American media moguls at NBC who just televised 16 days of athletes bouncing their butts off snow and ice have their own Olympic-sized competitive challenge to face: how to reverse a 33 percent drop in popularity ratings from the last Winter Olympics four years ago.

It could be argued the network is a victim of the studio creature it has spawned - overhyped expectations about an athlete's chance of winning gold.

Talk about a monster: Bode Miller's ability to wreak havoc on skis is matched by his ability to strike terror in the TV viewer clinging to the hope that Dorothy Hamill is the norm and Tanya Harding the anomaly.

But we never saw enough of the real Miller. We saw more of an illusion. There was nothing extraordinarily different about Miller in these Olympics than in previous competitions.

Look carefully at his performance history dating back to October 2005, and you'll see that Miller falls a lot. Miller routinely finishes in the top 10 in races that he enters and completes, which is only about 56 percent of the time for various reasons.

In fairly typical Miller fashion, he tanked on three out of five runs and placed fifth and sixth in the other two events he finished in Turin. The only thing Miller failed to meet in Turin was false expectations.

If network executives think the "bad boy" athlete prototype compounds the problem with their ratings, they're wrong. Miller was the American face of these Olympics, and viewers should have seen more of it.

NBC missed a bet by not exploiting more of that "bad boy" persona, which is precisely what makes Miller so interesting. In addition to showing Miller scream down a mountain, a miniseries called "The Real BoDelicious" could have been delighting advertisers while running parallel on one of NBC's other affiliates - documenting every pint of beer he guzzled, every basketball he dribbled, every bowl of Raisin Bran he downed and every move he put on chicks hanging out in Italian bars. (Miller is notorious for chasing women at night, Olympic teammate Daron Rahlves says.)

Watching Miller party and surf life is as entertaining to the American mass of TV viewers, if not more so, than watching him ski.

For Miller, it's not about standing on a platform; it's about the journey and experience along the way. Life is a delicate balance of work and play, and they are both equally important to Miller and the future generation of viewers who will fuel the next incarnation of extreme sports.

Expect a new cast of Olympic rebels every four years who are a little more apathetic about public opinion, a little more self-indulgent, adventurous and a lot less reverent.

The Olympics might soon be more focused on entertainment than athletic competition.

Imagine watching the aftermath of the Italian Olympic couple who fell while ice dancing, angrily stared each other down and then didn't speak to one another for 24 hours.

How about behind-the-scenes footage of the personal feud between American speed skaters Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis?

Let's see more of the Austrian ski coach who set off a doping scandal and then acknowledged he was suicidal when he crashed into a police roadblock during a bizarre flight from the Olympics. What missed opportunities!

American freestyle skier Jeret Peterson was sent home after he hit a friend in the mouth. That would have been great TV - just the right material to whet the insatiable appetite of the next generation of reality TV viewers.

The 2006 Turin Games might go down as the last "real" Olympics you'll ever see.

J.D. Bullington is senior policy adviser and director of New Mexico government relations for the Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber law firm.