By Alyssa Rosenberg So as ya'll might have guessed, I'm just the slightest bit excited about the Olympics. But while I've been jumping up and down on my couch cheering on Michael Phelps and Natalie Coughlin and losing sleep over Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson, who proved last night that age and maturity add a LOT to an individual performance in women's gymnastics, I've also enjoyed watching what I think is a quiet coming out party for the New York Times multimedia folks. Throughought this Olympics, the Times multi-media features have been just stunning, whether comparing Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz's performance in the events they both swam, dissecting Deng Linlin's performance in floor exercise element by element, showing how the balance shifted event by event in women's team gymnastics, or in my personal favorite, providing a history of Olympic torches in the modern era. It's not just that these features are aesthetically attractive. They're intelligent, and explain and clarify events or elements of the games in a way NBC's live broadcasts often have not. It's not that the Times is trying to compete with NBC in any way, but they've consistently managed to create features that are worth checking out even if you're watching the games obsessively, and that would leave you highly informed if you weren't watching any events at all.
