The latest edition of the Winter Olympics is scheduled to start Friday in PyeongChang.
If you weren’t aware of the impending start in wouldn’t exactly surprise me. The ‘buzz’ over this edition of the Winter Games is in my estimation about as quiet as it’s ever been.
There are some obvious reasons for the seemingly widespread disinterest starting with the chosen site location in South Korea.
PyeongChang is about as far from our country as you can get on this old world and that means a dramatic difference in terms of the time of day the sporting events will be live should you want to tune in in Canada. It will be a situation where DVRs will be working overtime to record events that are happening in the middle of our nights.
While I am a huge fan of the DVR, recording various hockey, basketball and CFL games so that I can breeze through more quickly, I typically don’t wait hours for the view. I like using the DVR to get about an hour ahead and then I can dive in a speed watch.
But that would mean early to rise to watch the Olympics with breakfast before delving into the day, and I am not sure how popular that will be among sport fans. Two weeks of trying to cram your Olympic coverage in by getting up extra early is not very appealing.
And you can’t really leave it until the next evening because getting through the entire day without the results being heard over the office radio, via a bud’s email, or through some other social media, seems infinitesimal.
Now I suppose there are those out there who can happily watch a taped sporting event knowing its outcome beforehand, but I am not one of those people. Yes I can appreciate the process taken to achieve victory, the thrill of a nice goal as an example, but ultimately I watch to see who wins, and knowing that ahead of the viewing means hitting my delete button and moving on.
So the time difference is one reason I suspect these Games seem to be arriving less heralded than those of recent memory.
The other reason which seems quite obvious is that the best hockey players in the world, those on the men’s side in any case, are not part of these Games.
In Canada the two medals at the Winter Olympics most coveted by sports fans are those handed out in hockey. We live, and die, by how our teams do. At recent Olympics we have held high hopes, and rightfully so, because the team was made up of the very best, players who had achieved greatness already in the National Hockey League.
The NHL by allowing the best players to don the jerseys of their countries in the Olympics allowed for the greatest showcase of what the sport of hockey is.
And then along comes the PyeongChang Games and the best-on-best men’s hockey event is lost to the stubbornness and greed of the board room.
While I tend to want to lay all the blame at the feet of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, he is not alone in wearing the blame on this. While he dreams his made up world cup event can be all that the Olympics are, he is wrong. On a world stage the Olympics shine brightest, and attract the most eyes to build a sport’s stature.
That Bettman was not doing more to build on that reality by making sure a deal that would allow NHL participation in these Games show’s shortsightedness on his part.
But as I noted, he is not alone in terms of blame; the International Ice Hockey Federation and the International Olympic Committee as equally culpable in this one.
That the NHL, IIHF and IOC couldn’t get a deal done arguing who would pay, and who would get the profits instead of looking beyond dollars to the good of the sport is a sad example of how greed trumps the ideals the Olympics are supposed to stand for.
The situation has turned some people off the entire Games, and I can understand why.
Still we should not punish the players on this edition of Team Canada. They were chosen to take up the flag in a sense, and while what the results will be is very much a mystery, you know as Canadian hockey players on an international stage they will work hard and skate every shift proud of the jersey they are wearing.
Beyond hockey and curling, the other sport where Canadian expectations always run high, who our legitimate medal hopefuls are is unclear to me, I simply haven’t tuned in to the seeming limited hype leading up to PyeongChang.
And, I suspect most of my attention for these Games will be limited to a daily dose of social media updates, and summarized highlight packages rather than in-depth, live action viewings, which is something of a pity because the Winter Olympics are often where individual athletes in sports we rarely pay attention to emerge as heroes.
