Pretty lame reason not to give the guy the answer - I’ve heard contestants on game shows mangle “Chopin”, “Don Quixote”, “Gandhi” - and get awarded the answer. And they’re going to make a big deal over “Achilles”? Face it, no matter how you pronounce it, you’re probably not saying it the way Homer would have.
I think they were a bit hard on him too, especially since pronunciation isn’t as easy to specify as spelling. (They make the rules, but maybe they should have made them differently.) Most persons with a strong interest in sports have heard ‘the Achilles tendon’ pronounced, even if they never discuss Homer (how many persons in this generation do?). It’s possible, though, to know a good bit about things from reading, and not know how to pronounce them.
I read a considerable amount of German literature in translation on my own before I studied German itself — and without discussing it with anybody — and thought the name of ‘Goethe’ (perhaps the best writer in the language) was pronounced the same way as ‘Goth’. :-) I had no need to discuss him, so why should I worry about the pronunciation? Also I read a couple of volumes of the French writer Gide’s journals, all the while thinking his name started with the sound of ‘g’ as in ‘get’.
[Obama I excuse less because as head of the armed forces he should make sure he knows how to pronounce ‘corpsman’.]
I wonder what standard the program uses for pronunciation. There are many different “standard” pronunciations: British RP, American, Australian (also regional pronunciations within the countries, including rhotic and non-rhotic in the United States, which can determine whether you pronounce an ‘r’ in some positions).