China Fine In CBC's Eyes

Canadians, it seems, are starting to catch a bit of Beijing Olympics fever.
Through midnight Sunday (a period which included the first two full days of competition in China), some 15.2 million Canadians had tuned into CBC's Games coverage. Most impressively, that included an average of 919,000 who were up at 7 a.m. ET (and a whole lot earlier out west) for live coverage of the out-of-this-world Opening Ceremony (not too shabby numbers, eh, NBC? And they were actually slightly lower than for Athens 2004).
More importantly for the CBC, audiences are growing. Olympic Prime averaged 1.2 million on Saturday night; it climbed to 1.3 million on Sunday evening. And that's without a Canadian medal yet at these Games (granted, though, these were weekend numbers, which are typically higher).
Olympic Morning, meanwhile, topped the 835,000 mark both Saturday and Sunday.
Online, CBCSports.ca/Olympics has attracted nearly 250,000 video streams per day.
*****
Lost in all the hype about the Americans' comeback triumph in the men's 4x100-metre freestyle swim relay Sunday night: The French screwed up royally at the finish.
(and before you start screaming, yes the Yanks were full value for their triumph).
With victory in sight, French anchor Alain Bernard rode the lane rope for the final stretch of the race, allowing U.S. swimmer Jason Lezak to "drag" in his wake. A huge error, pointed out by both CBC swimming analyst Byron MacDonald right after the event ("an unbelievable mistake") and studio analyst Mark Tewksbury again tonight.
An underwater camera (and haven't those been among the stars of the Games so far?) also showed Bernard looking over toward Lezak while the American focused on driving to the finish. Think any of the above might have made .08 seconds of difference?
Such is how gold medals are won and lost.
*****
CBC's live online streaming came in handy tonight. While the swim finals were starting at the Water Cube, Olympic watchers could also catch the start of the men's gymnastics team final live on the web.
The next best thing to picture-in-picture, don't ya think?