Despite my best efforts to sleep in, I accidentally woke up early and turned on the Peacock app to see the official debut of “sport climbing” in the Olympics.
Track and field was on. Then I checked the NBC app. Just the local weather. How the fuck does one watch this thing? I did some light Googling and found that the Peacock app wasn’t actually broadcasting climbing. Turds. Turns out that you need to upgrade your cable package with Xfinity to get a premium subscription to the NBC app to actually watch climbing.
Sorry, but I don’t care if my fucking mom is doing cartwheels on a balance beam, I’m not giving a single extra cent to Comcast, an evil company that is best known for terrible customer service, sneakily raising rates, and being solely and completely responsible for the continued broadcast of the disinformation channel Fox News, which is the reason that baby boomers have brain worms and 30 percent of the country refuses to get vaccinated.
I was about to give up on watching sport climbing in the Olympics. Turns out I wasn’t alone.
One could say that figuring out how to watch the Olympics was actually a big deal, couldn’t one? If even Alex Honnold was in the dark about watching this thing, that’s a pretty good sign that NBC fucked this up.
Wasn’t climbing supposed to be the thing that would bring in a new, younger viewership into the Olympics, according to the IOC’s thinking? So what kind of brain-genius then puts the event behind a paywall, without any clear communication in the lead up to the event about how to watch it, where, when, etc.?
Social media came to the rescue, fortunately, and someone sent me a link to the NBC site where I could watch the climbing broadcast for 30 minutes before being shut out. I watched my 30 free minutes on my iPad, then copped another 30 minutes on the computer and therefore saw much of the sport climbing event.
Great route setting and great climbing performances all around, particularly by Colin Duffy, who came in 3rd place, and Mickael Mawem of France, who landed in 1st because he absolutely dominated the bouldering and speed events. In our latest episode of The RunOut, we made a joke about “Who is Colin Duffy?” You can’t make that joke anymore! Just 17 years young, he’s a dark horse in some ways and seems to be peaking this week. After seeing these results, I think he stands a great shot at winning the whole shebang.
Unfortunately, one of the finalists, Bossa Mawem, appears to have torn his bicep. This nearly made me throw up.
Whether or not Bossa is able to continue in finals is TBD. It’s hard to see how he will be able to, given this video. If he drops out, however, that doesn’t mean 9th place finisher Alex Megos will get his spot in the finals. Bossa will just take 8th place in all events.
The Twitter universe provided most of the good takes about sport climbing in the Olympics, beginning with the terrible camera work was as well as the predictably dumb commentary. The bouldering event, apparently, was especially poorly shot, with lots of camera time given to people brushing holds or looking at the wall, and not a lot sports action that showed the beta.
My new favorite line, however, has to be using the word “departed” to mean fall. “He has departed the wall.” I hereby proclaim that henceforth this be the only way to reference a fall in climbing. Ah, sport climbing is finally in the Olympics, and I have departed the wall.
Well, we’ll see if I can figure out how to actually watch the women’s qualifiers tomorrow. I’ll have to call Honnold later today to see if he’s got the beta. …
Featured photo: Jon Glassberg / Louder Than 11
This piece of writing was better than actually watching the whole thing, thanks.
Try YouTubeTv (I think they even have a week long free trial). And then use your google/youtube account to log in to nbcolympics.com where every event of every sport is available without interruption. And replays too.
I watched the whole thing on peacock.(my wife had it figured out). I thought it was great. I see so much complaining about the camera work but considering the broadcasters were “onsighting” how to shoot and commentate this new event I thought they did fine. Needs work but people are so whiny about this stuff. There’s a lot more to complain about than the olympics ok people?
That’s the thing, you can’t log into NBCOlympics with a youtubeTV account, it’s not an option. And no matter where you looked on peacock they didn’t ever actually show the entire men’s or women’s finals. They show short clips OR they showed about 3-4 people do each even. But if you wanted to watch Ondra in every event, you were 100% screwed. What a waste to have purchased peacock for this.