SHANGHAI—China’s state television Olympics coverage got off to a tumultuous start. At a ceremony held last fall to celebrate the renaming of CCTV-5 to Olympics Channel (to distinguish it, presumably, from CCTV-1, -2, -3, -4, -6, -7, -8, -9, -10, -11- and -12), jilted media darling Hu Ziwei stormed the stage and announced that her husband, sports news announcer Zhang Bin, was having an affair.

The confrontation that ensued—Hu, clad in a pea coat and Burberry scarf, calmly explaining that her husband was tainting the image of the Olympics; a crew worker, palm splayed, rushing the camera lens; a pan to the blurry rings fading into the background—was the stuff of great soap opera. The clip was excised from the broadcast version of the ceremony, but fortunately some brave soul caught it all on a cell phone camera. It now lives on Youtube.

Since then, the state press has gotten its act together. We now have the impressive www.cctvolympics.com, which contains video from the torch relay, an interactive Beijing map, and a fun game called “Shoot the Turkey.” The content is too bandwidth-heavy to view from most Chinese connections, but the loading screen, at least, makes a bold statement by grouping the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube, and the new CCTV tower in one dramatic photo montage — lest we have any doubt about CCTV’s role in the Olympics.

As for Olympics Channel itself, a survey of the past forty-eight hours of coverage suggests this will be an interesting few weeks. There were the women’s weightlifting finals from Athens. There were highlights from soccer qualifying matches, viewed through the distraction, in the upper righthand corner of the screen, of a flashing “Good luck Beijing.” But the highlight was a documentary on the history of ping-pong. Think computer-generated animation: a lone racket, rotating in slow motion, tilting, unstoppable, toward victory.

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Posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 12:15 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.