At this year's Olympic Games, an important thing happened to the gay community: One of its own won a gold medal. But Australian diver Matthew Mitcham, the only out gay male athlete in Beijing, didn't just win gold in men’s platform diving — he also snagged the highest score ever received by a male Olympic diver, and kept the Chinese from sweeping the event.

But if you were watching any of NBC's coverage of the event — like gymnastics, track, and swimming, diving is a huge ratings draw for broadcasters — you wouldn't have heard a single thing about Mitcham's remarkable win. Yes, the commentariat mentioned his score, his home country, and his age. But they didn't mention that other seminal trait: That Mitcham was gay, and out — even when his boyfriend was there in the stands, cheering him on.

For a sporting event that's more obsessed with telling athletes' personal stories than even the NFL, many saw NBC's ignoring Mitcham's sexuality as more than a forgetful omission, but as an intentional move to keep sexual politics out of their coverage, even though the network had no trouble, say, covering the loved ones of hetero athletes.

Now NBC's Olympics frontman Bob Costas is answering calls for an explanation. And doing a pretty sorry job.

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Hungry? Why wait? Especially since the food being offered at the Olympic venues apparently sucked so bad that Snickers became the number two chocolate bar in China this quarter, either for lack of better options, the fact that Chinese officials kept visitors away from the Olympic Green, or following a deal chocolate maker Mars signed to make the deliciously nutty snack the official chocolate of the Beijing Games.

Snickers, known over there as "Shilijia," has been around in China for the last fifteen years, but it took the giant marketing tie-in of the games for the Chinese to come around on the junk-food. Or rather, it took the build up to the giant marketing tie-in to get the Chinese on the road toward the ambitious goal of obesity.

The game plan for introducing the East to a snack that costs about half of what the average Chinese teen spends a day? Only a little gimmick that definitely wouldn't fly in the U.S.

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So soon after it was announced that racial discrimination has been banned in Hong Kong, an English-language newspaper in Beijing has reported that blacks and other perceived “social undesirables” are unofficially banned from bars during the Olympic Games. The athletes who fit that description will have to save their celebrating until they get home, it seems.

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So, NBC, how's your plan for broadcasting 3,600 hours of Olympics coverage across your 500 different television properties going? With just 19 days to go, we hear you've sold 90 percent of your ad inventory for the games, but we've been hearing that for awhile now.

Sure, most of your programming time will be a cakewalk: Point the camera at Michael Phelps crotch as he dives into the pool; point the camera at Paul Hamm's crotch as he bounds across the gymnastics floor.

But what to do if, say, something controversial — and this means more than your standard doping accusations — happens in Beijing? Like if an athlete starts carrying on about Tibet, or the Chinese authorities crack down on a human rights protest outside Olympic Village, or the Today show's license to broadcast live from Tiananmen Square suddenly gets revoked? You still going to abide by Business As Usual?

NBC News president Steve Capus insists, "If there’s news, we’re going to cover it."

This is funny. Not because we don't believe NBC News' crackteam of reporters will try to do their jobs as best they can, because they will.

Rather, look to corporate overlord GE, who has a lot riding on these Olympics games. And not just the $1 billion in ad revenue.

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Ferris wheels will finally be scary again.

China has begun construction on what will be the world’s largest Ferris wheel, towering at 680 feet in Beijing.

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