Recent Stories with tag king

I watched an hour of NBC's Vancouver Winter Olympics coverage on KING 5 this afternoon, and I saw about 90 seconds of actual sports action. I'm not exaggerating. I'm actually being generous.

What I did see was amazing. In covering the normal hill ski jumping from Whistler, NBC showed close-ups of every liftoff, then showed a tense and entertaining series of angles as the jumper flew to the bottom of the hill.

After the jump, analyst Jeff Hastings narrated slo-mo closeups of each take-off, providing smart and insightful commentary on each. We got reaction shots of every jumper, as well as of his coach. And, most interesting to me, a close up of the coach who signals the jumper to start--very tense coaches, these, as they are trying to choose the exact time within a seconds-long window when the wind will be the most propitious. See for yourself: Here's their coverage of Swissman (?) Simon Ammann's gold-medal-winning jump.

Great stuff. But there was so little of it. NBC would show two jumps, then pause for a long commercial break. The jumps themselves are about ten seconds long, with surrounding chatter lasting about a minute for each. So for every four minutes of coverage, with only about 20 seconds of action, I'd see three minutes of ads.

The ski jumping lasted about 30 minutes, in which I saw about nine actual jumps. They did show the last four or so without a break, which was nice.

Once Ammann finished off the competition, Al Michaels let us know that speed skating would be next. Awesome! Can't wait! Too bad, because I'd have to.

First, a commercial break. Then we got an update on how luge qualifying was going. Then, another commercial break.

Back: Speed skating time? Nope, a long piece by NBC sports reporter Mary Carillo, who traveled to The Netherlands to give us a sense of the Dutch passion for speed skating. A neat piece, really, and I wouldn't mind it sprinkled into some actual coverage of actual speed skating. Hadn't seen any yet. And it was time for another commercial break.

When the commercials are over, we're at the actual speed skating venue! (Richmond Olympic Oval, about ten miles south of Vancouver proper). Finally! The NBC speed skating announcers give us a little preview of the event, showing the top US contenders and then...we get another commercial break.

By the time they come back from this commercial break, it's been 30 minutes since the ski jumping ended, and I have to be somewhere. No speed skating for me, although I would've loved to see what NBC did with it. (Although, by this time, I already knew who won, NBC delays the coverage three hours and I'd accidentally spotted the winner on ESPN's crawl.)

I love what NBC is doing coverage-wise, and I understand why they have so many ads. Nice production costs money; they probably budgeted out what they were going to spend long before the advertising market went to hell. Plus they paid $2.2 billion to for rights to these and the 2012 Games; and this was back in 2003 when advertisers paid a lot more for network TV ads. So NBC has to run so many ads to make up what they've spent. I get it.

So I'm going to watch NBC's coverage, but I think, for the first time ever when watching live sports on TV, I'm going to make sure I have a book nearby when I do.

Pier 48 outlined in yellow

Today is the last day for public comment on the demolition of the warehouse on Pier 48, an old wooden structure with 120,410 square feet, built in the 1950s. WSDOT has no use for the warehouse, which is deteriorating and becoming a "public nuisance," they say, due to its failing fire and security equipment.

The Port of Seattle sold the pier to WSDOT in summer of 2008 for $11 million, in anticipation of WSDOT using the pier, which came with an "upland" pay parking lot, for construction staging during the Viaduct replacement process.

(Some of you may be wondering what happened the Foxtrot class Russian submarine--it's found a new berth in San Diego.)

WSDOT's Greg Phipp's put together a call with project managers, who explained that they expect the demolition permit to be issued by the first of April, with actual demolition beginning in June. During that time, Pier 48's upland lot will be shared by the demolition crew and the construction crew working on the south end of the Viaduct, from South Holgate to South King Street. (Pier 48 was last in the news for a sinkhole that opened up near there, but the engineers assured me that the staging area is solid ground.)

Opening bids will be accepted for the Holgate to King section as of April 14. WSDOT plans to "replace the southern mile of the viaduct with a new side-by-side roadway that includes new on- and off-ramps near the stadiums and new bicycle/pedestrian paths along SR 99." By October, the demolition will be complete, and it'll just be the Viaduct construction crew at Pier 48, through 2013, when that stage of the project is to finish up....

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