Online Dominates Olympic and Paralympic Coverage

With apologies to my American friends, can we Canadians take a moment to appreciate the television coverage of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games on CBC?

Did you want to watch any match that involved Canada? You could find virtually all games on the main CBC network or sublicensees TSN or Sportsnet. If you wanted to watch a non-Canada match or if you didn’t have a cable subscription, they were all available through CBC Gem or the CBC Sports website. And get this … all for free (technically ad-supported) … and for any sport.

This amazing coverage couldn’t solve the time zone issue, but CBC would have a “while you were sleeping” highlight package ready to go each morning on their online platform as well as their YouTube page. So if you weren’t an insomniac, you’d be right up to speed. Or if you’d rather watch the whole match—and you could avoid spoilers—you could watch replays after events were finished.

COVID-19 posed some coverage challenges and CBC—like other networks—did not send play-by-play announcers to China. Rather, the announcers and analysts sat in Plexiglas booths that not-so-subtly resembled a prison visitation booth.

The Olympic commentary team of Bruce Rainnie, Mike Harris and Joanne Courtney did a great job despite having no control of the camera shots, no telestrators, and having to watch the exact same video feed we saw at home. If you were to watch games without the CBC folks, you’d get treated to the very capable Olympic Broadcasting System crew—including Canada’s Luke Coley, Norway’s Sander Rolvaag, USA’s Ann Swisshelm and TCN columnist Hans Frauenlob of New Zealand—or sometimes no commentary at all, for that “I’m in the arena” feel.

Some Canadians will argue about the coverage, saying they couldn’t find games or that CBC would periodically leave curling and jump to another sport. In the latter case, CBC does have a policy of leaving planned coverage to cover Canadian medal events live—to catch a Canadian athlete’s attempt at striking gold, silver or bronze. They’ve done this for years, for both Summer and Winter Games, and they always return to the previous sport they were covering.

How to avoid that? The aforementioned CBC Olympics and Paralympics website. Every single curling or wheelchair curling game, whether it involved Canada or not, was available on the site. All four sheets, all at once, with four different productions. Live and on replay. In fact, the CBC Olympics site stayed online for at least two weeks after the Closing Ceremony—it only disappeared midway through the Brier!

(Based on that, I’d guess you could watch any moment of Paralympic coverage all this week and possibly next week, too. If you reside in Canada, here’s the link to a bonanza of sport action, medal presentations and summary shows.)

So if you haven’t yet figured out how to hook your big-screen television up to the internet, you’ve missed a major boat here. I did warn you, almost a year ago, that webstreamed coverage of curling games is a train you should hop on. 

I feel for our American friends who had to suffer through NBC’s butchered coverage featuring poorly timed ad-breaks. We all hope they will eventually learn to value the unbroken flow of the Roaring Game. Taking it one step further, perhaps all networks (CBC included) can learn the value of side-by-side advertising, as I’m sure the leads would love to see their shots get some screen time.