After international Test cricket, fans haven't been able to watch the football games and archery preliminary rounds – the latter featuring Indians – which began even before the official opening ceremony.
Viewers on Twitter had vented their feelings about Star Sports not brodcasting the England-Pakistan Test match live. Instead, the network played the “Best of PKL 2016”. The explanation, according to Star Sports’s official Twitter handle: there were ‘scheduling conflicts’, referring presumably to the upcoming broadcast of the Olympics.
That should have meant that viewers would be getting to watch the football matches (starting August 4, Indian time) and archery preliminaries (starting August 5). In fact, with the men's men’s individual archery event featuring Atanu Das kicking off at 5.30 pm IST, and the women's event with medal prospect Deepika Kumari scheduled for 9.30 PM, there would have been enough to keep Indian fans interested.
But here's the unpleasant surprise:
Instead of the men’s or the women's Archery prelims, all eight Star channels are focussed on an Olympic history programme titled “Rings of Glory” programme – in SD and HD, in English and in Hindi.
Earlier, on a night when hosts Brazil kicked off their campaign against South Africa, U-17 World Champions Nigeria won a pulsating encounter against Japan 5-4, the defending Olympic champions played out an entertaining 2-2 draw with the defending World Champions Germany, and the newly crowned European champions Portugal rolled over the world’s No. 1 team Argentina 2-0, a total of 32 goals were scored.
But none of it was available to football- and sports-lovers in India. They got all sorts of reruns. But no Olympic action.
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