don't remember anywhere close to this adulation being heaped upon the Italians for the 2006 Games in Turin; in fact, the Olympics might as well have been held on a stage set for all of that, so pronounced was the lack of local color. NBC, it's a country, a bunch of people - let's try to dial down the awe of this exotic land of mystery.