Wouldn’t you be surprised if, in the middle of the World Series, the announcers cut away to do a five-minute interview with the pitcher’s parents? While the game continued?

Wouldn’t you be surprised if, in the middle of the Super Bowl, the camera left the field and did a five-minute-long interview with the quarterback’s high school friends watching the game in a bar in his hometown? Wouldn’t you be surprised if TV stations around the country decided not to show the World Series unless a local team was in it? If none of these sound strange to you, you’re gonna love NBC’s prime-time coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics because these kinds of things will happen all the time.

The Olympics celebrates the coming together of the best athletes to promote a better understanding between peoples and nations of the world. Not that you will see much of those “peoples” from other nations in prime time if the broadcast is anything like the Olympics of the past. If an American is favored to win gold in an event, you’ll see more of that sport than all the other sports combined. If an American is not favored to win an event, its chances of being on television drop dramatically. I wonder how often network executives and the IOC have this debate: Should a sport an American can’t win be considered an Olympic sport?