- Opinion by PJ TAYLOR
Bravo, Paris! Allez France! Olympic Games – we’re missing you. And it’s only been two days.
Back to reality. Oh, there’s still a cold winter out there.
If you had time over the past three weeks to soak up the coverage of the exhilarating 33rd Olympiad you’ll have noticed how magnificent the coverage was, and it was literally, everywhere.
In little old Nouvelle-Zélande, some 18,500km from the warm and sunny French capital and other spectacular each-catching venues. Just staggering.
Smartphones, fibre and the internet have changed the world (that statement sounds like granddad just woke up).
Olympic broadcasts and news of them readily available in the palm of the hand 24 hours, seven days a week.
For a global sporting event that used to be a tight 14 days and now spills over to 16. One thing Kiwis who constantly consumed the Games will be getting back, of course, is uninterrupted sleep, or you’d like to think so.
Back in the old days, when this writer started viewing Olympic Games from afar in 1972 (Munich) and 1976 (Montreal), we got coverage on one TV channel in the early days of colour transmission.
Grainy black and white previous to that, stretching back to the 1960s. And it wasn’t going non-stop, wall-to-wall.
Pioneering journalists and commentators have always been a lead carrier of news of the Olympics for a century on radio, a medium still vital in its global information dissemination.
And in the really old days, along with radio and before TV, film was flown back to Aotearoa from the Games and screened at cinemas, ala Pathé News, while newspapers have also been the constant publisher of the Olympics since they recommenced in the late 1800s.
Life was much more simplistic then. People would wait for news of the Olympics to be sent by sea, air, down phone lines and across news wires. They’d do the same for news of the All Blacks abroad. And Hillary.
The Games now leaves no one waiting. Anyone, and that means everyone, on this planet with a computer-phone can hook up. Fees can apply. A viewing audience in the billions.
Cue – dollar signs; cash register “ca-ching”. That’s a lot of folk absorbing the greatest selection of the world’s leading and attractive sports played out by the planet’s best competitors. An organiser’s and publisher’s and advertiser’s dream.
As there’s a cost of living crisis, and because he’s a traditionalist, this writer watched the Olympics on one channel, Sky TV’s Sky Open, and was impressed.
Full credit to the viewers who subscribed to the 12-channel package, it must have been amazing watching, but with only one channel, there’s no need to flick around and the decision of what to watch is made.
Sky Open’s broadcast content was the same as Sky Gold’s, transmitting day and night for the Games’ duration. And they didn’t miss any of the big moments for Kiwi athletes, including all the medal-winning achievements that made us cry with pride.
Together with Olympics coverage on SCNZ sports radio, in other TV news bulletins, and a skimming of newspapers, for people that couldn’t afford pay-for-view Games broadcasts, it was refreshing in this modern technology and information age that there was plenty of free-to-air action from Paris to enjoy and get excited about.
One hopes it will be the same for 2028 from Los Angeles.
