Cone of Silence
I'm excited to see how Ryan Hall does in the marathon, which started 20 minutes ago in Beijing. But of course because I live on the West Coast, I have to wait until after it's over to watch a tape of the race (and then probably suffer through lengthy cutaways). Anyway, until then I'll be doing my best to avoid hearing any news.
UPDATE: Ha! Getting it live and uninterrupted on the amazin' Internets. Wish I understood more Italian....
2 comments:
I watched the tape delayed broadcast. The cutaways were annoying, generally, and there was one that was infuriating: late in the race, NBC decided to go away from the three leaders to see what the Americans Ritzenheim and Hall were doing. There wasn't much to show at that point, as it was clear the Yank runners were going to finish well out of the money. But NBC spent so much time observing next to nothing that they missed the decisive move in the race. When they came back to the lead group, Wansiru, the Kenyan guy, had attacked (bike terminology) and dropped his two companions, Gharib of Morocco and Merga of Ethiopia. In that moment, the commentators barely acknowledged the importance of Wansiru's move, which indeed was the race winner. All in all, I found the NBC presentation disappointingly bland.
RAI in Italy stayed with the leaders 98 percent of the time. It actually was a bit too much of a focus on them. It would have been nice to get a brief glimpse or two of the six through 20 or so guys.
Funny thing, even though I know very little Italian, it was pretty obvious the guys doing the broadcast sucked. There was one two or three minute stretch, well into the race -- in fact, not long before Wansiru/Wanjiru disconnected -- in which I heard "Kobe Bryant" mentioned several times....
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