That Tweet--sent out by a reporter during the men's alpine skiing "Super G" final early this morning Central time--is perfectly representative of the tension in which we Olympics zealots exist during this transitional period for communications media.
There are so many different ways to follow the events of the Sochi Games. I can choose on which events I want to focus my attention, and I can even choose from among different perspectives on which I want to view them (i.e., I wonder what it's like to follow the Olympics as a Latvian). And then there are all the choices around timing. I can wait to consume what Bob Costas/Matt Lauer/Meredith Vierra want to serve me in the prime-time NBC newsreel. Or, I can get dispatches on the proceedings as they are updated and delivered to me over the course the day through various news outlets. Or, I can follow events as they happen through results recording at sites such as Sochi2014.com, live video streams at NBCOlympics.com or crowd-sourced, near-real-time documentation through social media.
But the pursuit of the most meaningful Olympics experience possible can be pretty worrisome and unsatisfying. It's easy for the whole endeavor to turn into another thing on which one feels behind (oh, yeah, I also need to get together my taxes, too). And stuff like unintended glitches with synchronicity--such as the one illustrated by the Tweet above, where someone's video-stream drama is spoiled by a stray social-media remark because of issues around packet latency--can be a real bummer.
I am a staunch believer that The Internet Is Amazing™. But I believe that it's pretty easy to flood the fun out of stuff now with choice anxiety and IT frustrations.
Yesterday, I was at Rough River State Resort Park in Falls of Rough, Ky., during the Team USA-Russia men's hockey game that the United States ended up winning in a shootout, 3-2. It was a great place to be. Amid the snow and mid-century-modern, institutional architecture, I imagined our being at an Olympic athletes village.
But there were some problems, too. The lodge's cable package does not include NBC Sports Network, so I ended up instead putting MSNBC on the TV to watch the Switzerland-Russia women's hockey game and tuning in the live stream of the men's game on my laptop. I was able to keep abreast of what was going on, for the most part. But buffering issues kept plaguing the video over the guest Wi-Fi, so it kept falling farther and farther behind the more and more enthusiastic Twitter traffic I was also following from Sochi.
By the time the hockey game boiled down to the shootout, I was so agitated and on edge that I limited myself to simply watching for the appearance of empty white or blacked-in dots at Sochi2014.com's page for the game. Then, when T.J. Oshie, a 27-year-old from Warroad, Minn., accounted for his fourth blacked-in dot in six shootout tries and I realized that it had actually given Team USA the win, I erupted.
And when I erupted, I erupted right along with a lot of the rest of the country and even the world. And that's a very, very neat feeling.
But you know what was an amazing feeling?
I know it's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison. I was 11. Rooting for the American college students against the USSR in 1980 was different than rooting for the NHL stars on Team USA against the NHL stars on the Russian Federation team in 2014. Also, that 1980 win clinched the U.S. hockey team a medal; this squad hasn't won anything yet.
Still, there are some aspects of watching stuff like the Olympics on TV in the big-three-networks era that I need to adapt for today--something about setting myself up to just receive the good as opposed to concentrating on capturing the best. I didn't get to pay much attention to the Olympics today; I know how that Super-G skiing final came out, but, otherwise, I'm just watching the prime-time show on NBC tonight and seeing what happens.
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