The sorry state of BBC sports coverage

So I'm a bit of an Olympics junkie. As much as I think the Games are an overly commercial spectacle, and its lofty ideals have been hijacked by corporate greed, doping, bad judging and probably the Russian Mafia, I still love to watch.

But this year I'm in Ireland, and the Irish couldn't give a toss about the Winter Olympics - I'm guessing because there are no horses involved (it's weird how much they love their horses). Though I have to say that I'm really surpirsed that they haven't embraced curling yet. Didn't anyone tell them that the sport involves drinking?

Anyway, since it's far more fascinating to watch Big Bruvva, or whatever the crap reality show of the moment is, RTE, the ever-fabulous Irish Broadcaster, is not showing ANY of the Olympics. Not even a 1/2 hour highlight show. Why would you, when Blackrock are playing Terenure in Rugby? Never heard of Blackrock and Terenure? Well they're suburbs of Dublin - and they're both even on the same side of the Liffey. Yep, high quality international-level sports matches are being played right here in Dublin, preventing the broadcaster from showing a little-known sporting event that is held only once every four years.

Luckily, I get BBC2. Unluckily, they only seem committed to showing about two hours of coverage a day. So far, my verdict is that the BBC coverage is really lacking. You would think that if they're only broadcasting for two hours a day, they would try to cram in as much sports and results as possible. Oh no, instead today I watched an interview with Andre Bochelli, who will be singing in the closing ceremony, an interview with an American skier, and an interview with Herman Meier. They did mention that Germany has two gold medals, Norway - 1, US - 1, and Canada - 1, but didn't mention in which sports these medals were won. They likewise didn't mention any silver or bronze winners. It makes me long for the days of watching American coverage where they would tell you all about an event - as long as an American was involved.

I knew there would be problems during the coverage of the opening ceremony. I started to count how many times they mentioned Torvill & Dean (way too many). That was like, so 1984. It's almost annoying as "Miracle on Ice", except that American Olympic coverage is on 24/7. The commentators glossed over the Canadians coming in because they were still rabbiting on about Sarajevo from when the Bosnia & Herzegovina team came in earlier. They then quickly added, "Canada is great in team sports. The mens & womens team won gold in ice hockey in 2002, made sweeter by beating the Americans, and they have good curling teams - oh and they might play Great Britain, blah blah blah, UK women's curling supremacy, blah blah blah." In the pre-Olympics show, they couldn't say "Canada's gold medal win in hockey" (mens or womens), without adding "made all the sweeter by beating the US" every single time.

Just as an aside, what's up with the lumberjack chic motif of the Canadian uniforms?

Today they covered the women's moguls final, and the short-programme of the pairs figure skating, but they cut away from that to show a bit of luge. They then did a 2-minute highlight montage that showed a German biathelete (I'm guessing one of the medals won today), Jennifer Heil's mogul run, and impressively a couple of clips of the Sweden-Russia women's hockey game. The clips were kind of grainy and far away so I have no idea where they got the coverage from, but they better start buying from the CBC by the time the good games get underway. You could hardly see the players at all because they only had an angle that showed most of the ice surface, which ensures that you can't see any of the action. It looked like they were showing a clip from the 1970's, and for all I know, they were. They then quickly mentioned that currently Canada is beating Italy 13-0 before signing off for the evening.

The BBC should stick with covering cricket and buy coverage from a real sports network.

I checked through the TV guide, and they don't seem to be planning on covering any of the hockey in detail. There is an Australian pub here that shows Hockey Night in Canada games on Sunday afternoons - but only when it doesn't interfere with rugby. Well, as luck would have it, the Six Nations Rugby Tournament is on now - ensuring that the Men's Gold Medal game won't be shown anywhere. Bah. They hold the damn rugby every year and it's just an excuse for the Brits and Irish to drink away the month that is February, so I don't know why they can't postpone it for the Olympics and drink away March instead.