I don't understand the NBC broadcast schedule. They have an American medal contender in the women's 10K and instead of showing it in the morning on the back end of the 100m qualifying heats, they bump it back to a 1:30AM start?!?!? WTF?
Same issue with 800m qualifer heats. They bother showing it, but only to show Nicole Teter dropping out a 100m into the race and an aging Hazel Clark getting dropped on the last homestretch and missing the qualifier. Very interesting story of a young Kenyans (Jelimo & Janeth) dominating their heats but they don't bother dedicating 3 minutes of broadcast time to show it.
However, they have footage of the 1500m with 3 of the most followed stories in Track and Field (Lagat, Lomong, and Manzano) and no mention of a broadcast. They could easily make this more exciting than swimming because with the pool, you can't really recognize people aside from their swim caps.
My main beef is they have broadcast time and legitimate medal contenders, but instead they're burning daytime coverage on water polo pool play (who's watching this anyway?) and pushing this stuff to late night coverage.
Updated: they showed the 1500m qualifiers prime time but it wasn't advertised so I completely missed it.