The 2012 London Olympics are in full swing this week, with some of my favorite events: swimming and gymnastics. I'll probably go back to actually getting some things accomplished during week two when track and field gets going, instead of being addicted to the Olympic coverage like I have been so far.
Ever since I watched a bunch of my brother's high school swim meets, I've really enjoyed watching swimming, and diving as well. So many great stories in the pool for this Olympics. Rising teenage star Missy Franklin, Ryan Lochte getting some attention over American rival Michael Phelps, who's showing that he might just be human after all.
Gymnastics is one of those must-watch events every four years during the Olympics. I remember watching Team USA in women's gymnastics win team gold in 1996 at the Atlanta games. Kerri Strug's vault? I mean, c'mon. That was pretty awesome.
Olympic spoilers
I do have a gripe so far with these Olympic games: I've been spoiled. And I know I'm not the only one.
It's just a couple days into competition, and I have been spoiled on results of some of the marquee events. In the age of constant and in-your-face social media, it makes sense that results and updates are available as they happen online. But there's this little issue of the six-hour time difference from the central time zone to London.
I'll use Twitter as an example because, let's face it, I love Twitter. If you listen to my co-worker Kay, I need a Twitter-vention. I also love the combination of Twitter and sports. I would love to send Olympic Tweets, if they weren't seemingly meaningless because everyone already knows the results hours before the Olympic coverage airs on NBC.
I've been spoiled on both the men's and women's gymnastics team final results for the United States, races for Phelps, other various swimming events and the devastation of Jordyn Wieber not making it into the all-around final (That's a topic for another blog.). Most of the time, I saw Tweets with the results. It even caused me to close my Tweet Deck today, but I was still spoiled by looking at Facebook and hearing about results from other people.
So much excitement is taken out of watching the Olympics if you already know what's going to happen at the end. I've still been watching, but it isn't the same.
New online Olympic etiquette, please
I have a proposal for how results might be better handled on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook, at least for news outlets, blogs or publications. It's fine to post about the Olympics before they've aired, just don't include spoilers in the initial post. Make reference to Olympic spoilers, then provide a link to another web page so users can choose to look at what happened.
In a perfect world, I'd prefer everyone to keep quiet until everything airs. I know that's not going to happen, but it would be nice if people could try and be a little respectful of others who still want to be surprised.
Prime example? I had the epic battle in 1998 between figure skaters Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan spoiled for me. My fifth-grade teacher asked the class if anyone had heard who won gold. A classmate answered. Then class went on. It was all pretty casual. I guess, clearly, it bothered me because I still remember that today.
Please, don't be a spoiler.
No comments:
Post a Comment