57 channels and almost nothing but sport on

''The enormity of what we're doing just blows me away''. No, that’s not Michael Phelps after another gold in the swimming pool but NBC sports Chairman Dick Ebersol. The reason for Dick’s happiness is the scale of NBC’s Olympic coverage, “It's more live coverage from a single Olympics than the total of all previous Summer Olympics combined.'' At 2,900 hours, or 120 days of continuous watching, in a country where size matters then consider the numbers that NBC is putting up to be super-sized.

Of course, when you pay $894 million for the privilege of being able to broadcast sports such as shooting, a sanitised version of America’s favourite pastime, then the last thing you want is for the events to take place at unsociable times for your viewers. What to do? Simple, throw your greenbacks around and change the timetable. Despite protests from the swimmers, surely the athletes know their place by now; the finals have been switched from the evening to the morning in Beijing. This way the NBC executives in Rockefeller Center, New York can watch the live action when they return home from work. The curious thing is that if you are unfortunate enough to live on the west coast of America and wanted to watch Phelps’ fourth gold live then you would have tuned in to find NBC broadcasting Access Hollywood instead and had to wait another three hours for the tape-delayed coverage.

Over here on the BBC there’s no such trickery. At the unhealthy time of something past three in the morning Phelps is live and even if he has water in his goggles and can’t see where he's going he's still winning. As I prefer to sleep my way through the greatest one man show in Olympic history since, well, four years ago I have been following some of the more accommodatingly timed sports during waking hours. I’ve even found myself pushing the red button to see what’s showing on the BBC’s five other live broadcast channels and here I discovered the women’s weightlifting - 63kg category. I was transfixed.

My experience of weightlifting is limited. I once joined a gym and managed two visits in a year before cancelling my membership. I did learn that after using a weights machine you surreptitiously adjust the marker down a few notches to give the impression to the next person that you’ve lifted a lot more than you really did. Under the glare of the cameras in the University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Gymnasium, Beijing it didn’t appear possible to pull this stunt.

Early in the competition the hot favourite, a 20 year old Russian mountain range by the name of Svetlana Tsarukaeva, failed three times and didn’t register a score. As she left the stage in tears she walked head first in to a wall. I couldn’t tell if this was a simple misjudgement turning the corner or part of her warm down routine.

Michaela Breeze the UK’s sole representative in the weightlifting was a name that I wasn’t familiar with. Of concern was that she was suffering from a back injury coming in to the competition. Now, I’m not a doctor but I am sure that a weightlifting competition won’t heal a bad back. So it proved. Alternating between receiving physiotherapy between lifts and looking like she was about to snap in half during them Breeze was roared on by the crowd who recognised her pain and treated her like a winner. She battled through to register a score and finished 15th above the Tunisian and Bolivian competitors. Asked how close she was to pulling out, the response was tearful but emphatic, “It’s an Olympic Games and pain’s irrelevant. You train for so many years for this. I’m just delighted to be here.”

The highlight reels may be dominated by gold and records but buried deep within the bloated media output there are tales equally worthy of coverage that do proud the sentiments of the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin: "The important thing is not winning but taking part. What counts in life is not the victory but the struggle; the essential thing is not to conquer but to fight well." Michaela Breeze may have struggled to walk unaided from the arena but thanks to the likes of NBC and the BBC the world had a chance to share in one of the bona fide Olympian stories of these games.

DS