As the 2018 Winter Olympics soon draw to a close, it's time for me to reflect on how these Olympics both resembled and differed from the games in years past. This year, amidst the stormy waters that constitute modern world politics, the Olympics were surprisingly non-political, and the coverage focused almost entirely on the athletes and their incredible achievements.
However, as seems to occur with every Olympics, I feel that the U.S. coverage of the games is always way too skewed to only talking about the American athletes, to the point where the announcers would rather discuss the surprising failings of an American athlete rather than the Japanese guy who actually won.
For example, in the men's solo figure skating event after the short program, American skating star Nathan Chen was in I believe 17th place. As in, nowhere near the lead. However, the announcers kept harping on his "shocking" falls and how nervous he looked, and he was even interviewed right after his short program and asked to "explain what was going through his mind."
Meanwhile, the skaters at the top of the leaderboard barely got a mention and certainly were not interviewed on American television, nor were their fantastic programs replayed nearly as much as Chen's disappointing performance.
I get that, of course, the U.S coverage of the Olympics is supposed to highlight the American achievements, but I personally watch the Olympics to see fantastic athletes compete in multiple sports, not to blindly root for the Americans to win everything even if they have very little chance of doing so. I'd much rather hear from the Swedish skier who, at age 35, finally won an Olympic gold medal than from the American skier who finished in 11th place.
The Olympics to me are about celebrating the athletic achievements of all countries, and despite what the U.S. coverage may have you believe, Americans are not the best in every Winter Olympic sport.
By heavily focusing on the American athletes, regardless of whether they win or lose their events, the Olympics coverage is missing a valuable opportunity to educate the audience about the sports and cultures of other countries, which is, to me, one of the big points of the Olympics in general.
As a young kid watching these Olympics, I would probably get the impression that the U.S. was expected to win the gold medal in just about every event, which was, realistically, very far from true. The coverage focuses so heavily on building up an unrealistic amount of hype for the American athletes, and then when they often don't live up to the enormous hype even more coverage goes into dissecting exactly what went wrong with their performance. It's fine for the coverage to be biased towards the U.S., but as a passive observer who is fine with the U.S. not being #1 in everything, I wish that I got a better sense of the incredibly diverse and global nature of the Olympic games while watching the TV coverage.
Overall though, I have very few complaints about this year's Olympics. I really enjoy the chance to watch sports I rarely see on television, pretend to care about hockey and marvel about how curling is considered a sport. However, I do think that there is room for more impartial, or at least more varied, Olympic coverage. 99% of the sports on American TV are played in the U.S., so when an opportunity comes once every few years to discuss the best athletes from other countries. Here's hoping that the state of the world will be slightly calmer by the time the 2022 Winter Olympics roll around, and that I'll learn more about the other figure skaters besides Nathan Chen.