As a sports loving Australian in the host country of the Olympic Games, it is with disappointment that I’m not seeing much of it. This time, it’s not because of time zone issues either. If anything, I should be able to see more Olympics than ever before.

After being led to believe that we would have 24 x 7 coverage on Eurosport (it was advertised during Le Tour) and having a television station sponsoring the event, our English language coverage can be described as mediocre. It starts at 9.30am and finishes at 7pm. The Games are finishing at about 11pm each night so to see a portion of this, we have been watching the Japanese channel. Mr Shallot is currently surfing to find an online channel instead. I’m improving my Japanese.

Mr Shallot is even more disappointed than me. He starts the countdown the next Games just as the last one finishes. As Mr Shallot has said “it’s difficult to be an armchair sportsmen when you can’t see it on TV”.

On top of this, I’m missing the expert commentary of Bruce McAvaney. That man has always researched the sport, knows the history, the likelihood of any particular person winning (and how they have been competing recently) as well as some useless bits of trivia (including statistics) which may come up at some point or another in a pub quiz.

I’m not convinced that the commentary team that we have endured here has done any research. This is compounded by the Olympic Organisers not giving them race radio during the cycling events. The experience of watching both the road races was diminished by the commentary team not knowing who any of the cyclists were, what they had competed in (except for the big names from Le Tour) or even having trouble determining which country the competitors were from unless they read it on their shirts first. They also appeared clueless when it came to the strategy behind a team cycling event.

The absence of the sporting clichés is also very noticeable. The only one they’ve used is “strung out like a rubber band”. What has happened to the classic “they’re so close you could throw a blanket over them” or “raising the bar”?

Looks like between Channel 7 and Bruce they have “raised the bar” too high and I now have unrealistic expectations of what I expect from my Olympic Experience. Seems like my Australian work colleagues feel the same way.

* Thanks to Men At Work for the title to this post.