Why has NBC won three Golden Rings?

Yesterday NBC won three Golden Ring Awards from the IOC for their coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Just to clarify, this is the same NBC that failed to broadcast the 7/7 tribute at the Opening Ceremony in favour of a Ryan Seacrest interview with Michael Phelps as well as preventing viewers without cable or satellite subscriptions from watching live sport.

This is on top of adverising faux pas during their coverage including a commercial for a Today Show interview with "Gold medallist Missy Franklin" right before they showed her race, spoiling the result for millions of Americans.

You think they would learn, guess again; immediately after Gabby Douglas became the first African American to win a gold in gymnastics, the network showed an advert featuring a monkey on the uneven bars - that won't cause trouble will it?

I think very few people would disagree that 2012 was NBC's worst year of Olympic broadcasting since the infamous Olympic Triplecast of 1992 which cost the network's partners around $100 million.

And despite all of this the American broadcaster still managed to win the gold award in the 'Best Olympic Programme', 'Best On Air Promotion' and 'Best Olympic Feature Film' categories.

Making this achievment more incredible is that NBC beat out the BBC's 'Super Saturday' coverage for the Gold Award on best programme: The BBC, the national broadcaster of the UK that recieved overwhelmingly positive reviews over their coverage was beaten out by the same people who brought you #NBCFail.

This post would be longer if the Golden Rings actually mattered and if they weren't controlled by who pays the most to broadcast the games.