First truly social Olympics fall short for this games junkie

• February 16, 2010

By Alayne Martell

To start, a confession – I’m a bit of an Olympic junkie. More specifically, the winter games fuel my fire way more than their summer counterparts. While I can’t remember feeling this Olympic enthusiasm back in 1988 when the games were in Calgary, I have certainly been captivated as our great country prepared to host the 2010 Olympics on home soil.

As the games got closer, it was apparent that the unofficial Olympic sport of pin trading was going to have some competition this go around; social media was poised to step onto the Olympic stage and this has become the first truly social Olympic games.

For an Olympic junkie like myself, the ability to follow Olympians’ tweets and get up to-the-second results on my mobile phone seemed like it would be my own personal Olympic utopia. But then the Olympics started. After a few days in, I am not convinced this new social aspect of the Olympics is a good thing.

Perhaps it was the prolific accounts of Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili’s horrific death or maybe it was the constant criticizing and mocking of every detail of the opening ceremonies (the performers are lip synching, the cauldron is broken, why are all the drunks chasing Gretzy as he holds on for dear life in the back of a pick-up truck, etc.) that has put a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t help but wonder if people actually consider that Nodar has a mother who could be reading this stuff or that the opening ceremonies are a celebration of our entire sporting world and more specifically, our country. Is there no respect in the social media world?

I put an unusual day one aside and was ready to embrace the competition with this new social media eye view. Then I realized that despite all the lists created to help you follow Olympians on Twitter, there was not a lot of information out there. I think a big reason for this is the IOC’s rather vague blogging guidelines that quite literally has Olympians scared to break the rules. On the other hand, you can’t help but think that these athletes, who have being training for years, must have better things to focus on than throwing out 140 character snippets during some of the most important moments of their lives. And really, I guess it’s a bit selfish of us to expect it.

While it is strictly a personal opinion, I don’t think any social media platform can compete with the excitement of sitting on the edge of your seat in front of your television as you cheer on the athletes going for their personal dream. The only thing that could possibly compete with that? Actually being there.