No Se Nada

As a very interested athlete, I grew more and more annoyed each passing Olympic day with the NY Times sports coverage of the games.

The worst offender was Selena Roberts and her column after sour-pussed column, written as if she had been ass-grabbed before the games by Bode Miller and so had a strong vendetta against him and everything else American.

It went beyond Roberts, though, and the consistently negative and catty coverage was building on my psyche. The Times made the athletes pay unfairly for the overhyping sins of the USOC, advertisers and the media. Further, the Times' editors seemed to have conducted a poll of Americans and found that they were only interested in alpine skiing and consistently snide recounts of failure.

Today was the culmination of my frustration. Roberts again had a predictably negative, bratty, "these guys suck" column, but the ultimate sin was what was not covered on the front page in order to make more space for more drawn-out negativity.

Today the Times had the opportunity to showcase two defining moments of the games: Apolo Ohno winning the 500m short track and being so thrilled and amazed at his victory that you could see the emotional release exploding from every square millimeter of his face. People in my house were crying when he won. He won after dumpster trucks full of pressure, most of it probably self-imposed, as NBC showed nightly videozines of the monastic lifestyle he adopted in the past two years preparing for his few races in these games. The Times recapped this hard-work-turned-success story on page 8 of the SportsSunday.

What's more, in reporting on the Ohno win, the Times decided it had to rehash details of the futility-of-everybody else story that had already been covered and covered and covered some more. In the Ohno story, the Times takes two big paragraphs to recount, again and in this order, Chad Hedrick's cluelessness, Shani Davis' decline of offer to skate in the relay, the futility of Bode, the primadonnaness of Johhny Weir, women's hockey's stumble to the Swedes, the grab-fall of Lindsey Jacobellis, and on and on. (Oh, they did have a picture of Ohno on the front page of the paper. It was next to an article headlined "Miller's Last Olympic Stumble..." and you get the rest.)

Just as good as Ohno's win, if not U-S-A enough, was Clara Hughes of Canada winning the women's 5000m skate. When she crossed the finish and saw her time, her face erupted in ecstatic disbelief, and then, because she left it all on the ice, she collapsed after half a victory lap out of emotional and physical exhaustion, breathing hard - or sobbing, or probably both - into the ice. The Times? Covered it in a tiny recap article on page 6.

Instead, the Times decided to continue to focus on the genX losers of downhill. What does the SportsSunday have on its front page today? Two entirely predictable stories and one completely random:

• Headline mast by Serena Roberts with the headline "No Good-Conduct Medal for Ugly Americans"
  
  Thanks, Selena. Maybe if you had walked around a bit and found some other venues you could have found some positive stories. It's too bad these two weeks have been such a bust for you. And its too bad that, for two consistent weeks, you let your own expectations get in the way of your usually good columneering.
• Only other above-the-fold story was about the goalie of Sweden's hockey team. (???)
• Below the fold? Another predictable Harvey Araton column on Bode with the headline, "Did Not Finish? Miller Never Even Got Started"

Not who won, who did well, who did spectacular. Just another couple of stories, in a daily string of stories, about how poorly the downhill team did. And a pouty departure from the good stories so visible on TV. It was like the Times was at a different games. Yawn. Y-a-w-n. Y-aaaaa-wwww-nnnnn.