Magnificent Two Weeks Over

It’s over. After seventeen days we have seen the completion of the 29^th Olympiad in Beijing, China.

Many people asked me why I didn’t post to my blog during that time. Everyone that reads here knows how much I enjoy the Olympics and know that it’s a big part of my research. And I have a very good reason why I did not post to my blog during that time.

I was actually watching the Olympics.

I had my TiVo working overtime. In addition to the content analyses that I’m working on based on NBC’s prime time coverage I was working toward updating my library of sports clips for future experiments. My goal was to get a little bit of every sport, and if possible getting clips of both male and female athletes competing in each. Some days I had my TiVo recording as much as 31 hours of coverage from the NBC family of networks: MSNBC, CNBC, USA, and Oxygen.

I figure that my TiVo over those 17 days recorded nearly 400 hours of Olympics. And while I watched a good chunk, I also fast forwarded through a lot of it. My goal in finding the sports for my collection were to have competitions that did not feature American athletes. If used in an experiment I wanted participants to feel as neutral as possible about the participants – I don’t want a feeling of patriotism and national pride to overtake any possible effects I would be researching.

Overall, I think I was relatively successful in my task. There were three sports that were not broadcast at all on any of the networks carrying the Olympics: judo, sailing, and taekwondo. Also, the networks did not broadcast men participating in the modern pentathlon – though they did broadcast the women’s competition. And then of what was supposed to be broadcast I did not get footage of women’s archery, women’s pairs in whitewater canoeing/kayaking, and men’s triathlon. I do not believe that, even though they were in the broadcast schedule, that the first two actually made it to air. And when it comes to the triathlon it was a victim of a choice I made – I chose to record the network that was airing men’s trampoline instead.

It was a great Games with many memorable moments. I can’t wait for February 12, 2010 for the upcoming Winter Games in Vancouver and for July 27, 2012 when the Summer Olympics will return in London.