“If you’re doing P&L’s these guys have done spectacularly."

There's nothing golf related in Richard Sandomir's story on ESPN firing the first warning shot in bidding on the next two Olympics games, just some beautiful businesspeak that our friends and Ponte Vedra may want to note.

“Our DNA is different than theirs,” John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content said by telephone on Tuesday. “We serve sports fans. It’s hard in our culture to fathom tape-delaying in the same way they have. I’m not suggesting it wasn’t the smart thing for them to do, but it’s not our culture. We did Euro 2008 in the afternoon. We’ve done the World Cup in the middle of the morning. We have different audiences.”

I always love the talk of culture and ESPN. They two words really are synonymous.

Skipper, who returned earlier this week from Beijing after attending the Summer Games, said NBC’s enormous success over the first 11 nights of the Games “probably forces us to change some of our calculations.”

“If you’re doing P&L’s,” he went on, referring to profits and losses, “these guys have done spectacularly. If I was holding the rights to this, this is a great time to be selling them.”

Meanwhile, the thought of golf in the Olympics prompted this positive post by Iain Carter at the BBC, with one caveat: he wants to see a better format. Who doesn't?  Gary Van Sickle at golf.com was not so kind.