Women’s Gymnastics Deserves Better TV Coverage

This month, NBC will once again attempt to pull one of the greatest tricks in television: convincing people to care about sports they that have ignored for the past four years. Millions of Americans will turn on their televisions in the coming days to watch Ping-Pong and beach volleyball and women’s gymnastics, which consistently ranks among the highest-rated Olympic sports despite the fact that only a very small number of Americans can tell the difference between a Produnova and an Amanar. In gymnastics and other sports, NBC often compensates for the viewer’s lack of knowledge by inserting drama—in 2012, the network notoriously made it seem as if the American women’s hopes for gold were in greater peril than they actually were by simply not airing the fact that a Russian gymnast had fallen during her floor exercise—and by spending time on every topic except for explaining the sports themselves.