If you are an Olympaholic, and you know who you are, you have a difficult couple of weeks ahead of you. NBC's 171-1/2 hours of coverage may seem like a lot now, but just wait until tomorrow dawns and you have to find something to do between 1-7:30 eastern time or 12-4:30 pacific time. This is not your Olympic TripleCast.
Such was the backlash to the 1992 TripleCast (personal admission: I bought the TripleCast) that NBC has punished all of us. It's like they're getting back at us for not supporting their experiment four years ago. "So you don't want constant minute-by-minute coverage of women's doubles table tennis, O.K. we'll make you watch Days of Our Lives."
If you've planned on taking two solid weeks to devote your life to Olympic viewing, you had better find some afternoon activities, or start reading Soap Opera Digest. Throughout the games you'll see Another World on weekday afternoons (note: Nick and Maggie are now sleeping together but Sofia is trying to tear them apart), but nothing from the World of Sports.
This is a difficult time for true Olympaholics. We count on our Olympic high to carry us through for a couple of years until, thankfully, due to the staggered Winter and Summer Games, we get another dose of patriotism and belief in the power of sport. And don't think going to the Games is any solution. It can be worse.
True Olympaholics will tell you they'd rather not be in Atlanta, because you can get stuck at an event all afternoon and not know who won the India-Pakistan Field Hockey game. How do you keep on top of the news when you're far away from a television? As someone who's tried both approaches, the ideal scenario is to spend a brief few days at the Games to get a feel for it and collect a lot of pins. Then return home by the last weekend of competition, so you can watch the finals in the team events and catch up on filling out your medal picks list.
Many Olympaholics find themselves working in Atlanta, a horrific predicament they'll tell you. Bruce Schoenfeld is one of them. He's Bob Costas' writer and won an Emmy for his work in 1992, but don't think he's happy to be working at the Games.
"I swore I wouldn't do this again," he said. "The best way to experience the Games is just to sit at home for two weeks and watch them. There's no way I'll let them drag me to Sydney."
Yeah, that sounds awful.
In 1984, the last summer Olympics held in a U.S. timezone, ABC broadcast in virtual perpetuity. There was a brief two-hour break in the afternoon and then a break for the local and network news. Otherwise it was "All Oly, All the Time."
If you were still school age and had the summer off, this was bliss. The two-hour lunch break allowed me and Brett Wolf (his sister is a U.S. Olympian in Judo this year) to go to McDonalds to get our daily Olympic game cards. We'd hastily rub off our cards only to find we had gotten Victor Dolipschi, Greco-Roman wrestling, Quarter Pounder with Cheese. We'd then watch dutifully, hoping Victor would come through for us and we wouldn't have to pay for lunch the next day.
Now the lunch break is at least four and a half hours long. What are we to do with our afternoons?
You could read my column, or check out scores and information on the web. You could run regression graphs on Finland's medal success through the years. And then there's always alt.olympics.medal-tally. It's the kind of place where you can debate things like "why does Judo give two bronze medals."
There'll be plenty of late-night coverage in these Games, with NBC staying on the air until 2:11 in the eastern time zone. That's good news for insomniacs, but bad news for school kids. When they here, "it's a beautiful day, go outside," they'll have no excuse.
