Peter,
Interesting post. A few quick things:
1) 'Joshua' is Joshua Cooper Ramo, hired by NBC as its resident China hand for the games, apparently. He's written several books. (I haven't read them.) I only heard him on the tube during the opening ceremony, where he seemed to do ok.
2) I assume from what you say that the IOC took a cut of the $894 million NBC paid China for the broadcast rights; how big a cut, do you know?
3) Re India: an Indian boxer, middleweight Vijendra Kumar, did v. well in Beijing; not positive whether he won a medal b/c the NBC olympics web site is not good at providing quick definitive info., and i didn't have the patience to ferret it out. (Prob shd have tried the site of Indian olympic team.) India is hosting the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010, and they make more of an olympic showing at the 2012 games in London.
4) Why some countries are good at one thing or another: no doubt a variety of explanations, but one cd be that once a winning tradition has been established in something (e.g., distance running in Kenya), it becomes institutionalized in the country's sports system/culture, and has no trouble generating interest and new recruits. (Just guessing, obviously.)
Another thing: I didn't watch that much of the coverage, but from what i saw NBC seemed to concentrate on a relatively few sports: swimming, track & field, gymnastics, volleyball, rowing, biking, and maybe a few others. But there are tons of other olympic sports and if you wanted to see any of them you had to go to the computer (or maybe cable, but i'm not sure about that). NBC must have run focus groups etc to try to maximize viewership, but still i find it annoying that some suits at NBC were in effect telling the American and other audiences "only these sports really matter" and downgrading and ignoring everything else. I'm sure this has happened before and is par for the course, but it's still annoying.
Lots of talk about the London opening ceremony - to maintain a historical tradition I suggest that the Brits run it for the first 30 minutes until it goes so wrong that we have to invite the Americans in to finish the job.
Peter, that's very amusing. Perhaps to extend your analogy we could have the Americans be undecided for the first 30 minutes which side they want to compete on, or bring it up to date by having the Americans flatten the site with high-altitude bombing and then ignore it until it's turned into a failed state. Maybe the Americans could show no interest in the games until a rumor is circulated that there might be oil under them.
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