Everything about the Olympics seems to be huge.

NBC kicked off its immense amount of television coverage of the Summer Games from Beijing with the extravagant opening ceremony Friday night.

On the screen, 2,008 drummers pounded out a sharp sound in unison while chanting in the Olympic Stadium, followed by another 13,000 or so performers in an impressive array of scenes.

The stadium is called the Bird’s Nest because of how the steel supports share a similar image to the craftsmanship of the real-life animals — though in keeping with the huge nature of the Olympics, the Bird’s Nest was among the impressive structures built with some $40 billion China spent on its Olympic infrastructure.

NBC played up the opening ceremonies, just like it will play up the rest of the games.

The network paid nearly $900 million for the rights to televise the games in the United States on its various TV networks and online.

Now we can expect to be overwhelmed with the Olympic coverage for the next three weeks.

NBC will air a record 3,600 hours of coverage from the Olympics on its various networks — NBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Telemundo and Universal HD, as well as NBCOlympics.com.

That’s 1,000 hours more than the combined coverage of every previous summer Olympics in the United States. NBCOlympics.com will feature about 2,200 hours of live streaming Olympic video.

The numbers are just staggering.

Here’s another staggering number — two.

That’s how many track and field events will air live on any of those networks or online in the United States — the men’s and women’s marathons.

China is hours ahead of the United States on the international clock, meaning that when people in China are watching things during the afternoon and evening, we’re usually asleep. Many of the track and field events will happen during the morning, Pacific Daylight Time.

But though NBC will have coverage during those hours on both USA and MSNBC, as well as on NBCOlympics.com, the network has decided to save coverage of those events for prime time in the United States, on tape delay.

That means that while the Web sites for Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Yahoo and every other organization that covers sports put up the results as soon as they happen, NBC will act as though the track events are happening live, sometimes well over half a day after they actually take place.

People who really want that experience can try to avoid any news accounts on any other television networks or any other Web sites or even in The World — we plan on printing information as we get it, to keep up with all those other news sources — and watch the track and field events as though they are live.

But it won’t be easy.

You can bet nobody else will back off their coverage just to please NBC and its exclusive rights.

I don’t have a problem with NBC wanting to broadcast the events in prime time, but I wish they also would show them as they happen. All summer, I’ve been telling people that if the final of the 1,500 meters was at 3 a.m. and on live TV, I’d be up at 3 a.m. watching.

The network’s track coverage shouldn’t be surprising. I’m already miffed at NBC for its handling of the recent U.S. Track & Field Trials from Eugene. NBC covered some events well and completely ignored others. Often, when the runners were getting into the blocks for a race, a roar would erupt from Hayward Field, the fans reacting to a field event. More often than not, we’d never find out what they were yelling for.

Compare that to coverage of, say, golf or auto racing. If you hear a roar while watching the Masters, you can bet CBS will quickly show you what caused the gallery’s excitement. In the same way, if a caution flag comes out during a NASCAR race, FOX will find images of the crash that caused the yellow flags to come out and show them to you from every conceivable angle.

The network’s track telecasts already were substandard long before these Olympics started.

While NBC won’t have any live track and field coverage, save the marathons, the network will broadcast most of the swimming finals, as well as much of the gymnastics competition, live in prime time (on the East Coast, that is, while we’ll still get everything delayed by three hours).

To pull that off, NBC talked Olympic organizers into having those events contested during the morning, Beijing time.

That decision shows that NBC is banking on swimming and gymnastics to be most appealing to fans.

Local swimming guru Ralph Mohr has been telling me for months that the United States will win more medals in swimming than in track and field, even though countries can have just two swimmers in each event, compared to three people per event in track and field.

He’s probably right. But it’s like comparing apples to oranges in a way. There are only a few world powers in swimming, primarily the United States and Australia. In track and field, several African countries dominate the distance races, while the Europeans are best in the throwing events and the Americans and Jamaicans control the sprints. The medals will be split among a wide pool of countries.

Also, swimming star Michael Phelps is trying to win eight gold medals — several more events than a person in track and field can practically be expected to compete in. Of course, swimming also has just four strokes, while there are many different styles of events in track and field. Imagine a swimming decathlon, where Phelps also would have to master the kick board, underwater gymnastics, some type of hurdles and diving from the platform.

I’ve got nothing against swimming. I admire the dedication of top swimmers, and the best deserve their time in the spotlight.

But so do the so-called fastest person in the world, 100-meter world record holder Usain Bolt of Jamaica, and the two men with the best shot at beating him, countryman Asafa Powell and American Tyson Gay. Not to mention all the other record holders — runners, throwers and jumpers alike — who will be competing in Beijing.