What is the best site to watch Olympic sports without commentary?

July 26, 2024 4:20 PM

I'm in the US, but equipped with a computer and a VPN. The constant babbling and cutaways to athletes overcoming childhood traumas has prevented me from watching the Olympics in the past. Now, there are a lot of legal watching options: do any of them just let me watch sports without commentary?
posted by SunSnork to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (8 answers total)

If you watch the livestreams of the events on Peacock, you will still get play by play commentary for most sports, but not the packaged segments with the childhood trauma. For the less popular US sports, they are often just streaming the Olympic Broadcasting coverage, which has more international commentators. I have also heard good things about Canadian CBC coverage with a VPN.
posted by wsquared at 4:50 PM on July 26 [1 favorite]

This is probably a dumb question, but are you open to muting the feed? Or do you want the ambient/crowd noise, as well? Things like track and field and swimming are not generally noise-centric sports in the way that figure skating or floor in gymnastics are.
posted by moosetracks at 7:49 PM on July 26

Response by poster: I was hoping for the ambient sound, particularly if there is concurrent music for routines. I don't particularly need high quality sound, though.
posted by SunSnork at 8:19 PM on July 26

Look around on Peacock, for the skating a couple years ago I found direct feeds that were uncut and had the hall announcements. Was fun to watch without the usual inanities.
posted by sammyo at 10:05 PM on July 26 [3 favorites]

Cbc is usually pretty good;
https://gem.cbc.ca/event-guide/paris-2024
posted by yyz at 6:45 AM on July 27 [3 favorites]

Came here to say cbc (via cbc gem) — but it really depends on the popularity of the sport. I just watched an entire table tennis set without a bit of commentary or hosts talking at all - we were on our own to figure out what was happening. But then we watched surfing and it had what id call “play by play” but as there were no canadians, there was not one iota of background on any of the athletes that wasnt just the usual blah blah blah during a slow bit when filler was needed. No trauma cutaways, thats for sure. However i cannot promise this wont happen for any match involving a canadian.
posted by cgg at 5:11 PM on July 27 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I'm watching Peacock right now and there's no TV announcer, no cutaways, and no commercials for the replays of women's qualifying gymnastics. There are no US gymnasts showing up so maybe that's why?
posted by oxisos at 10:18 AM on July 28 [1 favorite]

Best answer: To clarify a bit: on Peacock's live feeds, depending on the sport, you will sometimes get play by play and sometimes get ambient sound (although mostly you'll get play by play). You will never get human interest stories. You will get commercials, but they won't interrupt the action. And the multi-view they're offering this Olympics (typically four events on one screen, with sound from one of your choosing) is really helpful if you don't know exactly what you want to watch, although they do have feeds for every individual event happening every day should you know exactly what you're looking for.

I have found, so far in this Olympics, that Peacock's live coverage is pretty good, because it skips all those Heartwarming Stories Of Redemption, Struggle, And Triumph that you get on the primetime show (sorry if that sounds churlish, but for those who don't know, American Olympics broadcasts are very much all about that, almost all the time, and it gets old really fast), and just shows you the sport itself. And if you're used to watching sports in the US, you know what you're gonna get - a play by play, that's pretty much it.

And, at least so far, the Peacock PBP people I've seen/heard are well-versed in (and usually used to compete in) the sports they cover; the fencing commentators do a really good job of talking through how fencing actually works, for example, so if like me you come into most Olympic events not knowing much about the intricacies of their rules or scoring, they are actually pretty helpful a lot of the time.

So it's not just ambient sound, but at least for me, it's also not just mindless blather, most of the time.
posted by pdb at 9:01 PM on July 30 [1 favorite]