The Olympics are notorious for treacly human interest stories: the biathlete with one leg who survived an attack from a horde of weasels, the one whose parents escaped from some war-torn hellhole to get them to America, the one athlete whose entire family is killed by NBC when they don’t have enough human interest stories and need to make one…you know, the usual.
Chris Klug Is Fascinating, Soon To Be Overdramatized
↵Prep yourselves for the tale of snowboarder Chris Klug, then, since he’s suffered from a serious medical condition and he’s paleolithically old by Olympic standards. Klug will be a 37 year old man on his second liver at the start of the games, practically guaranteeing a soft-focus opus on Klug’s life since he’s the Brett Favre of snowboarding plus the added intrigue of a life-threatening illness.
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Not that Klug isn’t fascinating—oh, he is, having won the 2002 bronze on a duct-taped board 19 months after a liver transplant, missing the 2006 games due to a scoring technicality, and only making these games thanks to creating his own snowboarding team. This is a fascinating story when you line up all the facts, which is what NBC should do instead of giving us the “Touched By An Angel” version of events with lots of soft-focus shots and lens-flared panoramas of the slopes where Klug trains. Which is what they’ll do, and thus cheapen an otherwise fine story by letting its shoddy telling get in they way. NBC Sports! Where it’s always 1989 and analog!
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