Originally Posted by The Toronto Star
August 17, 2008
Chris Zelkovich
The debate over showing Olympic events live or on tape has been raging for some time, practically as long as Bob Costas has been avoiding grey hair.
Considering the results, mainly NBC's record-setting ratings for the Beijing Games, it seems almost pointless to knock the network's plan. In fact, delaying things by a few hours on a weekday makes some sense in maximizing the prime- time audience.
But tape-delaying the biggest event of the Olympics, the men's 100 metres race, by almost 12 hours on a Saturday is not only disingenuous, it smacks of thinking from another century. And I don't mean the 20th century.
While Usain Bolt was shattering the world record around 10: 30 yesterday morning, NBC was showing the U.S.-Spain basketball game. While interest in the so-called Redeem Team is high, surely NBC could have broken into it for the race.
Instead, it ignored the glamour event of the Games and ran a promo for its night-time coverage. Included in the promo was a nice feature on American sprinter Tyson Gay.
What that feature didn't mention, of course, was that Gay had already been eliminated in the semifinal and that Bolt had already won the event NBC was promoting.
That, of course, would have spoiled NBC's perfectly packaged coverage.
On a day when Bolt's victory would be all over newscasts and websites instantly, it seemed like a silly decision indeed...
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