So there are two “rebroadcast” commentators for gymnastics on The Olympic Channel. One is Olly Hogben, who was just interviewed on Gymcastic and who makes a point to 1) not infantilize female gymnasts; 2) know the names of the skills, the scoring system, etc. He is overall delightful, and manages to say things like “and…there’s an accidental dismount” when a gymnast falls in a way that sounds empathetic rathr than mocking.
Then there’s the other guy.
He sounds like he’s probably also British but significantly older (but what do I know – when I can only hear someone’s voice, I essentially just picture them as a large sentient chin). I won’t fault him for trouble pronouncing names (but I reserve the right to giggle when he repeatedly says “cereal” for Cyril, and I will never understand why, upon realizing he couldn’t pronounce Padarariu, he decide to say it over and over again with slight variations, as if he were chewing on a particularly sticky candy), but the *other* things he says…I haven’t watched the men’s individual all-around competition from the Stuttgart World Cup yet (I was maybe not going to because I know who won and men’s gymnastics is 1/3-1/2 boring depending on who’s doing the parallel bars), but I have heard him do commentary on men’s competitions before, and while he says just as many inaccurate things about the scores, he doesn’t comment on their appearance or gush over them in a proprietary way (actually, I may be wrong about that…I have some lingering memory of him gushing over the men’s bodies in a slightly different proprietary way last time).
It’s just somewhat baffling as he clearly has no idea what will cause a routine to score in the 14s versus the 11s and so was constantly startled by the scores. And though I’m sure he intended no ill-will, he kept saying things like, “Well, she’s taken the second position with that score! But not for long, I’m sure.” I was so disappointed that Spencer at Balance Beam Situation watched the broadcast that had Tim and Nastia commentating, so I can’t even look to his blog for other gems from this guy.
Of course, now I feel I should make a case study of this and watch the men’s competition, especially as I’m sure it will include many of this commentator’s references to “bunny hops.”
One fantastic thing that came from me watching this (in addition to seeing Simone, Mustafina, and the aforementioned Padarariu) is that I found a song I heard at least a decade ago in China and thought I would never hear again. I could hum it for quite a while after I got back, but there weren’t iPhones then and trying to transliterate melodic syllables in another language doesn’t get you very far in a google search (neither, incidentally, does searching for “very popular Chinese song”). At this competition in Stuttgart…it was playing in the background at the arena! And I managed to Shazam it in spite of the commentary running over it, so now I have it forever…although I still have no idea what it’s called because it came up in Shazam in Mandarin (which is logical, but means I cannot tell you what it is).
Speaking of music and melodic syllables…women’s artistic gymnastics has a rule (I want to say this is new-ish, by which I mean post-2008) that although floor music can’t have words or lyrics, it can have vocalization…which has led to some gymnasts doing floor routines while a singer scats wildly in the background, or mumbles, or emotes in a most extreme way without quite saying anything that could be definitely pinpointed as a word. I mean, someone has the Grease song with “wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a wop-bam-boom!” or something along those lines.
