I am a Brit living in a filthy foreign country with very little sports broadcasting, and am rather disappointed I'm missing out on one of the few remaining things I like about the BBC: excellent Olympics coverage.
Opera now categorises its VPNs by continent rather than country, so I can't just pop on a UK VPN and go to iPlayer. Free proxy IPs from the internet yield only unstable connections.
Do I have any other options for watching, short of paying a subscription or flying somewhere else?
Almost all of us who'll see your post are in the UK so the least likely people to have any idea how to see our own TV from outside of the country. You need somewhere with lots of expats in. A "britpostconversionthera.py" if you will.
>one of the few remaining things I like about the BBC: excellent Olympics coverage.
I hate to break it to you, but the great maw of capitalism has swallowed that too.
>>9709 I was noting earlier in the week the lack of excitement around these Olympics. Now, much of that is COVID related, more of it is me related, but the event does appear to be becoming less and less captivating and as such the IOC may well have abolished themselves before long. Actually, no, that's BS. They off-load the primary costs to the host nation and can sell TV rights for a billion dollars, they aren't going anywhere.
>>9708 >This is no longer possible, however, after Olympics organisers decided to sell the European television rights for the games to the US company Discovery in a £920m deal.
On this note, I can't recall ever being excited about the Olympics growing up, nor anyone I know being excited about the event either. I had always just assumed it's something that just happens and nobody cares all that much.
I just assumed they didn't want to put every sport on a different channel because some people don't like sport. Imagine tuning into BBC Four for a documentary on the history of freeform jazz, and instead it's Serbia vs Mauritius in 3x3 basketball. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and besides, you can watch every sport on BBC iPlayer after it's ended, and you're unlikely to be watching live anyway since most of it's on at 3am.
>>9713 I remember being excited about Atlanta 1996, Beijing 2008, and London 2012. Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 I admittedly have very little recollection of. Barcelona 1992 and Seoul 1988, I was an infant and it's not reasonable to expect me to have cared.
>>9714 >you can watch every sport on BBC iPlayer after it's ended
Yeah good luck with that. The way it appears to be organised means there will be an two hour long programme called 'Day 2 - Surfing' and then click on it and there's no surfing. Or rather there is, but it's after several minutes of badminton, swimming, etc. Why it's not really organised by sport I've no idea. Perhaps to gloss over the fact they don't have the rights to most of it as discussed.
OP here. Indeed, subscription to that company (via Eurosport) is how I am currently watching my Olympic events of choice. I'll probably cancel right after the games, but it does indeed feel like a bit of a slap in the face.
I think it depends how into sports (that aren't club football) you are or were growing up. There was a big boxing scene in my hometown due to a few (now famous) faces turning professional, and many young talents cut their teeth by showing some promise in the Olympics.
I think everyone instinctively gets the "purity" of track and field athletics, and people with Jamaican ancestry are rightly proud of their achievements in sprinting. The swimming and horse stuff is mainly for the posh who had access to the facilities at a young enough age to get really good at it. Weightlifting and gymnastics were always massively popular in Eastern bloc countries, and you'd have had to have slept through the 2008 Beijing games if you didn't notice China's ascendancy in both, making for some really exciting competition.
Some hobby sports are now being picked up as niche events, like climbing and skateboarding. You could be cynical and say this is the Olympics attempting to stay relevant, but sports fall in and out of favour over time, and I would be inclined to say the more the better.
Personally I get more excited about the Olympics than any other big sporting event, with the exception of maybe a really big boxing matchup or the Six Nations, just because of the sheer amount of talent on display. I can tune into a discipline I know fuck-all about and see the world's best doing it. As much as I hate the commercialism, that still feels pretty special.
>>9713 I usually watch a women's event as a bit of a teenage tradition. Unfortunately I might give it a miss this year as staying up late to ogle women's abs feels a bit wrong'un.
>>9719 > Some hobby sports are now being picked up as niche events, like climbing and skateboarding.
I tend to enjoy those "niche" competitions a lot more than the more mainstream events as for the first couple of events at least the former tend to fit closer to the modern olympic idea of "amateur athletes" that's been completely lost in the established disciplines. While there's undeniable beauty in seeing athletes perform asymptotically closer to the maximum the human body can achieve, I find more fun and joy in seeing a slightly scrappy performance by people who are quite good and really try hard.
>>9722 The Paralympics is outstanding in every conceivable way. My all-time favourite sporting moment is from the Paralympics (the 200m in London 2012; I forget the name of the disability category but you'll know it when you see it). Also, they're all niche sports; it's the ultimate hipster tournament. Sure, sprinting and hurdles and cycling are pretty generic, but not when you have no legs.
