Olympic TV

Hearty congratulations to all New Zealand’s Olympic athletes. We can be proud of them and our taxes were well spent.

It has not all been good, though. In the past, publicly owned TV broadcast pretty much all the events featuring New Zealanders, and those events were broadcast free to air. This time, the great god money was the winner on the day. Sky Sport captured the lot and stopped other broadcasters from using more than a small amount of the material.

Whatever happened to public television and why should us taxpayers fund the athletes but not be allowed to freely see them in action? Graham Weir, Lower Hutt Another successful and interesting Olympic Games where Brazil delivered above fears and negative expectations – well done, Brazil.

Also well done the UK and New Zealand, who both did exceptionally well. In terms of medals, I find it interesting to aggregate results. For the EU, I counted 325 medals, or one per 1.5 million of population. This is 70 per cent more medals than the US and China combined.

The US at 121 is one medal per 2.7 million people. These ratios have been similar in previous Olympics. New Zealand was outstanding with 18 medals from a population of 4.7 million – one medal per 240,000 people. Well done! Sport is fun. Frank Olsson, Freemans Bay