KEY POINTS:
Over here on the couch a slightly anxious feeling builds. It's because it is the Olympics' last few days. The sets and props are about to be packed up in China and sent off for the London opening in 2012.
Your correspondent has been dipping in and out
of the free-to-air coverage with a frequency bordering on worrying. A raft of sports, some familiar, some exotic, some odd, and some new have floated across the screen.
There has been anguish, our men's soccer team letting China squeak a draw, the women doing the same against Japan, and the men's hockey team giving Spain a whisker of a chance to get a win, and them getting it.
There's been the joy, New Zealand finally located the medals drawer and has been dipping into almost every day since.
There's also a growing and jarring sense of being protected from the unpleasant, odd from a medium where current affairs and news lives off pain, distress, anger, disappointment, terror, and that old saw, 'If it bleeds, it leads.'
So far there's been lots of winning, exhilaration and the occasional burst of tears. Only, by definition, sport is people pushing themselves, their bodies, and their minds beyond anything done before. In team events it's against others as determined and moving as quickly.
That creates horror moments, people crashing from bikes, fluke blows flattening people, even cold-blooded brutality. Putting these, or some of them, against the joy, would give a wider, more accurate picture of what sports is really like.
I am not arguing we dwell endlessly on these.
I simply notice they aren't there.
It started with the boxing. Actually, it started with the absence of the boxing, that most primitive of sports; two people in semi-controlled conditions trying to damage each other.
I have seen one fight, ending with the fighters on their feet waiting for the points decision. The wrestling, which can be savage, isn't getting much time and attention either.
This might be to concentrate us on the good, the wholesome, or catering to an audience with a high percentage of violence-rejecting women. I don't know. But, if the so-called respectable end of the television industry lives off suffering I'd be interested in the rationale for airbrushing sports into something softer than its reality.
Geoff Bryan's time in front of the Olympic cameras is almost over. Photo / The Listener
