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.

I always love seeing the variety of vehemence in that eternal argument about which Olympic sports should be axed — and whether the Games themselves should be axed, and why.  I tip my hat to Ryan Quinn for leading off the current round of screaming and yelling about this.  But in my opinion it’s an academic argument.  As the then IOC president said in an interview just before the Sydney 2000 games, “To accept new sports is very easy, but to get rid of sports is quite impossible.” Anybody who wants to see their least favorite sports disappear will have to assemble a lobby that is more powerful than the lobby that put the sport on the IOC program in the first place. So good luck.