MSNBC keeps running a little promo calling itself America’s most trusted news source. Therein, awestruck faces turn to the network as Wall Street crashes or the Berlin Wall crumbles or some other cataclysmic world event demands authoritative explanation.
Last week America’s most trusted news source spent a lot of time on bikini-clad women cavorting in the sand between bursts of music, reminiscent of a tourist disco on Crete, circa 1982. Presumably this trustworthy weekday programming choice has been enlivening many a broker’s office.
NBC has been doing its best to treat this event like any other–generally not showing us the accompanying entertainment of skimpily clad dancers, for example, and analyzing the dickens out of every dive Misty May takes into the sand. But the semantic combination of Mediterranean sun, perfect sand, the Aegean Sea, shades, tattoos, an in-house DJ and much naked flesh works against these noble aims.
We can smell a party across the living room. We start wondering if it’s too early for a beer. We can see that those smart Greeks actually have shown up to watch this one.
These are the most sexualized Olympics ever on television, not because NBC wants them to be but because the events and the athletes of the world have moved inexorably in that direction. The lines between competitive sport, live entertainment and recreation have disappeared.
In the vacation-loving, liberal-thinking, flesh-baring new Europe, it’s all about quality of life. Professionalism begets the need for marketability, which begets sex. And there’s nothing Bob Costas can do to stop it.
By Saturday morning NBC had stopped fighting the inevitable and had pulled out the thrashing guitar soundtrack and lines like “the Olympic beach volleyball stadium is rocking.” Before long we were being told by Karch Kiraly that Elaine Young “loves it hot” (the weather) and we heard all about how some players bring their boyfriends or girlfriends to their events and “make a vacation of it.”
“That may not be the proper attitude to win a medal,” Kiraly huffed, temporarily scared that we might start thinking–how dare we!–that this whole affair is a tad, er, recreational in nature, “but they enjoy what they do.” Sure. And NBC no doubt enjoys bringing it to us.
Regular viewers of NBC prime time have learned by now that whenever Costas says, at 7:05 p.m. Central, the words “but first,” that means we’re about to very briefly watch an event the Americans did not win.
So it went with regular old gym-bound women’s volleyball Friday night. Such has been the level of exposure for the stuff on the sand, it’s likely that plenty of viewers were surprised to see a sprung floor, potbellied coaches and absolutely no bikinis.
Despite the best efforts of the brilliant and evocatively named American player Logan Tom–now there’s a moniker that suggests a true athletic pioneer in the grand old fashion–the Americans went down. They played brilliantly, but they somehow evoked an old-fashioned sense of struggle, not a party with a golden ice bucket. How yesterday they were.
“Michael Phelps in 16 minutes,” it kept flashing on the screen.
