From Johnny Weir’s Team, a Fresh Voice for NBCBy RICHARD SANDOMIRFEB. 21, 2014
NBC’s deployment of two figure skating announcing teams for the Sochi Games creates an opportunity to compare how each performed at an important moment.
Calling the women’s free skate live Thursday on NBCSN were Johnny Weir, Tara Lipinski and Terry Gannon, who have demonstrated the ability to deliver quick, critical analysis. Calling it on NBC in prime time in a recorded package were Scott Hamilton, Sandra Bezic and Tom Hammond, enthusiasts who are given as much to analysis of triples as they are to flowery praise.
The most important moment Thursday was how each team assessed Kim Yu-na, the defending Olympic champion and final skater of the night, who had been challenged by the Russian Adelina Sotnikova.
Shortly before Kim finished her program, Weir said that she looked “a bit tight,” and when she was done, he said quickly: “On a night when she needed to give more, she didn’t. She gave what she had to.”
As Lipinski watched the replay, she noted that the height of Kim’s jumps and her speed were less than usual, and that Kim had landed six triples to Sotnikova’s seven.
Hamilton noticed a shaky landing by Kim on a triple lutz. But when her skate was over, Hamilton and Bezic filled the Sochi air with superlatives. “She skated incredibly, perfectly,” Hamilton said. Bezic said the performance was “pulled back” from Kim’s free skate four years ago in Vancouver, yet called it “four years better, four years more mature, and spirited, and sensual.”
And even after Hamilton suggested that the scoring system might benefit Sotnikova — that the Russian’s technical elements were so high that Kim needed a “phenomenal artistic score” to win the gold medal — Bezic declared that Kim’s performance “was head and shoulders above anyone else.”
When Kim’s score gave her the silver, Weir was quick to offer needed context, saying of Kim: “On any other night this would be hers, but Adelina Sotnikova made the Olympic moment.”
Lipinski added: “You cannot skate safe in the Olympics.”
Hamilton and Bezic let the score stand on its own, without criticism. “She went up against an artist and threw everything she could at her in the air,” Hamilton said in his praise of Sotnikova.
As their broadcasts ended, neither announcing team raised the possibility of the controversy that has once again engulfed the judging of Olympic figure skating. By Friday morning, 1.7 million people had signed a petition at change.org demanding an investigation into the debated decision to award the gold to Sotnikova. The petition cites some prominent comments on Twitter, including one by Katarina Witt, the last woman to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals. “Shame Gold Medal,” she wrote. “Yuna Kim is a real queen.”
NBC Sports executives will not decide for a while how to use their two announcing teams in four years at the Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. In its first Olympics, the Weir team has earned raves; one friend told me that listening to their preternaturally smart analysis reminded him of hearing John McEnroe analyze tennis on television for the first time. Naturals.
Hard-core fans might want to keep the teams where they are. Weir, Lipinski and Gannon have been terrific, with the energy to call one routine after another for hours; they have also given viewers some real-time narration of skaters’ scores as they are being totaled, which they can see on monitors in front of them.
Maybe the NBCSN cable channel is the best place for them. Maybe the tight structure of the prime-time package, with its long commercials breaks, would make them less effective.
Hamilton, Bezic and Hammond are reliable and usually good (although I could do without Hamilton’s emotional sound effects). But sometimes announcing teams reach a plateau and need a shake-up.
And sometimes viewers like to hear a sport called by new voices who are closer to current athletes and speak to one another as if in a friendly conversation. So it would surprise no one if NBC infused youthful voices in its prime-time figure skating booth in the same way it uses sports like snowboard cross and halfpipe as part of a strategy to reach young viewers.
― espring (amateurist), Friday, 21 February 2014 22:12 (ten years ago) link