Discussion: Fin(n)ish

I don´t really know about just the live sound but WebTV was definitely in Swedish + a Finnish alternative too. Maybe it was the Finnish TV sound you heard?
How was it advertised on the website?

This was supposed to be the free announcing from the race arena (and not the paid live web broadcast), at least as I understood it. But it wasn't; though occasionally you could hear the race announcing dimly in the background. It was tow people speaking in Finnish with occasional advertisement breaks with the ads in Swedish. Weird, but no big deal to me in the end. It just would have been fun to have heard some of the announcing in Swedish, but it didn't matter enough to me to pay for it.

It's probably just me, but this is a lot less interesting than it used to be, partly because I don't know any of the current runners anymore, and I'm now so far removed from the time I spent in Sweden. And also, while it's kind of neat sometimes to see the GPS tracking, overall I thought it was a lot more interesting and suspenseful when all you had were the intermittent radio reports from the forest. Seeing GPS dots move across a screen somehow drains the excitement out of it in a way that I'm unable to express well. But, again, it's probably just me, and maybe for the vast majority of people GPS streaming, etc. marks a huge and welcome leap forward.

For anyone who's ever seen a crowd go crazy over dot racing at a baseball game, it's not hard to imagine that a fair number of people would find the GPS dots moving across a screen quite exciting, even if they had no idea what those dots represented. Or are orienteers cut from a different cloth than most baseball fans? (Full disclosure: I like baseball, but I'm baffled by the appeal of dot racing.)

I very much like following the dots when I can. Ethan has worn a tracker a few times and , really, it's the only time we actually get to "watch him race". Yes, there are other times where there are just splits coming in and that's better than nothing but it's not like you see the routes, hesitations, head to head racing and getting a bit ahead or falling a bit behind because of the route on each control.

Baseball is an odd sport, and one can wonder just how good of athletes those players actually are. For one, there's all the beards and spitting (well, I guess that's two). Unless they are actually getting paid to spit, it's hard to see the need for so much spitting. I know many people who don't train at all and are in no way athletes who can go entire days without needing to spit even once.

And, for another, they're supposed to be so good, and yet it's all but astonishing how often the pitcher misses the batter. Don't they ever practice?

Finally, you know it must be a truly odd sport when the fans need a break (7th inning stretch) more than the players do.