Friday, January 11, 2013

Reality Aquatics TV: Good or Bad for sports?

This week, FOX premiered Stars In Danger: The High Dive for 2 hours in Prime Time. Wow! Aquatics coverage in Prime Time in a non-Olympic year. Unbelievable... sadly it was for a sad reality competition - D list celebrities (some of whom are professional athletes BTW... thats a little unfair, no??) doing high dives after private sessions with private divers and coaches. I'm not really sure what to make of this; I'm sure I would have watched for fun had I not been away that night working helping another coach in Toronto... but I would have watched for the same reason I watch "Skateboard Fail" videos on the internet or why everyone on the 400 slows down to see a car wreck. Is this good for aquatic sports? BTW, this was after Kim Richards trained for several hours with pro divers and coaches...



This week, Ryan Lochte also announced a reality show on E!. If it's possible, his show may be even a bigger train wreck than SID:THD. Sure it's funny for us; we're kind of "in" on the joke... but is this how we want our sport to look to outsiders? Ryan Lochte has already embarrassed himself in interviews and created a media personality as being sort of an idiot (I tried to phrase that nicely). Imagine a camera following him around 24hours/day??? Although, a thousand monkeys at a thousand type-writers will eventually write the great American novel... in other words, Ryan is likely to have 22min of intelligence in a week's time.

I have opened up the comments section for this post (which I NEVER do) because I'm interested in your opinion on this. I honestly don't know how to feel. Post below or send me a twitter message. Are we getting good exposure or will the public write fail to take our sport seriously?

Update: For some reason the comments section is not working. Tweet me and use the hash-tag #realityswim