Every mens and womens basketball game has been broadcast live. You just have to be up at 3 a.m..

Y'all been giving synchronized diving a bum rap. No, I haven't thought about it for four years. But that's how these on again off again love affairs work. It's best not to think about them when they are away.

The skimpy bathing suits, the long and lean bodies and the grace of the sport are a wonderful sight to behold every four years during the otherwise dog days of summer.

Was just talking to my wife about this last night, bemoaning the lack of the traditional Olympic sports on in primetime. But hey, if you look at the rest of major network primetime programming, it's all T & A so why should the Olympics be any different? :-(

Men's indoor more interesting than sand volleyball? What planet are you watching from. Here's the deal on men's indoor: Bump-set-kill. Repeat. Got it?

To me, playing in the sand is much more a true sport. Frankly, I would eliminate from the Olympics all sports with more than 4 on a team. Keep it interesting. Keep it exciting.

1. There's a lot of basketball on month after month after month after month after month.

2. Olympic basketball isn't all that different.

3. It is on on some of the channels.

Thanks for acknowledging your readers, King. Now if only we could get the ear of someone at NBC. Before tonight's Beach Volleyball marathon.

I guess I should add, since I was quoted here, that I also don't have any problem with keeping beach volleyball in the Olympics. There's been a lot of debate about whether to add a certain sport or remove a certain sport, or whether it's necessary to add a sport to replace one that's just been removed, etc. But as King touched on here, I don't think the total number of events is nearly as important as how the networks choose to cover them.

Now I agree with Gary Kamiya that it's understandable American athletes will get the most coverage here. But one of the few reasons I still bother to tune in to the Olympics is to be exposed to sports I've never had a chance to see before, even - like a commenter in an earlier thread expressing his boredom with handball - when the results don't live up to the expectations. Often these are sports Americans don't dominate, which is one of the reasons they get relegated to the "results highlights" ghetto, where we maybe get one quick clip of the victorious moment and then a shot of the medals being placed around the athletes' necks. What I would like is for a network (especially one utilizing as many channels as NBC) to try to recreate the confusion and bustle and energy that must be present if one were attending the Olympics in person. More live coverage, less puff pieces and irritating interviews, and a greater variety of events would improve things dramatically.

Announcer said the two American women did yoga to unwind after a stressful beach volley ball game and I was thinking that if you get stressed at beach volley ball, you're probably not doing it right. This is a sport that needs to be played with a bucket of beers. Making it stressful is just wrong. The worst thing about the beach volley ball is that here on the West Coast, you have to sit through hours of beach volley ball and synchronized diving before Michael Phelps swims even though NBC has the Michael Phelps tape in the can and you can read about it on the Internet for hours before they get around to showing it.

We get basketball, football, baseball ALL the time! Thank goodness for beach volleyball!

NBC's TV coverage of the Olympics has been its normal, over-hyped, what-did-USA-win-today crap. However ...

To their credit, their on-line content has been incredible. Great coverage of entire events (not just the USA stuff) on-demand. High quality, too, if you've got the bandwidth. And virtually no commercials or annoying hyped up commentary. Just the game, as if you were there.

Here's the link to the basketball page:

http://www.nbcolympics.com/basketball/index.html

Find the game that you want and click the "Rewind" link to have the entire thing re-broadcast on your computer screen. Full-screen, if you want.

Most of the other sports are there, too, so just click and enjoy.

Somehow, this is twice as boring as watching single diving. Yet every time I turn the Olympics on, it's synchronized diving.

Archery, fencing, kayaking, shooting, sailing, table tennis, taekwondo, judo, wrestling, dressage, etc. Surely all these sports deserve their 15 minutes of prime time fame?

I love learning about sports that are wildly popular somewhere else. I had no idea until I traveled in Malaysia and Thailand that in southeast Asia, badminton players are like rock stars. Who knew? But there they are on the front pages of the papers, like Kobe Bryant or whatever.

Olympic level badminton is nothing short of amazing. The skill and speed of those players is astonishing. Yet we haven't seen it yet, between the Michael Phelpsathon (yes, he's a great guy, doing great things, but let's move along!) and the skimpy-suited beach volleyball festival.

So show us all that stuff. Teach us the finer points of trap shooting scoring, or bow construction, or who's the bees knees in target shooting. I think the Olympics are the ultimate in oddball sports we never get to see otherwise, and yet they don't show us those sports.

Bring on the judo!

And is maybe one rationale for NBC showing so much of it because it's LIVE in primetime, and people tend to tune out of non-live events? Of course, probably the only reason that it syncs up with US primetime is because no other countries care enough about it to object to that scheduling.

My favorite factoid from the beach volleyball coverage, which I must have heard at least six times during a match a couple days ago: "If May/Walsh win the gold here, they will be the first team to repeat as gold medalists in the HISTORY of Olympic Beach Volleyball!!!" Yes, I know half of the Chinese gymnastics team wasn't even born when beach volleyball was introduced in 1996, but that doesn't mean it was a long time ago!

And actually that annoying factoid is too bad, because in general, the BV commentators are by far the least annoying of the other primetime commentators (swimming, gymnastics, synchronized diving are nearly unbearable, Dan Hicks's call of the men's 4x100 excluded)

I haven't seen anyone mention the crowd of green-swimsuited cheerleaders(?) that run around the sand and just add to the silliness of it all...though actually I don't remember seeing them last night. Maybe they've been removed? Maybe they were needed to lend their skills to the dressage competition?

Oh, and for the ultimate in gratuitiousness (gratuity?) see http://www.nbcolympics.com/beachvolleyball/photos/galleryid=122861.html It's a set of 20 close-up photos of bikini-clad ass, under the Dalhausser-thin guise of educating us about the extremely complex hand signals that they use. Hilarious.