Boosted by its coverage of the Beijing Olympics, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) got a "gold medal" to beat all other U.S. networks in TV coverage ratings, the TV-rating agency Nielsen said Wednesday.

NBC's 17.7 million average viewers for the last week marks the highest for any network since Fox's Super Bowl week in February, and the best for NBC in two years, the Nielsen said.

The average score of the network's coverage of the first three days of the Olympics has consistently outpaced that of the 2004 Athens Games.

The coverage of last Friday's opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, which recorded 34.9 million viewers, a 32 percent share in adults 18-49, was the network's most-watched night since the finale of "Friends" in 2004.

(Xinhua News Agency August 13, 2008)