The big political news of the week will be Obama’s vice-presidential announcement, which may very well come by the time this column is published. I could very well write a column how much I like the centrism of Sen. Evan Bayh or the foreign-policy assertiveness of Sen. Joe Biden, but I will likely be wrong and the commentators will have a field day. So no go.

I’ve been watching a ridiculous amount of Olympics coverage, however. NBC’s coverage has been predictably sappy, with wall-to-wall coverage of Michael Phelps. Coverage has not benefited the serious sports fan, as the focus has been on individual competitors and their soft-lighted stories, rather than the actual competitions themselves. To a certain extent, I can understand the narrow-bore focus on Phelps; he’s been the only American athlete so far to achieve dominance in his sport besides female gymnasts Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson, who traded off defeating the thirteen-year-old Chinese gymnasts. I could write a lot about the Olympics, but I think it is important to make three points that the media seems disinclined to.

1) These Olympics have only strengthened my discomfort with sports in which victory is completely determined by judges. We’ve seen some gymnasts — namely Liukin, who tied for first in one event but received a silver medal — be denied what is rightfully theirs by the arcana of a scoring system that no one seems to understand. Most sports at least attempt to be transparent in their method for determining victors and let matters be settled on the playing field. Gymnastics, controlled by a small cabal of insiders and experts, seems to pride itself on being complicated. The sport’s governing authorities obstinately refuse to even look into the “allegations” (which are obvious to everyone) that the PRC is using underage gymnasts.

2) There’s also been considerable consternation in the media about China’s huge lead in gold medals, which they will likely carry through to the end. It’s rather unprecedented that the U.S. is losing by so many in the gold meal count. What we don’t realize is that the U.S., in recent Olympic history, had only dominated the medal count in 1996. In 1992, the U.S. actually lost to the Unified Team (comprised of all the former Soviet states besides the Baltics). In 2000, the U.S. barely scraped by, 91-88, over the Russians. In 2004, the U.S. only won 102-92. The rise of China as America’s main sports threat is new, however, and likely to continue for the decades to come, as the Russian team has turned in a middling performance at these Olympics.

3) There’s been an interesting debate in political circles about the U.S. Olympic Committee wanting to ask Congress to supplement their $130 million annual budget, which comes from mostly private sources and corporate sponsorships. Most countries receive generous state subsidies for international athletics competitions, most notably the Chinese, who are said to have 46,000 full-time athletes on the state payroll. Funding from the federal government (if it replaces some corporate sponsorships) might be in the best interest of the U.S. Olympic Team, as the use of athletes (who make barely enough to get by) for corporations’ profit is one of the greatest misfortunes of the modern Olympics.

Despite my enjoyment of the Olympics, the intensity of the coverage in the American media has been exhausting and I will be glad when it is all over. Not only is it detracting from the presidential election, but it’s also detracting from preseason coverage of college football, which is surely the most important annual event in sports.

Stuart Baimel is already looking forward to Ohio State-USC and thinks Florida will take the title. Send your bowl projections to sbaimel "at" stanford.edu.