<table> </table> Who could have predicted that the biggest Olympic cheating scandal wouldn&#8217;t involve any of the athletes?</p><p>After one week of the Beijing Games, NBC is enjoying audiences larger than it projected; the U.S. teams are performing as well or better than anyone expected; and the wow factor for viewers is much higher than I&#8217;d anticipated.</p><p>Yet if there is one story line that neither NBC nor the Chinese overseers of these Games could have imagined emerging from the first week, it was the outrage over revelations that portions of the dazzling opening ceremony had been faked.</p><p>One striking minute-long sequence showed fireworks going off over Beijing along the course of a mile leading up to the National Stadium (or Bird&#8217;s Nest). As viewers watched, the light show in the sky appeared to have been perfectly tracked by a helicopter-cam. If you had just tuned in, you might even have thought it was the opening shot from &#8220;CSI.&#8221;</p><p>As it turned out, that comparison was unfair to &#8220;CSI.&#8221; A Beijing newspaper reported later that a much brighter set of footprints had been re-created in a CGI effects lab and shown on television instead of the real fireworks. (According to the <em>London Telegraph</em>, the fake fireworks took nearly a year to make in the lab.)</p><p>NBC figured out a way to be truthy about the sham fireworks without really calling attention to their shamminess. &#8220;Today&#8221; show co-host Matt Lauer, who was helping call the ceremony, told viewers they were looking at &#8220;a cinematic device employed by Zhang Yimou,&#8221; the action-film director who oversaw the opening ceremony.</p><p>Lauer then referred to the sequence as &#8220;almost animation.&#8221; In fact, it was actual animation.</p><p>The Chinese cover-up deepened when the<em> New York Times </em>revealed Tuesday more fakery, this time involving Lin Miaoke, the 9-year-old girl seen in the ceremony gliding through the stadium suspended by a wire. She&#8217;s seen singing into a microphone. As it turns out, it wasn&#8217;t her singing. Officials decided that the original singer, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, was not cute enough and replaced her with Miaoke, but dubbed in Peiyi&#8217;s voice.</p><p>Joe Bua, a blogger and reader of mine, summed up the resulting outrage of many viewers: &#8220;I knew the footprints thing was CGI, but the swap of the little girls is beyond the pale. Years from now, one girl has a video record of the event, the other has the memory of not being cute enough.</p><p>&#8220;Whoever decided that is evil.&#8221;</p><p>Or just poorly versed in the ways of an open and free press.</p><p>And NBC&#8217;s announcers might have also told us that the opening ceremony had been extended by 27 minutes over its actual 50-minute running length to make room for numerous commercial breaks.</p><p>After that litany of complaints, any praise for NBC&#8217;s high-definition Olympics may seem faint by comparison. But I&#8217;ll try anyway: I have never watched a Summer or Winter Games where I was so bombarded with spectacular, gasp-inducing, utterly riveting video.</p><p>I&#8217;m the first to admit that I like seeing people from my home country win. And that they did, a lot, during the first week. And when they did, it seemed NBC cameras had 14 different replays at the ready.</p><p>The fact that these Games are able to broadcast so much live to the Central and Eastern time zones helps. The time lag between Kansas City and Beijing is 13 hours, which means many events can be covered as they happen &#8212; with a little help from Olympics schedulers, who know what time is prime time in America.