I can’t believe it’s news either, but apparently this is what We As a Nation are talking about today. Try googling “Bode Miller” and “Christin Cooper” and see what you get.

Clearly she and NBC wanted to see tears — the Olympics is famously 10 percent sports and 90 percent backstory — but she wasn’t rude about it. Judging from the volcanic outrage on Twitter after it happened, you would have thought she’d held up a photo of his brother’s headstone and said, “How’s this make you feel, huh?” Miller himself thinks it’s much ado about nothing:

“I have known Christin a long time, and she’s a sweetheart of a person,” Miller told Matt Lauer on TODAY Monday. “I know she didn’t mean to push. I don’t think she really anticipated what my reaction was going to be, and I think by the time she realized it, it was too late. I don’t blame her at all.”…

“I feel terrible that she’s taking the heat for that because it really was just a heat-of-the-moment kind of circumstance,” Miller said. “I don’t think there was any harm intended. It was just a lot of emotion for me. It’s been a lot over the past year. You sometimes don’t realize how much you can contain that stuff until the dam breaks, and then it’s just a real outpouring.”

“My emotions were very raw, she asked the questions that every interviewer would have,” he tweeted afterward. “[P]ushing is part of it, she wasnt trying to cause pain.” Some of the upset is due, I suspect, to people thinking Cooper steered his thoughts to his brother when they weren’t already there. Not so: Miller told Lauer in another interview that, unusually for him, his mind was on his brother before yesterday’s race. In fact, as you’ll see, he was the one who brought it up in the interview. By the time it was over, all it took was a nudge, not a shove, to get him to crumble.

Note that the clip, which aired last night, was taped much earlier in the day. If NBC had any problem with it internally, it didn’t stop them from dropping it into primetime. Coming soon, presumably: NBC gets Russian Olympians to share their most harrowing tales about living in Putin’s authoritarian state. Ha, no. Kidding. No way. Click the image to watch.