Better Late Than Never? Not in NBC’s Case?

I don’t understand why you guys are so upset that NBC is going to show the Sydney Summer Olympics on a taped-delay basis. Judging from their Sunday prime-time presentation of the last day of the track and field trials, even if they were planning to show the Olympics live, there’d only be two ways to approach their coverage:

1. Skip it altogether.

2. Tape their “coverage,” and fast-forward through their dreck later on.

During their two hours Sunday night, there were:

* 30 minutes of commercials;

* 12 minutes when Inger Miller and/or Marion Jones was on camera;

* 17 1/2 minutes when Michael Johnson and/or Maurice Greene was on camera (not including the overlap of when the commercial being shown included one of these athletes);

* 1 minute 15 seconds spent on the men’s high jump, triple jump and discus combined!

With coverage like this, I may well take option No. 1.

ROBERT EARLE

Torrance

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Once again political correctness rules TV coverage. Instead of the Olympic trials we get women’s basketball (nobody, and I mean nobody, cares), and women’s golf (on the same day as the British Open and who cares?). NBC Web pages contain no schedules. To find out event times you have to go to the sports Web pages like women’s gymnastics, etc.

This stinks. Once again NBC has purchased rights to the Games so they can keep the Games off the air.

HOWARD VEIT

West Hollywood