I had the privilege to watch on TV yesterday's historical 100 m dash where Usain Bolt, age 20 from Jamaica, broke the World record with a staggering 9.72.
The 100 m, in my opinion the purest expression of sport, the event that best interpreters the true spirit of "the games" in an explosion of human power, was a few minutes later put to comparison by the broadcasting station to a lengthy and advertisement loaded golf tournament.
With all respect to any kind of sport, I play golf myself, but what a contrast between the two events and what a pain to hear someone in the public yell "in the hole" every time a million dollar man is putting the ball not even close to the hole.
Unfortunately we will have to watch more and more golf, and other advertisement friendly sports, rather than the track and field events. I hope there will be some US athlete at the Olympics to capture the attention of the Americans and have the TV stations capitalize on that.
Now, making a comparison between a typical track and field event broad casted in Europe and US, we can watch in Europe two hours of program non stop on each event. We typically see in US only the US athletes, with background stories about their private life and family, the race itself with primary focus on them, a few times could not even know who won the race, if not an American. And of course a lot of advertisement to exclude sports events not of interest to the sponsors, I guess we will see a lot of basketball games, they use shoes !!! again nothing against basketball.
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Franco,
I share your sentiments. Although advertising can have good effects, take Google, it also pollutes everything; the highways (everywhere but in VT), the TV, the newspapers.
On the other hand , without sponsoring by advertisers we would not see any sports on TV.
Will TTO survive without advertising as a source of income?
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