What's Up With the Olympic Coverage???

So, you'd think the city hosting the Olympics would manage to provide decent TV coverage. If that city is Beijing, you'd think wrong! The first week there were five channels that reliably had prime-time coverage. This week it's down to three. The basic rule seems to be: if China is in the event and likely to do well, it has a chance of being covered. I get rooting for the home team, but they take it to a remarkable extreme! I mean really, who wants to watch four evenings of weightlifting??? Weightlifting is NOT exciting. If the home team takes a medal, show the winning lifts on your hourly highlights, but full coverage evening after evening after evening? Especially if you've only got five channels with coverage. Surely there must be something more interesting!

Last night a Brazilian friend came over. The plan: dinner and the game. Which game? Brazil vs. US for the gold in women's football (that's soccer to the rest of you Americans ;) ). Football doesn't exactly dominate the US sports scene but I bet even if the home team weren't playing the game would have been televised (maybe not live, but definitely televised). In the rest of the world where football borders on mania (ok...basketball supersedes here but it is definitely hugely popular) it's prety hard to imagine that an Olympic gold medal football match wouldn't get TV coverage. We channel surfed all evening. We even checked all the channels that hadn't been carrying Olympic coverage. Nada. We got athletics (well, people on the track...I didn't actually see much activity), ping pong, and women's volleyball. The other two channels are no longer running Olympics coverage. What's up with that?! People here are actually quite friendly towards the US and Brazil definitely fields popular football teams. We couldn't believe they didn't air the game!