Will RTÉ Olympics be on the right track?

RTÉ 2 television has announced an all-day schedule of coverage of the Olympic Games.

This is an ambitious undertaking for a station whose normal staple in the intervening four years is football (in GAA, soccer and rugby union guises), hurling, and not much of anything else. Minority sports followers, of whom there are more than imagined, will hope that this extended coverage includes actual action from many of the 26 sports that never get a look-in.

While it is understandable that RTÉ will be keen to devote time to all the Irish athletes, it is hoped that we will also see the best of the medal-winning performances elsewhere. Too often we are shuttled back to studio for endless discussions and analyses of minor heats while major action is happening all about. There is too great a reliance on the ‘time-fillers’ of long-distance running, endless boxing bouts, triathlons etc, while sports that could be knowledgeably edited in even five-minute slots like weightlifting, wrestling, archery are reduced, if we’re lucky, to disjointed 30 second highlights that convey little of the atmosphere of battle.