If I ever win an Olympic medal I will:

(1) Cry unabashedly. Anyone who knows me will realize this isn't so much a promise or a plan as an admission that I know I will do it because I'm a big crybaby under the best of circumstances.

(2) Sing the national anthem while it is being played during the medal ceremony. After watching sixteen days of medal ceremonies, I have realized how annoying it is to watch people stand up there on the podium and randomly move their lips once every fifteen seconds. Either commit to singing your national anthem or just stand there and smile, but don't do that weird mumbly, barely moving the lips thing - it looks lazy and stupid. Maybe it's the choir nerd in me, but I was taught that people should be able to tell you are singing (even if they can't hear you) by watching your lips. With some of the athletes, I couldn't tell if they were fidgeting, biting their lips, mumbling to themselves, or what. In a similar vein, I will not press my lips together, lick my lips, or keep sneaking looks at myself on the Jumbotron during the national anthem. Compare this to every time the Chinese won a gold medal - I don't speak Chinese, but damn if I couldn't read their lips while their national anthem was playing! Seeing all of those things made me realize why Motown used to train their singers what to do (and what not to do) on camera. I'm sure most of these athletes were caught up in the moment and didn't realize all the things they were doing, but since I just watched approximately 4.9 million medal ceremonies, now I know what I will and will not do in the event that I win a gold medal at the Olympics.

(3) Be sure I am not wearing a white leotard with huge sweat stains. I felt really bad that Nastia Liukin was being photographed raising her arms after her silver medal beam performance and then a few minutes later at the medal ceremony. If I were her, I would always look at those pictures and think not, "That's the day I almost won an Olympic gold medal on beam," but "Why didn't anyone tell me I had huge such huge sweat stains showing? Whose idea was it to wear white leotards anyway?" I know she didn't have time to change, but if she'd known then maybe she would have just held up her medal with one hand and put the other arm around Shawn Johnson instead of exposing the pit stains to all the world.

I just read an article about how NBC is so proud of themselves for their "successful" Olympic coverage. I beg to differ. They had a lot of coverage, to be sure, but it wasn't GOOD coverage. If I ever get put in charge of producing the Olympics, I will:

(1) Have commentators who know something about the sport. Why Al Trautwig is a gymnastics commentator (and John Tesh before him) is beyond me. I don't need the everyman comments along the lines of, "Wow, what do you think will happen, Elfi?" After all these years of doing gymnastics commentary, Al Trautwig still doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, so he is utterly useless to me. Another good rule of thumb, even for the experts: if you don't have anything interesting to say, shut it. I'd rather have silence than listen to someone babble for the sake of making noise in an attempt to justify why they were paid good money to be sent halfway around the world. Really - I'd rather hear nothing than inane comments.

(2) Learn from experts or professionals in each sport which camera angles are best. There is no need to show a head-on shot of someone doing a tumbling pass because it makes it impossible to see if the gymnast under-rotated, over-rotated, landed correctly, etc. I also don't need to see leaps from the front. They need to be shown from the side so that the viewer can see whether it was high enough, split 180 degrees, whatever. If they can show diving and swimming from every possible angle, they can do it with other sports too.

(3) Tell the camera operators that no, we don't need extreme close-ups of athletes while they are competing. I am watching to see their athleticism, not to see their faces fill my entire television screen. Not only do I find it weirdly intrusive to zoom in that close, but it also means that I CAN'T SEE WHAT THE ATHLETE IS DOING. I don't need to see someone's face from the chin to the forehead while they are running or doing any sort of activity. In addition, I would tell the producers that when a camera zooms in that close, just switch to one of the 95 other camera angles. There is no need to stay on that zoomed in camera for the next 30 seconds. Don't reward the zoomers, man. Same rule applies to opening and closing ceremonies. How can I see all the precise formations moving to form different pictures if the camera guy keeps zooming in on two people out of two thousand? It's cool to see the individual shots once in a while, but for crying out loud, the producers need to look at their monitors and see gee, they're doing something that looks really cool from far away so maybe now isn't the best time for a close up.

(4) Air as much of it live as possible. Do you know what live means? That means showing something while it's actually happening, not telling China that we WILL start competition at 7am to accommodate American ratings and then put everything on a time delay for the Mountain and Pacific time zones. It's pretty pathetic when I can find out who won an event on Wednesday night before I go to bed but it won't air until Thursday evening at 11pm. There is a 12 hour time difference between Beijing and New York. That means that when an event airs in New York at 11pm, it's 11am in Beijing. It's also 8pm in Calfornia, which is primetime ratings, so why not air everything live, at least from 8pm PDT (11pm EDT) until the day's events are through? And please don't add insult to injury by leaving that huge red LIVE in the corner of the screen.

(5) Tell online news sources not to print huge headlines on the front page screaming, "MICHAEL PHELPS WINS EIGHTH GOLD MEDAL" until after the footage has been aired everywhere. I have no problem with posting the results online, but it's possible to do that without giving away the results for people who are not given the option of watching what happened for another three hours. Some websites were better than other. Yahoo news posted headlines like "See if Michael Phelps won another gold" (although they did also post a headline saying that Nastia Liukin's bar score tied with someone else, followed by, "Who won?"). The New York Times, on the other hand, had no such subtlety.

(6) Learn how to edit wisely. So first I have to sit through all of the supposed athlete bios, which are really 30 second fillers of being told these two divers have trained together for ten years, but revealing absolutely nothing about their personalities or lives. Then I watch "live" coverage where half the routines aren't shown. Then they go back and show parts of routines that they skipped, but in extreme close up AND slow motion so I can't see what the routine actually looked like. Then I get to watch a 45 second long shot of the arena with NO ONE COMPETING before switching back to different sport. So let me get this straight - NBC can't air an entire routine (again, as an example, gymnastics routines last a maximum of one minute and thirty seconds) and I'm only allowed to watch what amounts to 10 seconds of footage which end up lasting 25 seconds due to the ill-advised choice to show it in slow motion, but I can later watch dead air while no one is competing in the arena or THREE HOURS of marathon running? Since they didn't air anything live here on the West Coast, try editing out all the shots of runners milling around beforehand, getting into the starting blocks, and other stuff that is just eating up part of the precious six hours of coverage that amounts to about three hours of competition. Here's another idea: get rid of every segment where Mary Carillo showed an amazing lack of knowledge about whatever she was doing/seeing as well as a general disrespect for non-western culture, and SHOW MORE OF THE OLYMPICS. I guess at least now I know for certain that Mary Carillow doesn't know jack about pandas, acupuncture, kites, gymnastics, dams, or Shaolin monks. Singing "I'm a little teapot" in a tea house? Wow.

* I realize a lot of my examples involve gymnastics. My sister used to do competitive gymnastics so I always watch!