Once Again The Olympics Have Outted Themselves As The Biggest Idiots On The Planet
The Olympics, objectively, are fucking awesome. Every 4 years we gather around our televisions and watch the best athletes in the world compete in sports we love and sports we only see every 4 years. There's not much better than the excitement of swimming and gymnastics where legends like Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Katie Ledecky, McKayla Maroney (sup), Simone Biles, and many others become American legends and heroes. We don't normally pay attention to those sports, but every 4 years those athletes garner our attention in unimaginable ways. But the god damn Olympic people want to make it as hard as possible for us to enjoy. The schedule is confusing, I know for a fact the olds can't figure out Peacock streaming, and the time difference to watch live obviously doesn't help. So thank goodness for Twitter where you can get updates in real time....wait...no????
Yesterday some handball goalie got smoked in the face, Big Cat was talking about it for hours, and then all his handball videos got DMCA'd (pulled down) by the Olympic nazis. They decided "nope, if you want to see handball, you gotta go through us!". And that's how you make sure nobody sees your product. This ain't 1988 anymore, we live on the Internet to get to the second updates from the people we follow online. Big Cat tweeting a handball video gets more people talking about Olympic handball in 1 minute than have ever talked about it ever. And the suits say "no thanks" and wonder why numbers are down across the board.
The fix is obvious- follow the NBA's lead. I got way more interested in the NBA once all the best clips were uploaded to Vine/Twitter immediately. Imagine if the NBA made all those people delete the videos/got people's accounts suspended for simply sharing alley-oops and Steph Curry 3's? It'd be insane…looking at you, MLB. Spreading the game organically online is how to grow the game. Stopping content creators from literally doing it for you is so counter-productive. Barstool Banks used to do full recaps of the best and funniest moments, and now unless those moments are tweeted by the official Olympics Twitter, which most aren't, than nobody ever sees them. It's lunacy.
I get that NBC pays a billion dollars or whatever for the rights, and that's great because seeing a funny handball clip online makes me want to turn on my TV to watch handball. And I bet it'd make someone who is bored at work subscribe to Peacock to waste time during the day. Let people share the funny stuff online and viewership goes up, I guarantee it. If only the suits weren't so up their own buttholes to realize that.