King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Olympics postscript: On ratings, streakers, drugs and why Bode Miller deserves infamy. Hint: Not because he didn't try.

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Feb. 27, 2006 | And so, with more absurdist Vegas camp masquerading as high art in the Closing Ceremonies, another Olympics comes to an end. As always, these Winter Olympics turned out to be pretty entertaining, even for snow sports-dissing, stick and ball sports-loving landlubbers like me.

The curling rocked, of course, even before the streaker in the poultry loincloth showed up. The hockey was amazing, the men's gold-medal win by Sweden over Finland as tense and thrilling as any NHL Game 7, and the women's upset of the U.S. by Sweden as surprising and inspiring as they come.

The world was introduced to snowboard cross, an X Games-type event that's actually entertaining. And to a bunch of the sport's practitioners, whose attitudes were sometimes as puzzling as they were refreshing.

Americans have collectively decided that these Games were a bust for the Red, White and Blue, even though the U.S. team had a better medal showing than at any other Winter Games except 2002, which was on home ice and snow.

But expectations were high, and almost all of the highest-profile athletes failed to deliver, from Michelle Kwan's injury to Bode Miller's self-inflicted fizzle, with a squad of Johnny Weirs, Sasha Cohens, Jeremy Blooms and female hockey players in between.

Could have been worse, though. We could be Norwegians, who actually care about these sports during the other 206 weeks of each Olympiad, and who won two gold medals here, tied for 13th place with China, one behind Estonia. This would be like the U.S. winning fewer gold medals in a Summer Games than Bulgaria.

The easy cultural take on the Turin Olympics is that NBC's coverage got beaten in the ratings by "American Idol" and "Desperate Housewives," and therefore nobody cares about the Olympics anymore. I think that's too easy.

NBC's 20th century, tape-delayed approach to the Olympics is what the world has passed by, not the Games themselves. The network's Olympics Web site, where more timely results and highlights were available, groaned under record traffic.

The way people want to consume an Olympics has changed, and if NBC ever catches up, it'll do fine with the Games. Its next chance will be in two years, when the Summer Games will be held in Beijing. That is, Eastern Daylight Time plus 12 hours. The Olympic day will be ending just when most of America's is starting.

And even though NBC expected to and could have done better, we shouldn't go too far with the idea that its Turin ratings were so low they proved Americans aren't interested in the Olympics anymore.

Next page: A baker's dozen final thoughts: Bode Miller, streaker, drug tests, Ricky Martin and more