As the U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team heads into the medal round, sales of USA Basketball merchandise are heating up.

NBA officials report that for the first week of the Olympics, combined sales at the NBAStore.com and the NBA Store in New York City increased 57 percent compared to the week leading into the Beijing Games.    Read More  >

Dream for Darfur and Team Darfur have been having their problems with the Olympics.

Dream for Darfur, Mia Farrow’s organization, has been conducting alternative TV shows to NBC’s airing of the Beijing Games. Dream for Darfur is the advocacy group that’s been highly critical of International Olympic Committee TOP sponsors for what Farrow sees as their silence on China’s policy toward Sudan and Darfur.    Read More  >

Cat Osterman

Cat Osterman yesterday recorded only the second no-hitter by an American in Olympic softball history, propelling the gold-medal favorite U.S. team to another convincing win in Beijing.

The performance came at an important time for Osterman and her teammates, as softball won't be included at the 2012 London Games. Fortunately for Osterman, her two largest endorsement contracts — with Wilson Sporting Goods and Under Armour — don’t expire until 2011.    Read More  >

NBC is averaging a 17.8/31 national rating through Tuesday night for its prime-time Olympic coverage, up 15.6 percent from a 15.4/27 for the same period during the 2004 Athens Games. The rating marks the best prime-time rating through the first five nights of a non-U.S. Summer Olympics since a 18.2/34 for the 1992 Barcelona Games. NBC earned a 19.9 national rating and 82 million viewers for Tuesday night's prime-time coverage, marking the network's highest-rated and most-viewed night during the Games so far. Meanwhile, NBCOlympics.com has seen 17.7 million video streams, 21.1 million unique users and 373.9 million page views through five days.    Read More  >

Gold
Team USA merchandise
The USA House in Beijing sold more Team USA merchandise in two days here than it did during the entire Athens Games. Nike's red hoody T-shirt and Ralph Lauren's T-shirts are flying off the shelves. While the numbers represent only a fraction of total licensing revenue, the strong sales bode well for the USOC's bottom line.

Silver
U.S. table tennis program
Three Chinese-American table tennis players could win the first Olympic medals ever in that sport for the U.S. Consider it a lovely historic full-circle journey that started here 36 years ago with the Ping-Pong Diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. And now, Chinese-Americans are among the world's best players.

Bronze
Amanda Beard
One of the faces of U.S. swimming, Beard has never met a camera or media outlet that she didn't adore (or that didn't adore her). But on Wednesday, after the four-time Olympian failed to get out of the first round of the 200-meter breaststroke (the only American swimmer thus far to not make the semifinals), she angrily blew off post-race interviews. Funny how Beard begged for media attention earlier in Beijing when she disrobed for a PETA photo shoot. Perhaps she should have kept her clothes on and continued to work in the pool.

Tin
MSNBC's "Olympic Update"
No one is questioning the amount of coverage that the NBC Universal family has across its various networks, but we doubt anyone would care if this program disappeared from the schedule. The show, which comes on MSNBC at 5 p.m. ET, is designed to be a casual "Access Hollywood"-style offering, but it's a little too casual. For instance, studio host Tamron Hall wondered why the "elite U.S. league" did not shut down for the Olympic baseball competition and joked that Australian boxer Brad Pitt is not attractive enough to be confused with the award-winning actor. If only they would show multiple slow-motion replays of a Hungarian weightlifter dislocating his elbow. Oh yeah, they already have.

In just two days, total sales from the U.S. Olympic Committee’s store on the ground in Beijing eclipsed the number of sales during the entire Athens Olympics. And that’s just the beginning.

The USOC expects to generate eight times the sales it did in 2004 before the Beijing Games end on Aug. 24.    Read More  >

Looking for a slice of Americana in Beijing? Try the USA House.

Just 100 feet south of Workers' Stadium, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s hospitality center in Beijing is open daily to business partners, national governing body officials, invited guests, and athletes and their families.

The facility is 42,000 square feet and three stories tall. It offers flat-screen TVs for Olympic viewing, food and drinks, wireless Internet powered by AT&T and concierge and massage service from Hilton Hotels.    Read More  >

NBC may be thrilled about its ratings, but what about CCTV, China’s official TV network, which has multiple channels? According to the International Olympic Committee, 840 million Chinese people tuned in to at least some of the opening ceremony last Friday night.

The ceremony was shown on six different CCTV channels, plus some regional channels. The average audience in China during the opening ceremony was 496 million people, for an 83 share.    Read More  >