Watching the Olympics

I must say I'm quite disappointed by the Swedish coverage of the Olympics. We have satellite TV, so we get two stations that are showing the Olympics, both government run. Unfortunately I realized only a few days ago that it was more than just one station. The other station is not listed in the TV guide, and you can only get it with cable/satellite. It's something like CSPAN in that it usually shows either the news in text format, very dry lectures, or parliament sessions. Since I don't have difficulty sleeping, I don't usually stop at this channel when channel surfing.

Anyway, a couple days ago I discovered them showing the semifinals of the synchronized swimming duets! There were no Swedes competing, but there was a Swedish judge, so the commentators compared her scoring to that of the other judges. Since I used to do synchro myself (very badly), I was thrilled to see it. I immediately started taping it so I could show it to my daughter. Unfortunately she wasn't particularly impressed. She was most interested in the costumes and music but watched for less than 10 minutes.

Yesterday I caught them showing the last half hour of the gymnastics exhibition, so I taped that too. Gymnastics is probably the highlight of the summer Olympics for me, and this was the first I'd seen of it this year, and both the mens and womens competitions were already over (I believe I still have a chance to catch some rhythmic gymnastics). This seemed really odd to me since gymnastics seemed to be a very popular spectator sport in the US, and it got a lot of air time. Perhaps Swedes are less interested in watching it because they're simply too tall to be that good at it. As it turns out, my daughter was much more interested in gymnastics than synchro.

In general I would describe the Swedish coverage as heavily biased towards soccer, handball, track & field, and various types of fighting (boxing, wrestling, tae kwon do, etc.) It seemed like they showed every match or heat regardless of who was participating (with the exception of race walking which I have not seen at all--it is considered track & field, isn't it?). Besides these sports, they would show Swedes competing in anything. It was kind of cool to see a little fencing, dressage, sailing, and rowing, but it's kind of weird to see the Swede getting eliminated in the quarter finals and then they don't show any more. It was also kind of weird to hear the commentator clearly rooting for the Germans when they were playing against the US in beach volleyball. I think Michael Phelps was the only non-Swede (or opponent of a Swede) to make the nightly prime-time summary, and I was lucky enough to see several of his races. They even had a special tribute clip after he won number 8. I guess if you're that amazing, it makes for good TV all over the world.