[comment caption=Has quality Olympic commentary become a lost art?]Unkind words have been said about our Olympic commentary team and, stick though it might in my patriotic craw, I have to say I agree with them.
Their performances have been analysed to the point of tedium by television critics, armchair sports aficionados and assorted other commentary gurus - which includes most of the nation - and been found wanting.
It is only fair that I should be allowed to join in.
After all, it was with funds especially earmarked for the promotion of charter programmes that TVNZ made its winning bid for the 2008 Olympics coverage.
And as such I'm as entitled to my opinion as the next taxpayer.
The sad truth is that the 2008 Beijing Olympics has exposed a sorry lack of depth.
There are a few superannuated bods at the top end with oodles of experience but whose strangled delivery gives the impression they've just heard the chop suey they swallowed for dinner contained not Peking Duck but Beijing Dog.
Either that or they can't quite get over the fact they are still in the game.
Then at the other end there is an assortment of young faces who have evidently graduated from the reserves' bench of the Kaitangata Senior A netball team, and who have never been told that it's not compulsory to gush in every single utterance of every single interview.
The occasional gush from an awestruck young female sports reporter faced with 100kg of bulging, quivering and blatantly exposed Olympian muscle is forgivable; to gush nonstop, regardless of the provocation, is the commentating equivalent of a bad case of norovirus: the squirts from both ends.
Some of these people should be locked down - in an isolation ward.
And in the mid-range, where the strength of the pack should lie, there's not a lot to write home about either.
Still, it can't be easy being a commentator in this day and age: the job in the era of state-of-the-art television coverage falls between two polarities - stating the blindingly obvious, or turning up the emotional volume as a sort of partisan cheerleader.
In the first instance you are on a hiding to nothing: so easy to get it wrong - which perhaps wouldn't matter if the whole world wasn't watching and could plainly see just how wrong you were.
Witness poor old P. J. who emoted himself senseless on behalf of the nation in the women's double scull finals.
First he had the Evers-Swindell twins ahead by a metre or so about 100 metres out when in fact they were plainly still about a metre behind; then he called them in third on the line behind both the Germans and the Brits.
There might have been trouble had we not been able to make the call ourselves and were all just too elated to care.
Mind you, old stager that he is, perhaps he was simply putting the brakes on expectation - revved up at every opportunity in certain quarters, most notably at the cycling velodrome.
The classic was Greg Henderson's 40km points race.
To be honest this event is a bit like watching paint dry, but here we were being told every 30 seconds that Henderson practically had it in the bag, what a master tactician he was, how the rest of the field were about to suffer an uncontrollable collective bout of that same norovirus - it's everywhere these days - just keeping up with him.
There was no way he was going to finish out of the medals . . .
This bore very little resemblance to what was actually happening on the track.
And in any other field of endeavour would have earned a prosecution under the Trades Description Act, or similar.
Henderson, very fine athlete though he undoubtedly is, was not having a good day at the office and that was obvious to even those of us for whom the finer tactical points of this discipline remain a complete mystery.
Still, at least we didn't have a team in the women's beach volleyball.
The men of the nation might have had to listen to some absurdly left-field commentary about the quality of the spiking, watch the contestants fondly patting each other's bottoms, and pretend we were engaged by a sporting contest.
Oh, come on! If beach volleyball truly is an Olympic sport, make way for nude mud wrestling.
Now that'd really give the commentators something to gush about.
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
