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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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The Olympic Games have gotten worse every iteration. The coverage is so bad that it’s nearly unwatchable. The coverage barely bothers with competition and has been steadily replacing the sports with ever longer and more maudlin stories about how the poor athlete had to overcome so much to even make the team. Most of the opening ceremony coverage thus far has been various celebrities, none of whom have anything to do with the Olympics and many of whom are no even remotely athletes.

I think honestly the only reason I’m in is to catch the obscure sports that most people don’t care about when they put them on minor cable networks or YouTube or something. Fencing is fun to watch and doesn’t get enough ratings to warrent ruining with biographies instead of showing the matches.

I think honestly the only reason I’m in is to catch the obscure sports that most people don’t care about when they put them on minor cable networks or YouTube or something.

Isn't that the whole point of the olympics? Most of its sports are things that would never get any sort of audience normally. It's just not that fun watching sprinting, weightlifting, rowing, etc normally. watching them once every 4 years with "fierce international rivalry!" and "olympic gold medal!" at stake is about as much as most people care to watch them. The big sports like soccer and basketball are kinda lowkey at the olympics, since there are other, better tournaments to watch them.

I feel like the olympics coasted for a long time during the 20th century based on the USSR vs USA rivalry. No one cared about the actual athletes or the sports themselves. I guess the networks are trying to add "human interest story" to make us care about the athletes, but frankly most of the athletes are extremely boring people who practice like a machine, nonstop every day at an extremely tedious sport, just to shave of 0.1 seconds and win 5 minutes of fame at the olympics. It might have been more fun to learn about them back when they were actually amateurs and had a life outside of sports, but those days are long gone.

Someone smarter than me pointed out on twitter that it's heads they win, tails we lose

If we tune in to satanic mass, we're participating in and tacitly accepting their blasphemy (or just incredibly bad coverage, if you prefer)

If we tune out, we're taking the wind out of the sails of an ancient western tradition celebrating achievements of excellence. Which is about the most 'trad' or 'based' or whatever the kids are saying these days thing you can do

Sounds like it's time to make an alt Olympics.

The X-Games are basically that (but with an alternative rock extreme sport sort of vibe)

Do those still exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Games

Looks like it

You can skip the opening ceremony, watch the sports that you feel best reflect athletic ideals, and skip the ones that don’t. It’s a tiny signal but a signal nonetheless.

If they bother to show the competition. Of late most of the competition isn’t even aired. They instead choose to air feel good “overcoming adversity” stories until it’s time for the top contenders an the American athlete to go. Gymnastics is going to be a giant hug box, and so will swimming until an American is in the heat. At least things like archery, weightlifting, synchronized swimming, and rhythmic gymnastics are obscure enough that they’ll show the competition.

I just turned on NBC this morning hoping to watch some olympics and the first thing I see is some chick's hospital selfies. I had to switch to USA network showing badmitton to get some action.

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