Vancouver 2010 Olympic Security Plans

[A Black Falcon]

To elucidate: Hockey will never have a following like basketball/baseball/football in the United States because there's such little fertile ground with which to grow our own players. Unlike the three sports named above, hockey has practically no presence on the high-school level. In most parts of the country, expensive facilities are required for the sport to even exist. Thus, while we have a 'national' professional hockey league, much of its talent is imported from places where hockey can easily be played in a natural environment. A sport which requires an icy environment can only achieve so much success in a nation in which vast stretches never experience such an environment.

Hockey's pretty popular around here, and all the New England highschools have hockey teams, and many of the colleges teams too... college football? Maybe not, within the past year several major New England colleges have dropped football (Northeastern, for example). They haven't dropped hockey, though. At the school I went to the men's hockey team was by far the most popular sports team on campus, it wasn't even close. (Though of course the most popular sports teams overall would be the Boston pro teams, that wouldn't be even close either.).

As I said though, this is because we actually have snow and ice all winter long (usually, when it's not an incredibly stupid and worthless non-snowing winter like this one has been -- I know they've got a lot of snow down in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and southern New England, but up here in Maine we've barely gotten two inches all month. It's been miserable, no cross-country skiing... :(), so there's a reason for people to be interested in winter sports.

Hmm, interesting about NBC coverage - the Olympics up here is running basically nonstop and showing every single event, sport, and finding the time to interview virtually every Canadian athlete on three separate channels, and showing everything live. That could very well have to do with the increased national interest with the Olympics being in Canada, though. But that does seem like a pretty awful schedule NBC's running, and that's not in comparision to the non-stop live coverage up here, but just in general. Tape-delay, seriously? To make matters worse I can't even watch The Office. Damn NBC.

Yeah, NBC has always focused heavily on tape delay and shunting any "less popular" sports to its cable channels like MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, etc, while only having the most popular stuff on the broadcast channel. Then they don't even do Olympics all day on their broadcast channel but only part of the day. Then almost everything is on tape delay and almost nothing is live, so that they can show the major events during time blocks when they expect more people to be watching.

So for instance Bode Miller didn't win the gold in the morning or afternoon or whatever he actually did, he did it in primetime.

Anyway, for the winter olympics, this means that speedskating (long and short track), alpine, cross country/biathalon (afternoon and night blocks only, not evening), luge/skeleton/bobsled, and figure skating/ice dancing stuff is on NBC, while most anything else is on cable. They'll show a game or two of hockey, maybe the finals of Curling or something (though that sport is pretty much treated like a joke I think), but the restof the stuff isn't good enough for NBC, oh no... who cares that they've got many hours of the day earlier on that they're wasting on their normal daytime programming, who'd want to watch anything that's not popular, or anything while it's actually happening instead of on a big tape delay!

Looking for video on NBC's website is no refuge -- things are on a tape delay there too. They want people to watch stuff on TV instead, where they make more money.

As you might expect, the situation is even worse in a summer Olympics, where there are so many more sports for them to ignore...