Channel Seven secured the broadcast rights for the 2008 Beijing Olympics in Australia and to mark the event, Channel 7 essentially blocked out all other shows over the two week period while the Olympics were on to broadcast it continuously.

I couldn’t believe that while broadcasting the Olympics close to 24 hours per day, that they managed to show so little of the sports on offer. If you look into that just a little bit, it becomes clearer quite quickly:

• If you replay the same three rounds of the diving five times in one day, a lot of time is burnt that could have been spent diversifying what they were showing.
• If you interview the same athlete four times, ask the same questions and and expect to get different responses – as the saying goes, it is the definition of insanity.
• If you re-interview the same set of athletes on different shows, continue to ask the same questions in point 2 a different way and still expect to get a different response – you get the point.
• Promote only the sports that have an Australian in it
• Promote only the sports that have an Australian in it and result in some sort of achievement
• All but flatly ignore the effort and dedication put in by every other athlete that did not get a medal or break some sort of record
• Televise two rounds of a given sport (see point 4) then ignore it if/when point 4 ceases to be relevant
• Continue to replay the same event over and over again, hang on – I mentioned that in point 1
• Fill time in my promoting yet another bullshit excuse to interview more athletes, hoping to get the tear jerking emotional response which you didn’t receive the last 3 times you interviewed them; meanwhile not showing the vast array of other sports available.

The Olympics are about pitting the worlds greatest athletes against one another in a competition that comes round once every four years. It will clearly come as a shock to Channel 7 that it is not about continuously interviewing and re-interviewing the same athletes and showing the same heats of the same sports over and over again.

I suppose we should be happy that Michel Phelps and Usain Bolt aren’t Australian or we’d still be hearing about it.