Outsports got some prominent featuring on today’s Dan Patrick radio show. He had me on for about 15 minutes to talk about NBC not mentioning Mitcham’ sexuality. I found DP very engaging (duh) and thoughtful on the topic. The discussion went on for another 20 to 30 minutes after I got off the phone between DP and a couple other guys on the show, as well as callers. Their conversation further strengthened my fear that many people in sports media just don’t know what to do with gay sports stories. DP was wary of getting the story right, which was thoughtful and professional; my beef wasn’t with him. The other guys, on the other hand, were against mentioning the gay aspect of the story at all and missed the journalistic angle of the story. As I’ve said, many people in sports journalism aren’t journalists; they’re just fans with a voice.

[Link to the audio, after the jump.]

NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel has issued an apology for his reporting team not mentioning on air that gold-medal diver Matthew Mitcham is gay and has a partner:

“We regret that we missed the opportunity to tell Matthew Mitcham’s story. We apologize for this unintentional omission.”

The statement comes after an NBC spokesperson defended the network’s decision not to mention it.

NBC defended its decision not mention Australian diver Matthew Mitcham’s sexual orientation with a series of answers that were more spin than fact.

The real story that Bob Costas won’t discuss — because NBC invested $900 million in broadcast rights for Beijing and had to deliver a feel-good Olympics for their advertisers — is the explosive dimension of athlete activism before the Games.  Jacques Rogge won’t discuss it either.  But as IOC president, Rogge was surely involved in pre-Games defusing of a dangerous and complicated situation that involved a number of countries.  It was international sports realpolitik at its best.

It was disappointing to see NBC not mention anything about Matthew Mitcham’s sexuality. The biggest reason for me is a journalistic reason: It’s a big story. The only openly gay male athlete in Beijing pulled off one of the great upsets at the Olympics in a spectacular fashion. If he had had cancer, or if his parents had been killed in a car crash when he was 2, or if he had just proposed to his girlfriend, they would have mentioned it. But they never showed him hugging his boyfriend, never mentioned it. They referred to “personal problems,” but I’m afraid they decided Matthew’s sexuality was off limits. A real shame.

Yahoo agrees:

That was a question we touched upon in my gays in sports media panel at the NLGJA Convention this morning just after Mitcham won gold. They didn’t mention it Friday night during the semis. But for them to not mention that the only publicly out male athlete in Beijing won a gold medal would be ignoring a major angle to the story. They have it on his NBCOlympics.com profile. We’ll see if they mention it tonight.

I’ve struggled mightily to understand why NBC prefers to tape events and repackage them for a delayed broadcast as if the sports themselves are not inherently interesting to watch. NBCOlympics.com, like every other site in the world, reports major Olympic headlines and live results, but then turns around 12-15 hours later and pretends in their primetime broadcast that the audience is clueless. Suddenly it occurred to me: we are.

I’ve chatted with a couple people who say they have Olympics fatigue: That after a week of watching the Olympics every night, they’ve tired of it. I can understand it. The first week was so extravagant with the opening ceremony, and so dramatic with Phelps’ chase, that this week has so far seemed a bit of a downer.

Just a little note that I’ll be a guest on the Derek & Romaine Show on Sirius OutQ Channel 109 Monday night from 7:15pm-8pmET. If you haven’t heard it before, it’s a great show, very fun. We’ll be talking Olympics for the hour, I’m sure focusing on gymnastics, diving, swimming, track & field, and yes, hot athletes. Listen if you can and call in.

From Variety comes news that NBC is getting higher ratings in those parts of the U.S. where the Olympics are shown on a tape delay vs. the Central and Eastern zones that saw many swimming and gymnastics events live.

…And they were doing so good. NBC, which has offered unprecedented live coverage of Swimming and Beach Volleyball (as well as 17 other sports live online), is dropping the ball with Track & Field. The coverage of the woman’s marathon, shown live on the east coast tonight, was fantastic: nearly start to finish live coverage of what was an exciting race. Yet the 100m dash occurred over twelve hours ago and NBC is pretending like we don’t know what happend. I mean, the Chinese government doesn’t even censor the airwaves this diligently. Why not show the races live in the morning and then show them again in primetime with all the “enhanced” coverage NBC thinks adds so much value? We’ve reached an era in sports broadcasting where the only value is showing things live as they happen. Imagine if the Super Bowl was held in Beijing (okay, this metaphor begs a lot of other questions… but still), we’d just watch it in the morning instead of tolerating a 13 hour delay, right?

A friend of mine derisively calls the American women’s girls gymnastics team “America’s Sweethearts”.  That is, when he’s not derisively calling them “The Pixies”. Watching the team finals competition the other night on NBC, I got increasingly creeped out by the whole thing.

A few days back I ripped NBC’s swim announcers Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gaines for their inability to shut up and for Gaines’ propensity to declare the winner before the race was over. He did it again Wednesday night (Thursday morning in China) on the call of the women’s 200-meter butterfly final.

While other teams may be gunning for Olympic gold, it seems one team is trying to become the dumbest team in the field. The Spanish basketball team posed for an advertisement (published by Spain’s Basketball Federation) in which they are pulling at their eyes to make them look slanted. Many are charging racism. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that they must have all checked their brains at the gymnasium door before posing for this stupid, insensitive ad. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Complete picture after the jump.

Memo to NBC: Tell swim announcers Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gaines to shut up. Their incessant yakking is detraction from what has been a great swimming session so far.

They both understand the sport, especially past Olympian Gaines, but too often they try and predict and do not let the event play out and let pictures tell the story.

Most every Olympic Games becomes known by a dominant storyline — the return of the event to its historic roots in the 2004 Athens Games, the first post-Cold War Games in 1992 in Barcelona, the first commercially televised Summer Games in 1960 in Rome.

What will become the storyline of the Beijing Games? The Smog Games? Genocide Games? The China-Fatigue Games? We’ll have to wait and see, but so far, the Phelps’ Games seems fitting. With three gold medals since the opening boosting his total take to nine all-time, he now joins the ranks of Carl Lewis and Mark Spitz as the most decorated in Olympic history.

Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke, a frequent panelist on ESPN’s Around The Horn, and the Chicago Tribune’s Kevin Pang tasted the finer side of Beijing cuising while there for the Olympics and decided to head over to one of the city’s penis restaurants. Said Plaschke of the ox penis he tried: “It’s very rubber, it’s got a little texture to it, but it’s really tasty. I guess I like penis.”

Video after the jump . . .

Every two years, we’re blessed here at Outsports with a flood of traffic during the Olympics, and this year is no different. It’s great to see so many gays and everyone else taking such an interest in sports; and other gay sites are getting in on the act. Over at AfterElton, Jim and I wrote a “Gay Viewers Guide to the Beijing Olympics” that Jim and I wrote for AfterElton. AE’s sister site, AfterEllen, has also been on the ball, having pointed out to us a couple lesbian athletes we didn’t know about.

For anyone who wondered about American interest in the Beijing Games:

Reports earlier this spring suggested that Beijing’s gay scene had become a government target in advance of the Olympics. The Gay Times of London is challenging that notion, insisting that the western media was too quick to jump on the gay oppression story and that the shutdown of popular gay night clubs was infact the result of fire and safety issues rather than homophobia.

“It makes me very angry that gay activists, who know nothing about China, and don’t even live here, report that the Chinese government is trying to stamp out gay culture.” Edmund C is one of the co-owners of Destination, the aircraft-hangar sized, industrially styled nightclub that’s the pivot of gay Beijing.

Google always gets theirs. The company’s YouTube unit will get a sliver of the Olympic pie, getting about three hours a day of exclusive content after striking a deal with the International Olympic Committee. Just when you thought NBC’s $894 million broadcasting deal was enough.

Don’t fret, interested viewer. The YouTube content, including highlight reels and daily wrap-ups, will reach 77 territories not covered by Olympic sponsors. That means South Korea, India and Nigeria. Not the U.S.

I just love the Olympics. If nothing else, it provides a distraction to media outlets who’ve been hyperventilating all summer about the presidential race, high gas prices or how California is burning, quaking or destroying the sanctity of marriage.

Now there’s this: No more Ferret Olympics, Olympets, Raw Olympics (not what you might think), the Gay Olympic Games and Olympigs. The U.S. Olympic Committee, in addition to producing some of the best athletes in the world, also produces some of the most litigious attorneys. Use “Olympics” in the name of anything and you’re bound to get a cease and desist letter. 

More evidence that Chinese authorities don’t like Amnesty International, the BBC or journalists. Big surprise. Some 20,000 journalists are flowing into China to cover the Olympics and some of them are cranky that China is back-tracking on its pledge  of “absolutely no censorship on the Internet” for media covering the games. As if this should surprise anyone. No word yet on whether Outsports is included in the “no browse” list.

A little poetic justice in the land of tightly controlled media. On a day that saw journalists reeling from the news that the IOC and Chinese authorities had misled them about the censoring of access to certain web sites, a South Korean broadcaster leaked footage of a secret and heavily guarded rehearsal of the Opening Ceremonies. I suspect many find the clip so enjoyable to watch not because it’s a brief, blurry glipse at lighting effects and costumed dancers, but because it’s a symbolic poke in the eye of the Chinese media censors. Read more about the leak and watch the video here.

The Chinese have reneged on a promise to keep the Internet uncensored for journalists, throwing a giant middle finger to the world’s media: