Good comments, all. I would argue that Melissa Stark's "Are you angry?" question was a fair one, because he certainly seemed angry, though I agree the way she phrased it sounded like she was talking to a 5-year-old. I would have just said, "You seem more angry than happy" and stuck the microphone back in his face.

Davis spent his early years in what appears to me to be a tough neighborhood on the South Side, and he has talked about running away from gang members as a form of training. But what NBC doesn't like to talk about is that he had moved to Evanston by the time he was 10. I'm no expert on Chicago, but I don't think Evanston is "drug-invested."

Oops! "Drug infested"

Actually, drug-invested is probably a better description. Good one, Anonymous.

nycprof: Also, am I misremembering, or wasn't there a "controversy" in the opposite sense with Phelps in Athens, where his participation in the relays as part of his attempt to best Spitz was criticized because he took away a spot from a lesser teammate? What I take away from this is that if you are one of the top individual performers in these sports you can't win whether you participate in the team events or not.

I think you're right Davis couldn't win on this one, but the situations are slightly different. The swim team was a favorite with or without Phelps, and he passed on a chance to swim the final so someone else could. It was kind of a nice-guy move. With Davis, the team's sunk without him, has a chance with him. He said he wasn't interested in the team event, that nobody even mentioned it to him till a week before, that it interrupts his training for the race he's been working toward for years, and that he didn't want to take someone else's spot, something that happened to him in 2002. As David Novak points out, you can take all this with whatever grain of salt you'd like.

kalyarn: What I find most interesting about these games is how it seems NBC has chosen to ditch their usual feel-good stories and instead gone for the harsh, angry coverage of rivalries and failure.

NBC actually ditched the feel-good stuff in Athens. It's a rare case where the big company listened to the peoples, who were screaming "Would you please for &$#*'s sake show us some events!?" There are still some syrupy features, and the ever-awful Hallmark Man, but nothing like what there used to be, and that isn't new this time, nor is it a result of American failures in Turin.

Roy: In case you haven't heard, it's not just a cliche this year...nobody, but nobody, is watching this crap.

NBC won seven of the first nine nights of the Olympics in the ratings. The ratings have been in the low- to mid-teens. That's about 10 times the audience for college basketball on ESPN, about five or six times the audience for college basketball on a network, more than twice the NBA All-Star ratings most years (I don't know what this year's were). The Daytona 500, the "Super Bowl" of the wildly successful, paradigm-changing NASCAR juggernaut, got an 11.3 rating Sunday. That's an all-time high. The Olympics has been at or above that every night.

Olympics ratings are way down from 2002, when the Olympics were in the U.S. and a lot more events were live, and 1998, in Nagano. But so are the ratings for everything else. Just because not as many people watch the Olympics as used to watch them doesn't mean "nobody, but nobody," is watching them. More people are watching "American Idol" and one or two other shows, but there are no other sports coming close to the interest level of the Olympics.

Not that that's everything to me. I write about the Olympics because I find them interesting. I'm sorry you don't. The Interweb has ample coverage of most sports. Enjoy, and if you'd like, come back in a week and I'll probably be done writing about the Olympics.

Atiya: really enjoyed the ice dancing finals last night simply because no one (at least, no one they showed) fell. The "original dance" the other night was just awful.

Funny, I had the exact opposite point of view.

brad lehman: Meanwhile, NBC has done its level best to ruin some very good games. They've had quite a knack for cutting to commercial while goals are being scored. Way to go, guys.

What are they supposed to do? The game only stops for 15 seconds at a time. Officially. I find it's more like 20. But still, there are no TV timeouts. So, it's a crapshoot. Even though there are goals missed this way, I think it's a good thing. I'd rather miss a goal now and then than have the endless TV timeouts of the NHL, which disrupt the flow of the game and make it too long. A replay can show me the goal, but I'll never get those wasted TV-timeout minutes back.

limedzez: Where is the curling update?

I've kind of fallen behind on my curling viewing the last few days because I've been watching, though not writing much about, hockey.

strictly: Thanks for the kind words.

Ross: If figure skating is pro wrestling, then ice dancing is midget luchador wrestling. And why isn't there a bit more scrutiny on this whole citizenship gamesmanship? Brown person fleeing despotic regime? No. Cute white girl who can ice dance? Come on in!

Excellent!