Poor coverage of Olypmic sailing

flaming said:
Iplayer is the place for the sailing races. Coverage is actually quite good I think. Though I do wish they'd replace that commentator though. Watching the Nacra medal race yesterday he seemed staggered that one boat was penalised "because it had the inside line". To anyone who'd ever raced it was a very clear and obvious foul. Ian Walker sounded exasperated constantly correcting him.
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Without a doubt, the coverage overall is pretty good, you can view that days racing usually shortly after 11pm. Have to agree Ian does sound a little exasperated at times, but in fairness to Ian and the BBC would Ian do a good job on his own? certainly it would not allow him to look at other races and results if the sole commentator, although Shirley does cover other races to a lesser extent.
The only annoying day I have seen is a coupe of days ago where they concentrated solely on the women's races whilst Giles was doing well, a little coverage of that race would have been nice along with some of the other races going on.
 
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There are two obvious reasons why there is less sailing tham cycling for example. One is that there are fewer chances of british medals ( is there any other reason but medals for covering horse dancing for example) and the other is the competitions in most sports are knockouts and short duration. They arent regatta format.

I'm a life long sailor but the sailing bores me. Like sex, its something to do rather than watch.
 
birdseye said:
There are two obvious reasons why there is less sailing tham cycling for example. One is that there are fewer chances of british medals ( is there any other reason but medals for covering horse dancing for example)
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Not so, you do not understand how large organizations work.

Take swimming. For 30 years the BBC has sent a large sports teams to cover Olympic swimming even when for a long period British Olympic sailors were bringing home a much larger collection of medals then the swimmers.

There are 4 factors that influence coverage:

  1. Watchability. Obviously the 100m sprint or horse jumping is more exciting per minute than round 9 of the 470 regatta.
  2. Basic human skills. All humans learn to run and jump and so can relate to sports around these skills. Much the same is true for cycling, swimming and kicking a football.
  3. Medal potential. How many Britons want to see China get a clean sweep of 5 badminton golds even though the sport scores well on watchability.
  4. Unfortunately the most influential factor that determines how much TV coverage of each sport we see is down to BBC culture and rivalry among established cliques.
There are established groups of consultants, ex. medalists and in-house commentators associated with each sport. By virtue of historical precedent these people expect to be called on to join the Olympic BBC gravy train. Off camera at each Olympics they will develop social bonds with the BBC executives who commission all this stuff and back home in the UK there will be invitations to dinner parties, weekends at fancy country retreats and French holiday homes. Tame journalists who can be relied on to promote certain sports coverage will join these social groups.

Then the planning for the next Olympics starts and it takes a brave person to upset the status quo and say we are halving the budget and people covering swimming in 2016 and allocating that money to sailing. Now stir in some BBC liberal politics and you have an explanation for what we see on TV.
 
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jonjo5 said:
There are 4 factors that influence coverage:

  1. Watchability.
  2. Basic human skills.
  3. Medal potential.
  4. Unfortunately the most influential factor that determines how much TV coverage of each sport we see is down to BBC culture and rivalry among established cliques.
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Two more factors:
  • Public interest. Go to any swimming pool in the country at 7am and you'll find young people practicing for competition. Competitive swimming is a huge sport - I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are a hundred times more competitive swimmers than there are dinghy racers. As for dressage ... the Pony Club has about 30,000 members, of whom about 16,000 attend Pony Club camps each year. I am quite sure that BBC channel controllers will be poring over the viewing figures for the Olympics, working out what people want to see and what they don't.
  • Comprehensibility. It's easy to see what swimmers are trying to do. Jump in there, swim up and down so many times and get to the end first. Cycling is the same, sort of - even though there a lots of different cycle race formats with different rules, the basic principle of all of them is easy to grasp: ride your bike as fast as you can from A to B. Sailing is very different. The boats go in all sorts of different directions, the rules are abstruse and there have already been 109 protests at Rio. Who wants to watch a sport where the winner is decided by legal argument?
 
JumbleDuck said:
Two more factors:
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I think you restated my "watchability" and "basic human skills" criteria using different language.

I thought that sailing was one of the UK's largest participation sports. Anyhow I would not expect BBC sailing coverage to approach more than 10% of swimming or cycling but surely they can do better than a couple of 90 second handovers to Shirley Robinson each day to announce a new medal prospect. 10 minutes of quality sailing coverage per day would represent an advance on what we have.

The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic sailing coverage. Prompted by a few positive comments about iPlayer recorded sailing material I sampled two examples today and found it very disappointing. The first had a deep sport commentator voice and offered nothing but generic sports commentary, it had no insight and could have been delivered by someone with no knowledge of sailing. The viewer got nothing beyond statements of the blinding obvious such as who got to a mark first and this was tarted up with simple researched data lookup such as crew names and scores in previous heats. There was absolutely no comment on the actual sailing e.g. mistakes, poor sailing handling or good tactics.
 
jonjo5 said:
I think you restated my "watchability" and "basic human skills" criteria using different language.
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I don't think so. Yours are good points (well, except the last, which I thought was a bit over the top) but as well as being watchable, a sport really has to be understandable, and it helps if as well as using basic human skills it also has a high number of participants in the potential viewing population.

The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic sailing coverage.
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Perhaps you notice that because you know about sailing, and meanwhile cycling fans are saying "The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic cycling coverage", badminton fans are saying "The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic badminton coverage", swimming fans are saying "The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic swimming coverage" and so on ...

Aside: what beats me about swimming and cycling is why they effectively find so many different ways to hold the same event. They seem to be the only two sports in which it's common for competitors to win lots of medals, and I can see why. If you can ride a bike fast, or swim fast then you clearly can win lots of things which require you to ride a bike fast, or swim fast.
 
JumbleDuck said:
Perhaps you notice that because you know about sailing, and meanwhile cycling fans are saying "The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic cycling coverage", badminton fans are saying "The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic badminton coverage", swimming fans are saying "The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic swimming coverage" and so on ...
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Nope this just demonstrates you have not listened to diving and sailing commentary.
 
jonjo5 said:
Nope this just demonstrates you have not listened to diving and sailing commentary.
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Indeed I have not, people jumping into ponds and sailing in triangles holding little or no interest for me. Anyway, I don't have a television. However, I stick to my point that people who know about something are more likely to find deficiencies in press coverage of it than members of the general public ... even if the coverage is perfectly adequate for the general public.
 
anoccasionalyachtsman said:
It must be difficult to cover it properly on a limited budget. The BBC only has 455 staff out there and I read that they outnumber UK competitors.
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That's another matter, of course. I suppose they have the excuse of dozens of simultaneous events ... they manage to send almost as many to Glastonbury to film a handful of stages.
 
Fishing is the UK's most popular participation sport but heaven forbid that it becomes a Olympic sport and televised.
jonjo5 said:
I think you restated my "watchability" and "basic human skills" criteria using different language.

I thought that sailing was one of the UK's largest participation sports. Anyhow I would not expect BBC sailing coverage to approach more than 10% of swimming or cycling but surely they can do better than a couple of 90 second handovers to Shirley Robinson each day to announce a new medal prospect. 10 minutes of quality sailing coverage per day would represent an advance on what we have.

The BBC does not seem motivated to deliver a half decent job of their Olympic sailing coverage. Prompted by a few positive comments about iPlayer recorded sailing material I sampled two examples today and found it very disappointing. The first had a deep sport commentator voice and offered nothing but generic sports commentary, it had no insight and could have been delivered by someone with no knowledge of sailing. The viewer got nothing beyond statements of the blinding obvious such as who got to a mark first and this was tarted up with simple researched data lookup such as crew names and scores in previous heats. There was absolutely no comment on the actual sailing e.g. mistakes, poor sailing handling or good tactics.
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Is it conceivable that the Olympics could host one design yacht racing, one yacht per country, somewhere between 35-45ft? Perhaps a selection from the dinghy sailors? Match racing with knockouts or perhaps the whole fleet in a series of 6 races?
 
MikeBz said:
Sailing probably stemmed from the need to deliver goods, but in both cases things have changed considerably.

The BBC clearly doesn't have an unlimited budget so it's no surprise they don't have chunks of money to pour into coverage of every sport. Sailing is expensive to cover well. It wouldn't cost a lot to put wee cameras on the boats (the boats are fitted with something - not sure if it has cameras in it or whether it's just a super-sized GPS tracker) but to convert all the output into something coherent would be another matter. At least it gets a lot more airtime than it used to. The live feed coverage/commentary they are providing isn't too bad if you can tune in to Ian Walker and tune out the infuriatingly repetitive carp that the other bloke spouts most of the time.
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The sport feeds come from Olympic Broadcasting Services, BBC add Commentary and Interviews.
 
Well well now. In todays Daily Telegraph sports section there is a piece by varying reporters/commentators on the Olympics such as Athlete of the Games, Unexpected Pleasure, My British Hero, Favourite Venue etc. etc.
One of the columns is "One Sport I would ditch for Tokyo 2020" with varying responses. However Oliver Brown states "Sailing. Officials would never countenance dropping a sport that had been part of the programme since 1896, but it still makes for the least engaging spectator experience''.
Other suggestions resulted in Football, Rhythmic Gymnastics, golf, Walking etc. Page 10 & 11 of todays Sport Section.
 
salignac said:
Other suggestions resulted in Football, Rhythmic Gymnastics, golf, Walking etc. Page 10 & 11 of todays Sport Section.
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Walking should go because it is a perversion of the concept of a sport. When challenged to get from A to B quickly the human body is designed to run. A so-called sport that challenges a human to move quickly on foot but bans running is the invention of a truly perverted mind.
 
jonjo5 said:
Walking should go because it is a perversion of the concept of a sport. When challenged to get from A to B quickly the human body is designed to run. A so-called sport that challenges a human to move quickly on foot but bans running is the invention of a truly perverted mind.
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Agreed. I'd also ditch everything else that is limited to people who can't do it as well as the best ... but without women's medals the BBC wouldn't be nearly as bursting with pride.
 
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