Olympics notebook

By Compiled from Times wires

NBC finds a chance to go live

So it turns out they could televise events live from the Sydney Olympics.

NBC Sports veered briefly from its policy of airing every bit of Summer Games action on tape, broadcasting the men's basketball gold medal game as it happened.

Viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones saw a live feed of the United States beating France 85-75.

The network originally planned to show the game with the shortest tape-delay of these games -- about 20 minutes -- but switched gears a few hours before the tipoff at 10:15 p.m. Saturday.

The cumulative rating for NBC's coverage through Saturday was a 14, the worst for an Olympics since 1968, when ABC paid $7-million for both the Summer and Winter Games.

The network began airing extra commercials during the first week of coverage to satisfy advertisers who had been told to expect no lower than a 16.1 rating when they paid up to $600,000 for 30 seconds in prime time.

Saturday night's program pulled in a 10.5, the lowest of the Sydney Games. Each rating point represents a little more than 1-million TV homes.

The 16-night cumulative rating is 35 percent below what the 1996 Atlanta Games averaged and 21 percent below the 1988 Seoul Games -- the last time the Summer Olympics were this late in the year.

CHANGING COUNTRIES: A rule used by Cuba to keep at least five athletes out of the Games may be revised before the 2002 Winter Games, top Olympic officials said.

"We're going to have to have a look at it because the Cubans were just being mean and the rule is not meant to allow somebody to be mean," said Dick Pound, a vice president of the International Olympic Committee.

Olympic rules demand that athletes with international experience must wait three years after changing nationality before competing in the Olympics, or get permission of the country they left.

RICH VS. POOR: Cash makes a huge difference between athletes escaping detection and getting caught in doping tests, IOC executive board member Jacques Rogge of Belgium said.

Rogge said drug cheats from rich nations had more chance of escaping detection than those from developing nations because of economics and science.

"The rich countries have a sophisticated doping system, the poor countries have no sophisticated doping system," he said. "That's as simple as that."