Sport - Olympic Games

DD disappoints basketball fans

NEW DELHI: Having brought a sub-standard live coverage of the Olympics through the past 16 days, Doordarshan again disappointed countless fans of basketball and NBA stars on the final day of the Beijing Games on Sunday when it chose to provide priority to boxing finals and medals ceremonies rather than the basketball final between the U.S. and Spain.

Basketball fans were in for a shock at noon when DD was on ‘boxing mode’ and then shifted to handball before bringing a glimpse of basketball action into the second quarter of the final with the U.S. leading 46-36.

In what was turning out to be an exciting contest between the ‘Dream Team’ and the World champion, one expected DD to go back to the basketball action quickly enough, but we were served with a medals ceremony in boxing and more of boxing bouts, with no Indian figuring there. A spell of water polo final was then shown before shifting back and forth from basketball to boxing.

By the time DD took a few commercial breaks and went back to the basketball court, less than four minutes were left of the match. And even before the post-match jubilations could begin, DD was quickly back to the studios to allow its anchors discuss the U.S. victory.

It defied all logic that DD preferred to show boxing, handball and water polo instead of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, to name a few NBA superstars, battling it out with a bunch of tough Spaniards.

This has been the feature of DD’s live coverage throughout the Olympics; some sort of a ‘teasing’ of viewers by showing an assortment of sports in short spells, ranging from one minute to 10 minutes, and cutting off ‘live feeds’ at the most crucial moments in many cases. Unending studio discussions only added to the misery of the viewers.

DD’s preference for sport like handball, fencing, rowing, women’s football, volleyball and beach volleyball was in sharp contrast to its ‘dislike’ for live action from gymnastics, swimming and athletics. There were days when live action from swimming and athletics was completely blacked out.

Gymnastics was almost ignored. Anchors invariably repeated what the viewers had seen, losing precious live telecast time of an athletics final or a swimming final, or else took us through the history of that particular sport, often ending up with irrelevant details, all at the cost of live coverage.

The DD commentators based in Beijing, most of them unfamiliar with athletes at that level, remained clueless throughout. One commentator identified Frankie Fredericks of Namibia, one of the all-time great 200m runners, now an IOC member, as Austin Sealy, another IOC member from Barbados, during a medals ceremony.

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