Chinese sports TV just keeps getting WORSE...

I have written on here a few times before about how much I love tennis, and especially the Wimbledon Championships.

I have written even more often of how gob-smackingly terrible the sports coverage is on this country's main national TV sports channel, CCTV5 (in theory, it stands for 'China Central Television'; but Chinese friends joke that it should be 'China CRAP Television').

Well, this year, CCTV5 didn't seem to be showing any coverage of Wimbledon at all. There were far too many China-friendly sports going on like, er, badminton... and volleyball... and cycling... and ping-pong, of course... and, er, basketball.

I suppose there must have been some coverage of Li Na's advance to the Ladies' Quarter-Finals, but I managed to miss it all.

BTV6 - the sports channel of the Beijing television service, which seems to have attained a national eminence equal to or greater than CCTV's - appeared to have been carrying most of the Wimbledon coverage this year; but I didn't find that out until the final weekend. And I'm not sure that they showed much of the earlier rounds.

Still, at least I got to see the Men's Final between Djokovic and Nadal live.

And on Monday morning, enjoying an unexpected bit of free time at home before heading out to an afternoon class, I happened to switch on the TV just after they'd started showing a re-run of the Ladies' Final between Petra Kvitova and Maria Sharapova. I enjoyed a full, uninterrupted two-game sequence, and I was foolishly starting to hope that they were showing the match in full, and as live.

No. At the next rest break they went into a series of advertisements. A long series of advertisements (well, mostly it was the same two- or three-minute sequence endlessly repeated). It dragged on for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, getting on for 15 minutes. It began to seem unlikely that they were ever going to return to the match at all. And I certainly didn't have the patience to wait around to see if they did, while watching the same ludicrous, annoying ads over and over and over again. I went off to potter around on the computer.

I returned to the TV about 40 minutes later, by which time, even if Sharapova's resistance fell apart - as I gather it rather did - and even if there had been no further bumper ad breaks, I would have expected the match to be still some way short of the climax of the second and final set. BTV6 was now showing a golf tournament (I couldn't work out which one). I can only conclude that they showed only a few brief highlights of the Ladies' Final, three or four of the biggest games. And in a ratio of 40% tennis action to 60% advertisements.

TV sports coverage in this country SUCKS beyond belief!