Highlights from television coverage of the Sochi Olympics:
GOOD SEAT: Smart feature Sunday by the underused Jimmy Roberts, about Irina Skvordsova, a Russian woman badly hurt in a bobsled accident who sat next to Vladimir Putin during the Olympic opening ceremony. In the story, Skvordsova said she was surprised the night of the ceremony when Putin sat next to her. If true, that's a smart use of political imagery along with being a kind gesture.
MIRACLE WORKER: Time for a moratorium on "do you believe in miracles?" Actually, it's been time for a couple of decades now. No one sent Al Trautwig the memo, and he reached for the cliche at the end of an otherwise well-called 50-kilometer men's cross country race that was a podium sweep for the Russians.
BOBBING FOR GOLD: During the four-man bobsled finals, NBC pulled out a brief film clip of a bobsled race from 1924 that illustrated how far the sport and its equipment had advanced. NBC's Leigh Diffey told how the sport got its name, from competitors bobbing their heads forward to get an extra edge. Great detail that added texture to the broadcast.
NOW, A FINAL WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR: With the Olympics done, now we can say goodbye to that greedy babysitter, the hard-charging electric car owner and that guy who got a tattoo on his... wait, are we ever going to find out where he got the tattoo?
MOST TWEETED: You don't have to win gold medals to drive social media conversation. Going into Sunday, Twitter said that the Winter Olympic athlete mentioned most in tweets throughout the Sochi games was Japan's Mao Asada, who finished sixth in the women's figure skating. Second was Yuna Kim, the silver medal-winning figure skater from South Korea, followed by American hockey player T.J. Oshie and snowboarder Shaun White. The Sochi games were mentioned in 38.1 million tweets since the opening, Twitter said.
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David Bauder can be reached at dbauder@ap.org or on Twitter@dbauder. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/david-bauder .