Visiting blogger: Why the U.S. sees the Olympics last

Ron Rapoport, the author and former sportswriter and columnist, stops in as an LA Observed visiting blogger on the occasion of Dick Ebersol leaving NBC and the network getting the rights to keep airing (on delay) the Olympic Games. Excerpt of his post:

Since I couldn't afford the time or expense of a trip to Sydney, I did what anybody living in Chicago who wanted to see the Games as they were taking place would do. I drove to Detroit, rented a hotel room, and watched the Canadian broadcast....

A few months later, Bob Costas came through town to promote a book and we went to lunch. How did it feel, I asked him, to go on the air in the dead of the Australian night so he could be the only image NBC saw fit to transmit live from Sydney for 17 days? What did he think of being reduced to a ringmaster of a circus long after the elephants left the building?

The paradox, of course, is that in the age of instant global communication, "the network whose millions are the Olympics' biggest source of income can recoup its investment only by not doing the one thing television does best: show history as it is being made."

Also around LA Observed: LA Crone is sickened by BusinessWeek's report titled "Cougars Inc.: The Lady Predator Lifestyle," one of Jenny Burman's hens has to have major surgery, and check out the new enhanced archives for Steve Greenberg's cartoons and Gary Leonard's photos.