Posted on 02/22/2002 7:11:02 AM PST by blam
Winter Olympic fans ordered to cheer on cue
US organisers of the Winter Olympics are telling audiences when to clap and cheer and what to sing, it has emerged.
One of the few sports where fans are not choreographed is curling.
The use of announcers to tell spectators when and how to celebrate has puzzled foreign visitors unused to the regimented ways of US sports.
Favourite songs of the television producer, hired to tell fans what to do, are If You're Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands, and YMCA, which is available in English, Chinese, German, Russian and Japanese.
Christy Nicolay, a television producer, was brought in by the games' organisers to choreograph the events.
She hired teams of producers and directors to script each event minute-by-minute and put together videos to be shown on the giant screens dotted around the venues.
"I come from TV. Everything I do is about broadcast," she told the Wall Street Journal. "The most important thing for me was to make these games different. We've pushed the envelope at these Olympics."
When sports are happening loudspeakers blast out orders on what to shout. During the men's snowboarding event, the announcer told the audience to shout "big air! big air!", followed by commands including: "Scream and shout! Make some noise! God bless you!"
And at the speed-skating, fans were told to shout "world record! world record!", before an order to stay quiet at the start of the race, followed by a request for more noise after the starting pistol had been fired.
And despite abandoning the choreography during the curling contest, big screens told the audience snippets of information, including: "Stone: made of granite."
Story filed: 16:02 Friday 22nd February 2002
No one is allowed to decide for themselves what to shout and when. What a wonderful world we live in, all for the benefit of 'broadcast' and we must of course always 'push the envelope'.
This woman is an arse and should be shot immediately.
This is true. Neither of the 2 fans would do what they were told.
JonaTHAN!....JonaTHAN!...JonaTHAN!
I've not watched a minute of the Olympics, and don't plan on watching the ones in 2004, either. They're boring, staged, corrupt, and so on. Kinda like a classier version of the WWF, I guess. I'd rather watch re-runs of past NCAA basketball tourneys on ESPN Classic.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.