Not long after we arrived in DC in 2010, the Winter Olympics were held in Vancouver. We were shocked at the quality of the TV coverage by the American TV network NBC, they seemed to be completely incapable of showing events live. When I heard that NBC were covering the London Olympics I was really worried that they would make the same mess of the coverage but they said that they had taken on board the criticism from before and would make sure it was much better. Well, they lied!!
The TV coverage was absolutely appalling. It didn't get off to a good start when NBC didn't show the Opening Ceremony live. We had to impose a social media ban on ourselves so that we didn't get any spoilers before we managed to watch it 5 hours later than the rest of the world.
My colleague Nick and I were excited that we had a TV in our office and planned to have it on all day watching the coverage while we worked. However, NBC had other ideas. They did show events all day but they didn't show anything important or worth watching, they saved anything good for their evening primetime show. This meant that they hardly showed anything live so we usually knew the results before we got to watch the event. The only event that I managed to see GB win a medal in live was the canoe slalom where they won gold and silver. Nick and I were so excited watching it live but that was our one bit of live Olympics excitement!
We were fortunate that the Olympics was being held in London because that did mean that at least the primetime coverage did show a tiny bit of the GB home team competing rather than just the American team. But you literally would have thought that team USA was the only nationality competing in the women's gymnastics!
NBC's real low point came when they didn't even show the men's 100m final live. Can you believe that!!
And then just as I thought the coverage couldn't get any worse, the Paralympics got a total of 5.5 hours coverage over the whole 2 weeks! You wouldn't have even known that the Paralympics was actually on.
I survived by following the Olympics and Paralympics coverage on the BBC website which was obviously nowhere near the same as being there or watching it on TV. We do feel like we missed out, lots of our friends in the UK managed to go to watch events and were able to follow it all much more closely than we were. It's just a shame that the timing of this 'once in a lifetime' event happened to occur during the 3 years that we were out of the country!
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