Every four years the world tunes in to watch its greatest athletes compete for Olympic gold.  Before this year I had only ever seen the filtered coverage from American media and thought the rest of the world probably viewed the Olympics in much the same way. However, now that I live in Lausanne, Switzerland, “The Olympic Capital”, and home of the International Olympic Committee, my eyes have been opened to the contrast of foreign coverage.

The biggest difference is how many channels cover the games.  In addition to the three Swiss channels, (one in each of the three main languages), there’s always been at least two French, one German, one Austrian, and one Italian channel, as well as an option on our smart TV to choose five different live feeds without commentary.  All together this gives us 13 channels to choose from, albeit sometimes one or more of the channels will be displaying the same thing.  Still this is much more coverage than I ever had in America, and its from the cheapest cable plan we could buy that gives us about 60 channels.

The Swiss channels are all public broadcasters, which means there are few commercials and the games aren’t as over produced because ratings are less important.  The NBC coverage I remember in America was filled with mini documentaries giving athlete back stories and analysts in a studio spending more time talking about the games than showing the games.  Here I haven’t seen a single athlete backstory, and with so many options, if I flip to a channel showing people in a studio or an athlete being interviewed I can just channel surf to something with live sports.

Commentators do talk through all the events, the same as in the U.S., but for me I can’t keep up with how fast they talk in their foreign languages, which is a double edged sword.  On the one hand I never get annoyed with color commentary, but on the other hand sometimes I get a little lost in sports I’m not familiar with and have to research them on the internet.  And there have been a lot of sports I’ve seen for the first time during this Olympics, including pistol shooting (where Switzerland won their first medal of the games), air rifle (where the U.S.A. won the first gold medal of the games), modern pentathlon (an event that combines running, swimming, pistol shooting, horse jumping, and fencing), judo, a second kind of gymnastics called rhythmic gymnastics, white water kayaking, mountain biking, and lots of handball which seems to be on at least one channel every time I turn on the TV.

Unlike in the U.S., where swimming and track seem to dominate the news, our TV hasn’t shown much of those two events, mostly because the medal event took place long after I’ve gone to bed.  Here all the channels show everything live, and don’t hold back popular sports for prime time.   If a gold medal event happens at 3 a.m. it will be shown at 3 a.m, (and I will be sleeping).  All of the channels also like to feature their national athletes in medal contention.  If Switzerland is going for the gold in dressage (essentially horse dancing), that would take precedence over a swimming race with no Swiss competitor.

All in all, it has been really fun getting into the Olympic spirit this year and watching it all with a European flair.