>Who has been watching the Winter Olympics? What do you think?

I've been watching a fair amount and enjoying it, for the most part, though there are far too many ad breaks and too much hype in the broadcasts. Read an interesting column in the paper the other day suggesting that it's time for NBC to give up pretending they're show stuff live and really do so. The suggestion was to show things live, but with less production, on the cable channels during the day and turn the evening NBC time into a SportsCenter-type format. Makes a lot of sense to me.

As for the sports, I find that as always, I enjoy most the ones that make it look like people are flying. I caught a little bit of aerial snowboarding last night and it was like a combination of ski jumping and diving, two of my Olympic favorites.

The cross-country skiing doesn't do much for me, but the Alpine is fun to watch. I've been enjoying both kinds of speed skating. Haven't caught much of the sliding events, though.

I've send some of the curling and wish I understood the game and the goals better. That actually leads me to one item I don't have a good suggestion for. For the most part, people watching the Olympics don't know much about the sports involved, the strategies, the scoring, etc. I'd like the broadcasters to provide that and translate the terms of art into English. OTOH, if you know the sport or if you're watching more that a little, hearing the same explanations over and over would be annoying.

That reminds me that I was truly aggravated with NBC (and NPR) for referring to Shani Davis as "the first African-American man" to receive an individual Winter Olympic goal. It's my understanding that he was the first black man, American or not.

As for the speed-skating duel <g>, I thought that Chad Hedrick has come off as arrogant and obnoxious. The exact order of events is not clear to me and if Davis said he would particate in the team event and backed out, he was wrong, but if he simply refused in the first place, that's his prerogative. I heard Dan Jansen on Today this morning suggesting the schedulers could solve this problem in future by putting the team pursuit last, so no one has to choose between an individual event and the team event.

Anyway, among the US men speedskaters, Joey Cheek comes across as the class act, donating his winnings to charity and making a speech about it.

Tamar