Olympic Coverage (with stress on the "limp" part)

I've been trying to watch the Olympics on NBC - not because of national pride or anything like that (some of our athletes are a bit embarassing), but because I'm genuinely interested in the sports - skiing, luge, bobsledding (now known as bobsleighing now - when did they rename it?), skeleton, and even curling.

And what a pain in the ass it has been. I've been using my computer to record "everything" (not for rebroadcast mind you, as I don't have expressed written consent from NBC) and then trying to skip through the things I don't care about to find the things I want to see.

To say that NBC has made this a challenge is something of an understatement. Ten minutes of historical data followed by two minutes of a ski run is a bit extreme (is that what's meant by "extreme sports"??). And the repetitiveness of it all - nothing personal, but I don't know Scott McCartney, and I'm sorry his mother had cancer and she wiped in a tree well and was saved by his father, but how many times do I need to hear about the story? And Hermann Maier's leg? Great, he nearly lost it in an accident - it looked pretty firmly attached the other day, can we move beyond the story?

On, and the site - nice idea - I like that I can go to the web to see if there's anything "good" on. But maybe, just maybe, instead of having the main site show the results and have a tiny link off to the side that says "go here if you don't want to see the results yet," maybe the default site could not show the results and the impatient masses can click elsewhere to get them? Just a thought..

And maybe, just maybe, you can stop ragging on the athletes. Ok, some of them aren't doing so well, but do you have to humiliate them? Lindsay Jacobellis (why isn't it called "sno-bo-cross" anyway?) fell. Maybe she was grabbing her board and showing off, maybe she wasn't. She knows whether she did or not and is going to have to live with knowing that she might have blown her chance at a gold - do you need to rub her nose in it, to force her to come up with excuses on the spot? Are you going to pay for her therapist? She's probably going to need one.

I'd also like to propose a new format for the next televised Olympics - how about "events on demand"?? There are events I want to see, and events I don't. Show everything, but show it as contiguously as is humanly possible. Don't take a break from skiing to show me ice dancing, show me all of skiing. And then show all of ice dancing. And then curling.. And so on.. Perhaps even show events in parallel, on different channels (it'd help sell multi-tuner DVRs as well). I can't believe anyone actually enjoys jumping from sport to sport to sport?

This year, I think everyone gets to take home a gold with the exception of the NBC team - they get banned for doping.