It was downhill all the way in Japan's media coverage of Olympics

Were the Turin Winter Olympics really that boring or was it just the Japanese television coverage?

It's difficult to believe that there were no interesting stories coming out of the Games, but the failure of Japanese athletes to win medals so demoralized the domestic media that all they could do was ponder this failure at the exclusion of everything else. One got the feeling that the rest of the world's triumphs and failures were merely a backdrop to the Great Japanese Medal Drought.

The crisis reached meltdown proportions last Monday during NHK's mid-Games highlights special. Once again, they trotted out the story of ski-jumper Masahiko Harada, who was making his fifth trip to a Winter Games. Harada is essentially a "professional" Olympic athlete, since he manages to secure a spot on the Japanese team every four years. As a news topic he epitomizes the "thrill of victory, agony of defeat" cliche better than anyone. He shouldered the blame for Japan's failure to win a team medal at Lillehammer in 1994 and then was given credit for the team gold at Nagano in 1998.