Small Errors, Bigger Problem

In lieu of a preview this morning, plus the fact that I missed enough of today to not have sufficient things to talk about in retrospect tonight, here is a special feature vaguely outlining some random Channel 7 mishaps I’ve noticed over recent days, as their fatigue and the post-overhype period where serious Australian chances have disappeared takes over. Results for today’s action are still included at the bottom.

These observationswill go in increasing order of astonishing ridiculousness:

• Long Hill?

Quick one first because I only saw it once and so can forgive it because people just make mistakes sometimes. On the night of the Men’s Large Hill Ski Jumping Channel 7 at one point advertised the ‘Long Hill’ as coming later, in graphic form so it is worse than a misspeak. Hardly egregious but pretty indicatively dumb and lazy.

• Hamish has no idea about Aerials.

It should come as a surprise to noone that Hamish McLachlan knows nothing about anything. He seems a nice enough, if kinda creepy bloke, but he brings no charisma or experience and gravitas from any background of note to the job. He’s just generally mediocre and the definition of a boring white guy, and worse, just cannot find a way not to convey the vibe of privilege. The McLachlan family of AFL CEO Gillon and Hamish, whose background is in Sports Management business, is the silver spoon family of the powerful AFL/Channel 7 relationship. Alongside Basil Zempilas (who you at least get the idea worked his way to the top and is a professional commentator…but on the other hand is even more actively infuriating and bad at his job), Hamish is the worst side-effect of Channel 7’s cheap ‘chuck AFL guys at everything’ culture of sports coverage.

I guess this is more just an analysis of Hamish. Because the moment that prompted this was nothing egregious (especially given an overall package of unconvincingly naive hosting work these two weeks). It just kept kind of annoying me the way his combination of being bitten by the Channel 7 hype bug, and not knowing what he’s really talking about, kept influencing his promoting of the Men’s Aerials. Before Qualification he kept excitedly talking about how cool it will be to see David Morris’ much hyped quintuple twisting jump tonight in Qualifying…despite, as should go without saying, that obviously being an end game jump he wouldn’t pull out till the final. It was painful to watch Lydia Lassila’s face as she tried to explain that as politely as she could.

I was going to talk about Edwina Barthomolew as a separate point but I won’t for now. In truth she’s not too bad (though not nearly of Mel McLaughlin’s somewhat out of place professional standard) but she is also a random person without inherent sports chops or an internal industry background and gives off a similar vibe to Hamish, of general Channel 7 poster-child privilege and overall cluelessness. She is, unlike Hamish, clearly a well polished TV presented though. So we’ll see how she goes for the rest of the Games and no doubt beyond, probably into the Commonwealth Games.

• Did Channel 7 record Basil commentating over old footage just to make it sound like they were hosting then too?

I’m not sure about this one. I haven’t researched deeply enough and it came from a brief moment in their Men’s Aerials promotion. I need to find Australian coverage archives of the time. But during a feature on David Morris, they replayed his silver medal winning jump from Sochi 2014 with Basil Zempilas commentating over it. Basil has been with Channel 7 uninterrupted for over twenty years. The problem? As reflected on extensively on this blog, Channel 10 had the Sochi rights, an effort that it has taken until direct Channel 7 comparison this time around for me to increasingly appreciate.

Did Channel 7 actually go to the effort of recording and/or compositing a Basil commentary over this footage and try to pass it off as ‘live archival’? For clarity, the snippet clearly featured him exalting ‘silver for David Morris in Sochi!” It wasn’t generic, it was a clear description of an event he didn’t commentate. It might not seem a horrible sin to some people but its just such an impropriety. They’re lying to us to further the already over-sold and false perception that by simply forking over the money they saved by having absolutely no other non-sporting content of any quality or production value, they are somehow an Olympic ‘authority’ and the ‘proper’ hosts. It is the principle of it more than anything, to reflect on the kind of mindset at play person to person at a network to feel like such a move was somehow necessary step without which their promotion of the event would be lesser.

• The Super G debacle

This might be a bit harshly placed, but I wanted to link the Hamish and Basil stuff as a pair. As covered previously, perhaps the single greatest shock of these games was the Alpine Gold Medal to unseeded Snowboarder Ester Ledecka in the Women’s Super-G. That Channel 7 missed it live is ok. They had the good sense to cover the first 20 runners live, where the medals by all logic should have come from. I admit that my frustration over this situation is amplified by the fact that I myself considered it over and closed my laptop, thereby missing the run live. But later on Channel 7 chose to cross back to the event just to show later Australian Greta Small running. The leader’s reference time on screen through her run was now Ledecka, having been reigning champion Anna Veith last we saw according to this coverage. Not only did they not show it, they didn’t even mention or reference it once in this moment. They did show the run later but that only casts their earlier mis-step as a flat out spoiler. Yes both crosses were during brief breaks in a different gold medal event. How they used to those breaks to quickly cross for an Alpine update for fine. But how does noone think to show both the most important and geographically first element at the first available opportunity?

This situation is so important for me because it is the best single simple summary of both the Channel 7 jingoism, and fundamental Channel 7 incompetence. It’s subtle and casual viewers wouldn’t notice (meaning I guess its ok) but if you’re perceptive to it, every day there are constant little signs Channel 7 as a whole just do not ‘get’ what’s going on. Their Summer Olympics and other sport coverage is bad because of its hosting and saccharine sob stories, but they know when and where to cross to things. The Winter Olympics are constantly full of moments where a coverage team with internal expertise of the events involved would be able to sense and react a developing story and jump on it.

In this instance, nearly half an hour after the clear biggest story of the games, noone at Channel 7 was yet able to cotton on or have the thought occur to them to do anything but the no doubt originally planned token footage of an Australian running slowly towards the back of the field.

• Speed Skating picture scandal

This one is my favourite because its just so dumb. At the very start of this article in reference to their small ‘Long Hill’ blunder I mentioned that mistakes happen and that I can abide them. So when the ‘coming later’ graphics said ‘Short-Track’ and showed an obvious picture of someone participating in Long Track Speed Skating, I was unsurprised and bemused but these things happen.

By the end of that day I was officially unimpressed as it kept being displayed. Once again we get to the fundamental level of competence and attention to detail on a games they don’t know about. The implication of the error not being fixed over a whole day is that literally nobody at Channel 7 even noticed the error. They appear to either know so little about the substance of the sports and just go through programming notions, or pay so little attention to their own coverage that they’re not even watching for errors, probably both.

All this was confirmed the following day, by which point I was aghast. As if taking the mickey, the following day advertised ‘Speed Skating’ with a picture of 3 or 4 people’s worth of skates clearly racing Short-Track. The confusion between the Short and Long track has occurred a couple of times since too and it is just sloppy.

• Pumped Up Kicks

It might be last but this one is also the shortest complaint. It doesn’t need any explanation to be obviously egregious. On Friday, the day of the most recent brutal school shooting in America, Channel 7 used the (otherwise common and, if inappropriate lyrically, fair enough happy sounding habitually established song for such purposes) utterly inappropiate hit song Pumped Up Kicks as their overlap music when going to a break. The ignorance at play, of both content and context, is astonishing.

 

TODAY’S RESULTS

FREESTYLE SKIING

	Women’s Ski Halfpipe
GOLD	Cassie Sharpe	Canada
SILVER	Marie Martinod	France
BRONZE	Brita Sigourney	United States

FIGURE SKATING

	Ice Dance
GOLD	Tessa Virtue/Scott Moir	Canada
SILVER	Gabriella Papadakis/Guillaume Cizeron	France
BRONZE	Maia Shibutani/Alex Shibutani	United States

NORDIC COMBINED

	Men’s Individual Gundersen Large Hill/10km
GOLD	Johannes Rydzek	Germany
SILVER	Fabian Riessle	Germany
BRONZE	Eric Frenzel	Germany

BIATHLON

	Mixed Team Relay
GOLD	France
GOLD	Norway
BRONZE	Italy

SHORT-TRACK SPEED SKATING

	Women’s 3000m Relay
GOLD	Korea Republic
GOLD	Italy
BRONZE	The Netherlands

 

MEDAL TALLY

No.	Nation	GOLD	SILVER	BRONZE	TOTAL
1	Norway	11	10	8	29
2	Germany	11	7	5	23
3	Canada	8	5	6	19
4	The Netherlands	6	5	3	14
5	France	5	4	4	13
6	United States	5	3	4	12
7	Sweden	4	3	0	7
8	Austria	4	2	4	10
9	Korea Republic	4	2	2	8
10	Japan	2	5	3	10