I have exactly one person in my life with whom I can talk gymnastics (well, I have three if you count Jessica and Spencer of the Gymcastic podcast and Balance Beam Situation; I wrote them some fan mail once in which I stated that I wanted a Greek chorus to follow me around and narrate my life and that I wanted it to be entirely made up of SPENCER clones, and they wrote back, so…friends! They also once retweeted a tweet that I sent from my secret twitter. It’s the little things.)
But since my fellow gym-watching friend is in Los Angeles and Jessica and Spencer are in my computer, I need to take to my blog to discuss the commentator from the recent European championships. Now…NBC has made some progress in that they no longer use Al Trautwig as part of their gymnastics commentary team (I DON’T UNDERSTAND why he gets to talk about so many things–I heard him doing commentary for hockey once, though at least I can avoid that), but what would really be ideal is a commentary team of Kathy Johnson and Bart Conner (they were/are commentators and at one point were a team on, I think, ABC?) OR just find a way to poach the commentator from Eurovision’s broadcast of European Championships. He was a delightful middle aged British man (I’m partially making this up based on how his voice sounded, which incidentally is how I ended up with a lifelong habit of picturing Garrison Keillor as just a giant chin) and NBC should do whatever is necessary to coax him across the pond.
Because he not only knew the PROPER gymnastics terminology EVEN THOUGH he is the layman commentator and not a former gymnast, but ALSO was full of epic dad jokes:
On the men’s high bar final, notorious for thrills and spills: “In short, will it be no holds barred…or NO BARS HELD?”
On the woman who performed her CATS-themed floor final routine wearing cat makeup: “If you were wondering if that’s against the rules, don’t worry: there’s a CLAWS”
On the gymnast from Belgium with the Harry Potter floor routine: “I don’t know about Bellatrix, but those were some Belgian tricks!”
On top of that, Eurovision isn’t geoblocked. Can they please just host ALL gymnastics from every country? I don’t know if I even have the ability to watch the (NBC broadcast) US National Championships (even if they’re on regular old NBC, aka not even cable) because I don’t have a cable subscription.
There also used to be a channel–I forget if it was Universal Sports or something else–that would let you pay $5 to watch all of the gymnastics world championships coverage. Please can we all accept that our consumption of media is a la carte now? I am totally happy to pay for my entertainment. I just don’t want it bundled with football. (Speaking of: I always start out thinking that it’s unfair that football fans can watch multiple games EVERY WEEK, but then I wonder if I would get overwhelmed if I had so much coverage (there is that much coverage for college gymnastics, but I find that less exciting). It might be a tyranny of riches in the vein of how I feel when I go to a vegetarian restaurant and suddenly have to read the whole menu).
