When the rebel becomes king, it doesn't mean the people will suddenly be smiling.
Nike, once the brand that championed all who challenged authority, seems to have suddenly taken on the mantle, as well as the athletic supporter, of a regime not known for its fondness for allowing people to just do it.
The story begins with tears and might end in many more.
Many Chinese faces were moist when Liu Xiang, a very pretty 110-meter hurdler, suddenly withdrew from the preliminary heats of the Olympic competition.
It all looked a little odd. He was apparently seen kicking an iron door in an aggressive manner shortly before the race. He went out onto the track and suddenly declared his ankle wasn't up to the task. He limped off in apparent agony.
Shortly afterward, someone who claimed to be a member of Nike's inside lane, wrote a post on a Yahoo message board that accused the company of being complicit in Liu Xiang's sudden exit.
(Credit:
CC bbaunach)
The suggestion was that Nike knew Liu Xiang couldn't win, so they told him not to run, as a disappointing performance would harm their investment in him far more than a heart-tugging withdrawal.
Now the odd thing is that this isn't the first time someone has accused Nike of having more than a digit in live sporting decisions.
When a curiously subdued, possibly drugged, and entirely sleep-walking Ronaldo played for Brazil in the 1998 World Cup Final, there were more than a few commentators willing to debate whether the only reason he had been on the field at all was because Nike, the team's sponsor, had insisted.
So how do you think Nike reacted to this Yahoo posting? Ignored it, perhaps? Launched a PR campaign featuring Liu Xiang hopping on his good ankle? Not quite.
"We have immediately asked relevant government departments to investigate those that started the rumor," said Nike spokesman Charlie Brooks.
I will pause now to allow you to perform your best double take.
OK?
Yes, Nike, the brand that prides itself on the iconoclastic and fantastic, has asked the not fantastically democratic Chinese government to root out this rogue and, well, shake him by the sleeves of his t-shirt, perhaps.
Mr. Brooks told The Guardian newspaper: "This isn't about a debate on freedom of speech. It's simply helping us to identify the person who posted it."
Which suggests that Nike either has a good suspicion as to the person's identity. Or not. It might also suggest to some that Nike has temporarily lost the part of its inner brain that judges when to stir things up and when to move right along.
What can Nike gain from behaving like a granny who's just had her handbag stolen by a tiny teenager and asked a big, burly policeman to find the man who took it? The company's actions serve only to highlight the issue more, when letting a sleeping blog lie might have allowed for this little conspiracy theory to waft its way into the annals of obscurity.
Unless, of course, it isn't a conspiracy theory at all, and they fear that this one little rumor might give credence to a quite staggeringly cynical story.
It all just feels so very, very unNike. Think about it. A brand that so many still admire thanks to Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Spike Lee, and remixes of old Elvis tracks, working together with "government departments." In China.
I wonder if they called Jerry Yang first to see how this blogger nonsense works over there. (Web debate on this subject in China is already being, how can one put it, edited.)
And I wonder what the "government departments" will do to the person who posted this tale.
Community service in a sweatshop, perhaps?
Peculiar Olympic viewing numbers have emerged from the Bay Area.
It seems that the Valley's finest have voted with their comforters and refused to play along with NBC's notion of, "You'll watch what we want you to watch, when we want you to watch it."
Although the San Francisco area averaged a 20.5 rating for the nine nights that ended last Sunday, this was down on the average rating for the Athens Games, which clipped along at 21.5.
It is not my intention to dance on NBC's bank vault. Some of the coverage has been excellent. And I personally have enormous affection for the ability of announcers such as Dan Hicks and Al Trautwig to make you feel you are in the presence of the Second Coming.
But the fact is that San Francisco finished fourth on the Nielsen Olympics ratings of 56 markets in 2004. This time around, it's 17th. Whatever you might think, it's not some strange isolated West Coast community. It is tied with Los Angeles. Folks in Sacramento, Calif., and Portland, Ore., seem to be losing patience too.
Would it be excessively brazen, therefore, to suggest that for the remainder of the Games, NBC switches to a live feed for the West Coast? Against my better judgment, I am prepared to say "please".
Surely NBC (and its advertisers) might be able to imagine that it would garner increased ratings from this risky, revolutionary strategy.
Perhaps it might mean more money too. Um, I mean viewer satisfaction.
It has to be a good thing for NBC to keep the engineers of our Future World happy. Otherwise, who knows what these irritable, irascible, irredeemably mercurial beings might do, in a fit of pique, to NBCOlympics.com?
Who would choose to be in NBC's PR Department this week?
I couldn't possibly accuse any of them of taking steroids, but could you blame them if they slipped something a little special into their noon smoothie just to deal with another sleepless night?
Many critics have been kvetching about technological fakery during the opening ceremony, when fireworked footprints were CGI'd for home consumption.
I'm not sure how the CGI increased our excitement.
However, the description from NBC's Matt Lauer was definitely breathtaking: "You're looking at a cinematic device employed by Zhang Yimou here. This is actually almost animation."
Actually, it was animation, wasn't it? It was literally an artist's impression, except this one wasn't trying to sell you a timeshare.
NBC's Bob Costas, who is very clever, must have spent many moments composing his CGI voiceover: "We said earlier that aspects of this opening ceremony are almost like cinema in real time. Well this is quite literally cinematic."
Would you have preferred: "Here's some animation to give you a more vivid sense of what they're seeing out there"? I think I might have.
All this reminded me of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics when the wondrous opening ceremony had, as one of its moments of high drama, an archer shooting a flaming arrow to light the Olympic flame.
Please don't tell anyone else, but he missed. The Spaniards had allowed for this possibility by rigging the flame's dish with so much gas that the arrow had to only pass somewhere near it for the flame to light up.
NBC has also suffered some slings and arrows by keeping the word "live" on the screen even on the feeds to the West Coast. Twice an hour, they remind you briefly that the pictures you're watching are, well, not literally live. In fact, they're not live at all.
Their defense is that this is no different from American Idol, which Westies also see on tape delay, with the occasional reminder that this is the case.
Please forgive me, but American Idol is to live Olympics what America's Top Model is to live NASCAR.
The reason why so much of sport still gets more than tolerable ratings is precisely because it is live. You get involved in it because it is happening right now. And love 'em or love 'em less, the folks at Fox try to make live baseball as live as it could possibly be, even identifying fans, managers and reluctant spouses engaged in the most spontaneous behaviors.
If you followed NBC's impeccable commercial logic, then surely Costas' favorite event, the World Series, should be on tape delay on the West Coast. Same goes for the Superbowl.
And if you think there's some jolly jingoism going on here, well, if I remember correctly, ABC and ESPN televised America's most popular international event, the World Cup, live. As in, you know, the thing you're seeing on screen is happening right now in some other country.
I know of no other country that would delay a sporting event that is happening live in the hope of expected commercial gain.
To me this is as odd as the fact that love seats are always so incredibly uncomfortable.
Still, NBCOlympics.com continues to be a source of utter Future World uplift. And that is why I must go. Argentina's finest field hockeyists are playing Great Britain online.
When I say online, I mean it's almost as if they were literally right there on my laptop. You know, cinematically speaking.
Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.
- prev
- 1
- next
