I missed all of the decathlon but it turns out an American won. Congrats to Ashton Eaton.

By the way,here's an ESPN article that agrees with you, Fred.

All that said, Bolt's run in 200m last night was amazing. The guy literally let up the last 20 meters or so and still beat the field by a second. 

tennyson wrote:

I rather agree with the article's assessment that peoples attention spans (at least here in the US it seems) are part of the issue. We are a 24 hours news cycle type society nowadays for what it is worth - good or bad. Peoples lives have become more hectic and filled with things pulling them in all sorts of directions and look for a quick resolutions and answers and avoid digging in on a lot of different areas. Thus the decathlon looses out to the quick hitters. 

There is NO COMPARISION of the skills required to do a decathlon vs any other Olympic event. 

NBC pays billions to show the Olympics. They need to maximize their return on investment and to do that, you need to find stories and sports that can fit into a nice 3 hour daily program. Swimming, gymnastics, and track provide that because the events are short, and because the U.S. is excelling at all of those events right now.

But also to NBC's credit, they have done an outstanding job putting every event either on a secondary cable channel or through live streaming on their phone app and website. If you wanted to see an event, it was available.