By the way, I would LOVE to see a medal ceremony—I’d love to hear the US National Anthem and watch the flags and the athletes on the podiums, but NBC doesn’t seem to show that, either. I guess it’s more important to have the bizarre United Airlines commercial or Bob Costas prattle on about something….

It’d be nice to see some variety—different sports and different countries.

Provocation aside, it was rude to the community and uncalled for.

You get all these sports, you can watch it, but the commentary is amateurish and the broadcast overall is poor, that’s the problem.

And NBC, who went out of their way to buy up the rights to everything, put less coverage on the main network and more on CNBC and so on, and not everyone has cable.

CBC is doing a great job, and NBC should learn from them.

I believe that the only times NBC specifies that an event is “live,” it actually is, which for swimming has been at 10 PM EDT, which is 10 AM Chinese time. (They paid millions to arrange that – there’s a legitimate source for complaint, especially if you’re Australian.)

Most other stuff is taped, and is tacitly acknowledged as such. (I.e., if it doesn’t say “live,” it’s probably taped.) You can usually figure it out if you calculate time zones, which is relatively easy this time around for those of us in the Eastern USA. If they’re showing anything in the afternoon (here) it’s after midnight in Beijing, hence almost certainly taped. If you’re watching at 3AM, you may well be watching events as they happen. Primetime is a mix of “LIVE” – labelled as such – and unlabelled same-day coverage. You just need to be alert.

(I’ve mentioned before that my personal gripe is that all of the track and field – the Real Olympics – will be at night in Beijing, hence in the AM here, but not showed until about twelve hours later by NBC. AAAAAAGGGGGGHHHH. But that’s just bloody-mindedness, and the inability of NBC to “buy” track [as they did swimming], not overt deception.)

So far I’m not aware of any outright deception on this score. If you have evidence to the contrary, I’d be interested in seeing it. And if you actually knew the result of last nights 4×100 freestyle relay (Phelps’ second gold) two hours before it happened, you could have made a fortune

Apparently, you don’t understand the simple idea that we all have limited time, and that being unwilling to spend some of it learning about X does not mean one is incurious or shallow or anything else. It means one would prefer to spend time on some other activity, which might even be learning about Y.

I think “passive-aggressive” is probably a good description. “I’m not insulting you. I’m just saying you’re shallow and incurious and lack intellectual depth.” No insult at all.

Now I’m tired of this. You decided to insult me based on some vague experiences you had with some other people. Now you claim that it wasn’t an insult, even though it was a plainly negative statement and you have no sensible basis for it.

To hell with you, Agithehun.

It included about an hour of team handball (Germany vs. S. Korea) and another hour of women’s volleyball (China vs. Poland). No American teams; live coverage (I think); one brief interruption to announce an American gold medal in some other sport (shooting?); i.e., none of the nationalistic/sentimental crap so many commentators are complaining about.

Why can’t people understand – it’s been said often enough here, and not just by me – that NBC coverage of the Games is not identical with American coverage, supposedly the subject of this thread???

It’s perfectly legitimate to complain about NBC coverage, which is clearly designed to be sports for people who don’t really care that much about sports. (Though whoever suggested it would be better under ABC needs some sense of cultural history – it was ABC who invented “up close and personal” coverage of the Olympics, Back In The Day.)

It’s also OK to complain that NBC is all you can access, if you can’t afford cable. There’s capitalism for you, and perhaps – or perhaps not – an argument in favor of a national television “service.”

But to claim that the US “doesn’t show” all the other sports, just because you can’t access (or can’t be bothered to access) any of the other channels that are not NBC, is just plain ignorant. Or the product of knee-jerk anti-Americanism. (Which is also just plain ignorant.)

For the record, I’m an all-purpose sports fan. If it moves and they keep score, I’ll watch it. I’ve seen Gary Sobers hit a century at Lord’s and Greg Chappell at the SCG. I watch the European Cup as well as the Ryder Cup and the Super Bowl and the Final Four and Wimbledon and – when I can see it – Seven Nations rugby and Australian Rules Football. None of this makes me any more virtuous than if I had become an expert on Science Fiction or tapestry-weaving. It’s just what floats my boat.

What does not impress me is self-righteousness, especially of the nationalistic variety, based on patterns of sports watching.

Of course that’s just my observation. ;}