"you're a tough COOKIE" - Marta Karoli

I am unabashedly addicted to the Olympic coverage. I can't get enough. In my normal life, I am not crazily patriotic but the Olympics come on and I am like actively rooting for other teams to fail. I kind of suck. Needless to say, I have come to familiarize myself with the announcers of the sports televised in prime time (diving, swimming, gymnastics). The diving chick is super annoying. She is definitely knowledgeable but sometimes needlessly throws things out like "short muscle twitch fiber" that make no sense to anyone. Bring it down a notch girl. Now, the swimming dudes are pretty great. I don't really have any beef with them. They are knowledgeable, pass on the knowledge, give good information about swimmers from other countries you wouldn't know, don't treat the viewers like idiots or assume the audience knows things they don't. They also had the best called race of the games so far, the spectacularly awesome men's 4 x 100 freestyle relay. I mean you can just tell they love swimming.

I do not feel this way about the gymnastic dudes.

First, the entire scoring system is all different than it used to be, and they keep talking about it, but they haven't really explained it on the broadcast, so that's annoying. But way, way, way worse than that is their constant need to jinx the fuck out of the gymnasts. It's like, "These gymnasts need absolute perfection in this next event and they are perfect and it will be glorious." And then two seconds later it's like, "Oh, and the team has fallen apart with 18 mandatory deductions. I guess I spoke too soon." I can't handle it. I spend the entire time knocking on wood. (yes, I'm that crazy) Finally, why did NBC hire Bela Karoli and then stick him with Bob Costas in the broadcast center? That guy needs to be calling the event! Isn't that the whole point of giving him a job?!? I don't get it.