I think I’ve finally figured out why NBC’s Olympics coverage is so … frustrating. It’s designed for people who hate sports and don’t want to watch them. Otherwise this makes no sense.
Last night, a 19-year-old runner from Grenada named Kirani James won the 400-meter race by a substantial number of feet…. This was all wonderful but, for some reason, the entire NBC broadcast crew decided that James’s talent and personality weren’t enough to carry the story. Or, perhaps, the story just wasn’t American enough. So they larded up their coverage with paeans to the moment in 1983 when Ronald Reagan arranged to liberate Grenada from the clutches of Cuban construction workers.
And in the amount of time they were going on about Ronald Reagan, they could have covered several pole vault attempts and maybe some wrestling.