On Aug 3, 2012, at 10:36 AM, Brian Walters wrote: > As for the Olympics - I lost interest years ago. The amount of public money > that gets sunk into over-pampered 'elite' sportspeople in search of 'gold' is > sickening, especially when they don't have to repay it (unlike university > students who do). Of course, I'm talking from an Australian perspective. It > may be different elsewhere.
I bet you're feeling a lot worse after the performances this time around. I'm not poking fun as we've had a few of our own too. I'm actually a little jealous of the Aussies for putting so much into their sports. >From a sporting perspective I love the Olympics. It's the top of the top >competitions, and it's about the only chance I get to see coverage of sports >that aren't rugby. From a commercial and political perspective the Olympics >are a complete dogs breakfast. We don't have a lot of public money being spent on sports, except for the rugby. Mostly athletes have to succeed before they get any funding which seems a bit backwards to me. The athletes themselves don't seem to get much of a financial return, although gold medallists find it a lot easier to get sponsorship/endorsement deals. What annoys me about the Olympics at the moment is that the broadcaster who owns the rights here is Sky TV. I think the rules say you have to broadcast at least some of it free-to-air so they have one token FTA channel to go with about 8 channels on the pay service. To their credit they're showing a very good selection on the free channel but they jump around a lot. Cheers, Dave -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
