Sports At Politics

There are only four Olympic sports (not counting sports that are scheduled to debut or re-debut at the Olympics after 2018 or sports that have been discontinued from the Olympics) where the United States has never won a medal of any color. Three of them are Summer Olympic sports: badminton, table tennis, and team handball. The other is a Winter Olympic sport, biathlon, which is a sport combining cross-country skiing and multiple sessions of shooting at a set of five circular targets with a .22 caliber rifle. While American biathletes haven’t achieved Olympic success (despite the fact that biathlon in its modern incarnation debuted at a Winter Olympics hosted in the United States , at the 1960 Winter Olympics in California), in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sherman Douglas High School in Florida, multiple members of the U.S. biathlon team that is competing/has competed at this year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, have publicly spoken out in favor of...

While most of the problems and criticisms of NBC's 2018 Olympic coverage to this point have been either due to NBC's traditional over-production of their Olympic broadcasts and considerable use of tape-delay, as well as some things that were largely out of NBC's control, such as multiple alpine skiing postponements due to high winds, NBC managed to pull off an embarassing, disgraceful, and Olympic-sized Heidi moment last night, nearly half a decade after the Heidi moment . However, unlike the Heidi moment, which, to my knowledge, did not feature anyone at NBC prematurely declaring a winner in that infamous 1968 gridiron football game, NBC originally declared the wrong person the winner in the women's super-G in Pyeongchang. After a relatively major on-course error cost American Lindsey Vonn any chance of a medal in the super-G, Austrian Anna Vieth posted a very fast time among those that NBC considered to be medal contenders, and Vieth was the leader when NBC cut ...

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not officially declare a single country to be an overall champion of each Olympic Games, although the IOC does publish a medal count for each Olympic Games, in which countries are ranked by most gold medals earned, followed by most silver medals earned, followed by most bronze medals earned. However, the U.S. broadcast rights holder for the Olympic Games, NBC, ranks countries based on total medals earned, followed by most gold medals earned, followed by most silver medals earned. This can result in discrepancies in which country is at the top of the medal count, as happened in the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2010 Winter Olympics: in both instances, the United States was at the top of the NBC medal count, but the host country (China in 2008, Canada in 2010) was at the top of the IOC medal count. However, the traditional medal count isn't actually a great indicator of how well countries perform in the Olympics for a number of reasons....

Currently, NBC and cable networks that are owned by NBC's parent company, Comcast, hold the English-language broadcast rights to the Olympic Games, with the current NBC contract with the IOC scheduled to end with the 2032 Summer Olympics at a host city to be determined by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at a later date. However, if NBC loses money on the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics this year, there is the outside possibility that NBC, should it get permission by the IOC to do so, may sell the 2020-2032 Olympic broadcast rights to another network. A number of factors are working against NBC this year, including: The 15-hour time difference between Korean Standard Time and U.S. Central Time, resulting in almost convoluted scheduling for NBC's Olympic coverage NBC's decision to devote a large portion, but not all, of its over-the-air Olympic coverage to two sports (figure skating and alpine skiing, even though the U.S. isn't expected to win any medals in...

For the first time in the Winter Olympics, there will be a mixed team event in alpine skiing. The mixed team event is considerably different than traditional alpine skiing events, as, in the mixed team event, there are two competitors on course at any one time instead of just one competitor on course, and the competition format is that of an elimination tournament. A total of 16 countries will compete in the mixed team event, with each country entering a four-skier team consisting of two male skiers and two female skiers; each team is also able to enter an alternate skier of each gender who can replace a skier of the same gender. The Olympic format for mixed team alpine skiing will be a single-elimination tournament, with the final match, called the big final, being contested for the gold and silver medals, although the losers of the semifinal matches will compete in the small final for the bronze medal. Each team is seeded based on a ranking system by the FIS, which is the IOC-appro...