There has been an enormous amount of discussion about whether NBC is failing or not in its broadcast of the London Summer Olympics, summed up by Linda Holmes’ excellent post bridging the gap between NBC’s business interests and viewers’ interests, neither of which are mutually exclusive. But beyond the questions of tape delay and streaming, I’ve been thinking about some ways to make the Olympic broadcasts more invigorating, and so have many of you. I took to Twitter to ask for suggestions. Here are the best ones, along with a couple of ideas of my own:

1. If you’re going to tape delay events, make good use of that constraint to provide continuity and momentum. “For commercials, pick up where they leave off rather than skipping stuff (parade of nations),” suggests Elizabeth Rosenzweig. And Mina pointed out that edits should be aimed at genuine slack time in events: “Using the editing options afforded by tape delay to show more events. Eg, Show a score immediately after a routine.”

2. Check the nationalism at the door. “I’d love to see more focus on int’l athletes,” offered Brian Forte. “Olympics are about bringing the world together, but NBC only talks about USA.” NBC has done a decent job of covering non-American Olympians in events where they are clearly preeminent, like Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, or Chinese swimmer Sun Yang, who was the subject of an interesting biographical piece that got at the tensions of his training in Australia. But the coverage is still oriented towards sports where Americans tend to make strong showings. A more interesting primetime broadcast would show more willingness to introduce sports where Americans aren’t dominant and with which American audiences tend not to be familiar, and to focus on athletes whose presence is geopolitically important, whether it’s the Saudi women or the experience of stateless Olympians.

3. More historical and technical pieces, fewer profiles. One of the best profiles of the Olympics broadcasts I’ve watched was of Olga Korbut, the 1972 Soviet gold medalist whose emotional performances both popularized gymnastics and became a Soviet propaganda tool. It was a deft explanation of all the elements of artistic gymnastics and of the ways individual athletes can become symbols, and the rich footage NBC used in the piece were a great way of demonstrating how the sport has evolved. Stepping away from stories of personal struggle might take some of the spotlight off individual American athletes, but it would allow NBC to provide greater perspective on the events and geopolitics of the games, beefing up the news magazine content and providing variation in the broadcast in the process. In addition, NBC would be crazy not to partner with the outlets who have provided some of the most outstanding graphical coverage of the games, including the New York Times, which has provided impeccable, easy-to-comprehend technical breakdowns of individual sports.

4. Give viewers a clear schedule. “Did they use to have a clicker that showed how long until the next event? I miss that. When is track and field? in 18 min,” wrote in Adam. NBC’s primetime coverage is extremely long, and there’s something punitive about pushing marquee events, especially those with strong appeal to younger viewers, like gymnastics, to the absolute end of the broadcast. “More apparatus finals in Gymnastics, plus the men’s 400m final in Track & Field coverage. Also, qualifying in men’s springboard Dviing, a men’s Beach Volleyball quarterfinal, and the men’s sprint final in track Cycling,” isn’t actually a descriptor that lets a family plan their evening viewing. I’m sure that’s how NBC wants it, to get as many people glued to the television as long as possible. But a more comprehensive schedule would make sure fans could be there for the events they care about most, and would help parents make decisions about whether letting a child stay up for fifteen more minutes actually made sense.

5. Eliminate poolside, trackside, courtside, etc. interviews. If fluff is the enemy, the interviews with athletes immediately after they compete are even more egregious than profile pieces. I’ve yet to see one elicit useful perspective on the event or surprising emotion. And they intrude on athletes’ chances to celebrate or grieve, and for us to cheer their victory or share their disappointment. Bob Costas has made his mistakes in these games, but he’s a strong interviewer, and I’d rather save all these snack-sized bites and let him make a meal of one or two athletes each night (and hopefully, to include some non-Americans).

Gabby Douglas was the topic du jour for Olympic commentators throughout last week, but over the weekend, she became a centerpiece in another manufactured controversy at Fox News, America’s top outlet for manufactured controversies. Douglas’ pink leotard, Fox host Alisyn Camerota lamented, was emblematic of an Olympic “trend” (one that, Fox wants you to believe, is part of a liberal-left conspiracy to rid the world of red, white, and blue) of athletes wearing colors that don’t appear on the American flag.

“Some folks have noticed that the American athletes’ uniforms don’t carry the stars and stripes look as much as they have in past years,” Camerota complained, without any evidence of who “some folks” might be. “The famous flag-styled outfits worn in year’s past replaced with yellow shirts, gray track suits, pink leotards.” Radio host/Tea Partier David Webb later chimed in with a sad tome about how America has “lost over time that jingoistic feeling” because “a soft anti-American feeling that Americans can’t show their exceptionalism”:

Camerota and Webb apparently haven’t watched much of the Olympics, or else they would have noticed the multitude of Americans donning red, white, and blue uniforms. But even if they have, Fox has apparently decided to use the Olympics to advance the false notion — one it began cultivating shortly after 9/11 — that anyone who doesn’t constantly wrap him or herself in the flag isn’t sufficiently patriotic. A politician who doesn’t wear a lapel pin isn’t American enough; an athlete who wears pink doesn’t appreciate her country the way she should (even if her father serves in the military, hasn’t seen her in two years, then shows up to surprise her with a giant American flag at the Olympic trials).

Aside from the fact that athletes eschewing the colors of their home countries isn’t a particularly radical development, the Fox version of patriotism isn’t patriotism at all. Rather, it is a hollow display of jingoism that, despite Webb’s concerns, we don’t need any more of. True patriotism doesn’t come from the color of an athlete’s clothes, it is determined by how they act and compete on a world stage while representing their country. It comes in many forms, from celebrating on the medal stage as the national anthem plays to crying because it doesn’t, and it even comes in the form of protests that aim to make one’s country — and the world — a better, more equitable place or feats, like Douglas’, that highlight the overwhelming socio-economic barriers facing many of our greatest athletes.

That might be anathema to conservatives like Webb and media outlets like Fox, who have spent the last decade trying to convince America that true patriotism comes from putting on a “These Colors Don’t Run” t-shirt and pointing an accusatory finger at anyone who doesn’t do the same, but it’s true.

“I’m proud to be an American!” Webb declared during the segment. So am I, and so too, I presume, is Gabby Douglas. She just doesn’t need to wrap herself inside the flag to prove it.

Watching the American women win the all-around team gold in gymnastics in London last week, and watching Gabby Douglas win the individual all-around gold after that, I was struck by the fact that all the women on the team were born just before or after the publication of Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, Joan Ryan’s book about gymnastics and figure skating that made it almost impossible for me to feel decent about watching those sports precisely at the moment that American participation in them peaked during my childhood. I wrote about this a bit for Slate:

Ryan chronicled the accident at the 1988 World Sports Fair in Tokyo in which Julissa Gomez was left a quadraplegic after attempting a Yurchenko vault. Gomez, who eventually died from complications of her injuries and treatment, was not proficient enough to perform the vault, but her coaches insisted on it as a way to boost her potential point total. Ryan devoted another chapter to the death from anorexia in 1994 of gymnast Christy Henrich, who shared a coach with Gomez. If they (and a young Romanian gymnast murdered by her coach in 1993) were the extreme outliers, the larger numbers who developed obsessive compulsive disorder or cutting were no more encouraging. For a nascent young feminist who also thrilled to Olympic skating and gymnastics, Little Girls In Pretty Boxes was to those sports what the debate over chronic traumatic encephalopathy is to football today, a challenge to the idea that they were redeemable.

And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think there’s something to that comparison. It’s not an exact one, of course. Anorexia nervosa was not a competitive event in gymnastics in the same way hitting other people and making them fall down is part of football. The problems in gymnastics that were literally killing young women in performance and in the prime of their competitive years were more easily separated from the performance of gymnastics than hits are from football.

But there are similarities. There was a prevailing belief in gymnastics that lighter bodies resulted in higher heights during some elements, and more delicate performances, much in the same way that the NFL has developed a preference for significantly larger players, making hits harder and more dramatic. Safer helmets may not be a cure-all for hits that cause concussions, and may encourage players to hit harder in the belief they’re more protected, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make football safer, or that doing so will kill the game. Gymnastics has adopted more stable vaulting tables and different points systems, and the sight of young girls doing astonishing things with bodies that now seem more oriented towards strength than fragility is no less thrilling for it.

That’s not to say that making football watchable will be easy, particularly since I’m not sure we’re at a critical mass of viewers who feel deeply uncomfortable continuing to consume a sport that destroys men’s brains and lives. And changing it is unlikely to happen quickly, particularly given that football players are conditioned to and rewarded when they hit extremely hard long before they reach the National Football League, with its hit-oriented highlight rules and bounty scandals. But if a generation of gymnasts could grow up and compete healthier in a world that Joan Ryan helped change, maybe a generation of young men can come up playing a different kind of football, shaped by the world of devastating reporting on chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

The 2012 London Olympics were destined to be notable for female participation when, just weeks before the Games kicked off, three countries added women to their national teams and ensured that this would be the first time every country represented sent at least one woman to the Games. Female participation in the Olympics has increased steadily in recent decades, but even accounting for that, the sheer amount of women punching holes in the barriers that once existed is breathtaking.

The barrier-breaking began with star American soccer player Megan Rapinoe, who came out as gay before the Games began. In doing so, Rapinoe not only became one of the most prominent out athletes in American sports, she also gave fans an opportunity to examine the fact that, even though it may have been easy for Rapinoe to come out, being a gay female athlete isn’t as easy as we often make it out to be.

Then there’s Gabby Douglas, the affable gymnast with a trillion-dollar smile who became the first woman of color to win an individual all-around gold medal. In an American sports world where race sometimes seems irrelevant, Douglas is an African-American woman who dominated a lily-white sport — one that is so expensive that her mother had to take on extra work and sell “almost all” of her jewelry to keep her daughter in training. Douglas, at least for the American crowd, has become the darling of the Olympics, and her success will undoubtedly provide an avenue for African-Americans into gymnastics and other niche Olympic sports, a road paved by the likes of Dominique Dawes and others before her.

The story of the games, however, is Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani, the first Saudi woman to ever appear in the Olympics. Shahrkani’s Olympic dream lasted just more than a minute, but those 82 seconds shattered cultural barriers that will, hopefully, make it easier for Saudi women to play the games they love. ‘‘I am happy to be at the Olympics,’’ Shahrkani said after her judo match, according to the Associated Press. ‘‘Unfortunately, we did not win a medal, but in the future we will and I will be a star for women’s participation.’’

The stories of the Olympic woman hardly stop there. Female athletes from various countries and in numerous sports are proving that they belong not just in the Games but at the forefront, and the barriers to female participation seem to crumble a little more on each new day of competition.

There are, of course, still issues facing women in sports both at the Olympics and elsewhere. Shahrkani’s story aside, women are still largely prohibited from playing sports in Saudi Arabia. There are still huge socio-economic barriers preventing athletes from backgrounds similar to Douglas’ from making it to the Games. Unlike Rapinoe, too many women find it impossible to open up about their sexuality in the world of sports. Female athletes often still lack the notoriety and sponsorships that are more common for men, and sexism is still rampant both at the Olympics and in sports.

But these women and others are bringing those barriers down, making the world of sports a more open and equitable space for females of all shapes, colors, nationalities, and sizes. Because of that, it isn’t hard to imagine the London Olympics going down as an Olympiad remembered for the triumph of the Female Athlete.

In Chloe’s last post on sports movies for women, she considered Bend It Like Beckham.

By Chloe Angyal

Toe to Toe isn’t really about sports. Yes, it’s about lacrosse players, and there are some great training montages, but really, this movie is not about sport. It’s about the straight and narrow path (which includes sports), and what happens when young women deviate from it.

Jesse (Louise Krausa) and Tosha (Sonequa Martin-Green) are seniors at a prep school in the DC suburbs. Jesse, who is white, lives in a luxurious house in the leafy green ‘burbs, and she lives largely unsupervised because her single mother is always traveling abroad for work. They have a housekeeper, Fatima, with whom Jesse is closer than with her own other. Jesse drinks a lot, smokes weed, and screws around. Early in the movie we learn that she’s been thrown out of multiple schools in the last few years.

Tosha lives in Anacostia, also with her single mom, as well as her grandma, kid brother, and her older brother and his baby daughter. Tosha’s mother isn’t terribly supportive of her academic ambitions, but her grandmother (Leslie Uggams) is determined that Tosha realize her dream of getting into Princeton. Tosha studies hard and is friends with other black girls at school, none of whom have grown up in the disadvantaged circumstances in which she lives. In her neighbourhood, Tosha is teased for playing “retarded white people games.”

Tosha and Jessie would presumably never cross paths at school were it not for the abovementioned game, lacrosse. They’re the only two seniors to make the team, and at the start of the movie, they’re both aiming to make the all-star team. They become kinda-friends, training together and bonding over their status as outsiders. Jesse is an outsider because she’s the school slut and Tosha doesn’t feel she fits in because she seems to be the school’s only poor black girl. But they’re both rather good at lacrosse, it seems, even if they have different styles of playing. In a scene early in the movie, Jesse watches Tosha at tryouts, her two tight black braids tucked up into an unmoving low bun, as she tries to drive through the players standing between her and the goal. There are blonde and light brown ponytails swinging all around her, and she stands out as she tries to muscle on through. Jesse, up next, tells her “watch me,” and runs onto the field, her own blonde ponytail flying around her head as she dodges and weaves and finds a path to the goal.

As the movie goes on, lacrosse becomes a symbol of the straight and narrow path. Tosha manages to stay on it, and on the team. Jesse does not. She’s late for games (because she’s busy performing oral sex in the locker room, on a boy who claims to have a crush on Tosha), and after being disciplined for repeatedly showing up late to practice, she just walks away. Off the team, and off the straight and narrow.

Emily Abt, the writer-producer-director, did an amazing job with two very fine but inexperienced young actresses, and nothing about Krause’s or Martin-Green’s performances feels forced or overdone. There’s so much going on in this movie that I haven’t mentioned here – around race, and class, and religion, and motherhood – that it’s almost a wonder that Abt is able to keep it all contained and under control.

As I said, at its core this movie is about sex, and about other ways that teenage girls supposedly misbehave when they aren’t properly loved and don’t properly love themselves. But it’s also about how sports can keep them on track, giving them something to work toward and achieve, and making them part of a team. In Tosha’s case, sports are partly her ticket out of Anacostia and into Princeton. In Jesse’s case, sports are just one more thing that gets thrown by the wayside as she veers dramatically off course. It’s hard to miss the message that studying. It’s hard to miss the message that for teenage girls, studying and team sports will lead to success, while experimenting with sex and substances will only make you unhappier than you already are.

Two weeks ago, Saudi Arabia and the International Olympic Committee agreed to add two female athletes to the conservative Muslim kingdom’s Olympic team, marking the first time in Olympic history that women would participate under the Saudi flag. Two days ago, one of those women nearly withdrew from the Games.

Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shaherkani, one of the two Saudi women, learned this week that she would not be allowed to wear her traditional hijab during competition because the International Judo Federation worried that it would threaten her safety. Faced with the possibility of participating without her hijab — a decision that would violate her religious beliefs — Shaherkani threatened to withdraw.

The IJF’s eventual compromise, reached yesterday, to allow Shaherkani to wear a headscarf was always obvious, given the Asian Judo Federation allows women to compete wearing hijabs and top judokas said it wouldn’t cause safety issues, making such concerns seem illegitimate. But for whatever reason, this issue keeps arising in international sport, creating a needless tension between the ideal of increasing female participation in sports and respecting their religious freedoms while doing so.

Safety of athletes should, of course, should be a concern, but participation should remain the most prominent goal. The IOC has gone to great lengths to increase participation of women in the Olympics, particularly women from countries like Saudi Arabia. But those efforts also go far beyond these Olympic Games. Saudi women are still struggling to gain any (much less equal) participation in sports in their own country, and had the SAOC and IJF let an unnecessary hijab controversy get in the way of that fight, it not only would have ruined Shaherkani’s opportunity, it would have put another barrier in front of Muslim women who want to play sports. That would have been a tragic ending to an otherwise wonderful story, and though the IJF ultimately made the right decision, it came dangerously close to undermining the fight that got Shaherkani to London in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, given their constant classlessness, the Daily Caller reacted to the news that American women’s beach volleyball champions Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings planned to stick to the bikini swimsuits the wear to compete by declaring “They’re going to be the cheekiest gals in London this summer. Olympian Misty May-Treanor and her fellow competitors on the US women’s beach volleyball team vowed yesterday to keep wearing their sexy bikinis at the upcoming Games — despite a new rule that lets female players compete in dowdy shorts and T-shirts.”

Then, they decided to wear long-sleeved t-shirts with bikini bottoms in weekend matches because, shockingly, it is not precisely balmy in the British Isles and sometimes when you are an athlete, you might want to stay warm so you can stay loose, and play your best and avoid injury. Quasi-famous dudebros like David Spade are apparently irked that they didn’t get to see enough skin, and the Daily Mail has gleefully validated their deep and pained concern. It’s a hilarious and depressing illustration of sexual entitlement and the second-class treatment of female athletes. By what possible standard would you think that an athlete you’ve never contracted with, much less met, was required to fulfill your personal quota for ogling? Or that when someone is competing on an international stage, they’re obliged to avoid so-called dowdiness.

Because even if they had initially planned to wear only their swimsuits, even if they enjoy wearing them as a display of attractiveness and strength (which, given that May-TreanorJennings has kids, is super-awesome) May-Treanor and Jennings are under no obligation to wear bikinis for any given match. The only rules they’re bound by are Olympic regulations on uniforms, the only guidance they should feel compelled to accept is that of their coaches and their own senses of what their bodies need, and the only reasonable emotional demands on them are their own internal standards for excellence and the pride that excellence can give their nation. And though it can be easy to forget amidst all the coverage of tears, and uniforms, and so-called divas, being the World’s Greatest is just as sexy a look on a woman as a regulation bikini.

Lizzie Armitstead is one of the U.K.’s Olympic darlings. On Saturday, she won a silver in the 140 kilometer bicycle road race — the first medal for the host country.

But while Armitstead was thrilled with her win, she also took advantage of the limelight to bring attention to something that was annoying her — Olympic sexism, and a lack of leadership on the issue from those who head up athletic associations.

Asked about her meeting with Pat McQuaid, president of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), Armitstead brought up sexism, saying, “It was the kind of moment where you kind of want to say ‘Let’s sit down and have a conversation after this’”:

“It’s something that can get overwhelming and very frustrating, the sexism that I experience in my career,” she continued. “But it’s something that as an elite athlete that you just get used. At the moment there’s not much I can do to change it but after my (athletic) career I hope to.”

Asked to elaborate on the sexism, she said it was “obviously just a big issue in women’s sport.”

“The obvious things like salary, media coverage, just general things that you have to sort of cope with in your career. Like I say if you focus too much on that, you get very disheartened and I try to focus on the positives.”

Armistead said plenty could be done to improve the problem “but certainly I think we could get more help from the top — which is the UCI. Just certain things like forcing perhaps pro teams to have an equivalent women’s team et cetera, but I don’t want to focus too much on the negatives really.”

She raises a great question here about where it becomes McQuaid’s responsibility to step in. No one could have expected UCI’s president to to police the playground where Armitstead was teased as a kid, but it’s not unreasonable to think that a President of a major athletic league could influence, say, salary scales for athletes. Or give Armitstead a professional stage to perform on.

Armitstead could have given McQuaid a piece of her mind. It would have shown a different kind of leadership, and might have been gratifying for her. But ultimately that single action won’t change ingrained sexism in an institution. She says she doesn’t have time for anything bigger, like organizing female cyclists or filing a lawsuit. As she rightly points out, “the problem is we are elite athletes training every day trying our best every day. So it’s very difficult to try to come together when I’ve been at home five weeks this year, to try to tackle that massive issue.” That’s why it’s up to leadership to listen to its athletes and come up with solutions. It’s just that they too often don’t.

If Armitstead wants to fight sexism after her athletic career, she will be in good company: There are a record number of women athletes in the Olympics this year, many of whom are also experiencing sexism. And Olympians, when they are not in training, do have a stage on which to spread their message. It could be a long time, though, before 23-year-old Armitstead is done with cycling and ready to tackle sexism. Even then, she may not feel empowered to step up. When a reporter asked her point-blank if she’d seek legal action, Armitstead said, “it’s something I’m not qualified to even think about. I’m just a cyclist.”