Sadie Frown of the Week: NBC's Olympic Coverage

Sadie and I were all fired up this afternoon. We were planning on watching the US/Canada hockey game. It would have been Sadie's first hockey game and I just know that she would have loved the sport. After all she loves football and baseball and just seems to be a sports-loving-girl.

We'd gone out with Nani and Grumpa and Nini and Gigi for some late afternoon Geocaching, but we made sure that we were home in time for the game... or almost in time... Sadie and I rushed in three minutes after the game had started, flipped on NBC... and found.... Russia playing the Czech Republic...

I took a deep breath. Maybe they would switch over afterwards. Or maybe it would start from the beginning after the Russian/Czech game ended. I flipped onto the satellite info and it said Russian/Czech hockey game, skiing, ice dancing...

Another deep breath. I reread the description. I flipped ahead to see if it would be on later. No sign of American/Canadian hockey anywhere.

So I flipped up to USA (the channel), which has had some Olympic events (they must be owned by the network or something). They were showing Pirates of the Caribbean. But I still had hope.

I flipped up to CNBC. Curling. Norway vs. Sweden if I remember correctly. Now Norway's red, white and blue checkered pants are pretty awesome, but we were looking for US/Canada hockey! The curling was almost over though, so I looked ahead to see what was on next... Sports Illustrated Swim Suit Models... seriously?!?! Instead of one of the major events for the North American teams in the Winter Olympics.

We went back to NBC, hoping that they might have come to their senses and found a recap of the 1980 Lake Placid USA/USSR match up. Now as interesting as this would have been as an intro to the game today or as a nice touch to add at intermission, it was downright insulting to those of us who knew the game was on and couldn't find it!

Paul had woken up to see the game (he's still on night duty) and finally found an explanation online. The game had been switched to MSNBC. We looked at the satellite menu and found that we would have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to get the game since we don't have the channel as part of my parent's package (and their package has tons of channels! It's crazy!).

So we are mighty annoyed. Paul and I have both been reminiscing about the days when the Olympics were on pretty much around the clock instead of select events with the favorites shown at 11pm (not everyone has Tivo!). This morning when we got home from Mass we checked NBC to see what even was on... any guesses to what it was? "Paid Programming."

I think NBC has proven that they aren't worthy of the Olympics. It's time to pass the responsibility on to someone who will do a good job and actually show the events that people want to see.

Maybe they can even find a network that shows the good events at a reasonable hour instead of in the middle of the night! I would have missed out on spending fourth grade obsessing over ice skating if they only showed it at 10 o'clock at night! The little kids that are the most excited about it are already in bed by then!