Olympic Viewing: US ski jumper tweets her pride at being first in the air

Highlights from coverage of the Sochi Winter Olympics:

RATINGS: An estimated 22.4 million people watched NBC’s prime-time coverage of the Olympics on Monday night. That’s down from the 25.2 million who watched the comparable Monday during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, according to the Nielsen company. Continuing the network’s pattern, it’s also up from the 2008 Olympics in Italy, which had similar time zone issues that prevented live coverage. Tuesday will be another key test, seeing how many people tune in to watch snowboarder Shaun White even if they heard during the day he didn’t do well.

EYE ON COSTAS: Matt Lauer joked about getting out the sanitizer before filling in for Bob Costas as NBC’s prime-time host. Costas, whose eye infection had become a big conversation piece online as well as a discomfort to him, is sitting it out. It’s no joke for Lauer: eye infections can be quite contagious.

NUMBER ONE: U.S. ski jumper Sarah Hendrickson tweeted out a proud moment, saying she had been assigned the No. 1 bib for her event. “That means I will be the first girl EVER to ski jump in an Olympic event,” she said via Twitter. Sochi marks the first Olympics at which women have been allowed to ski jump.

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David Bauder can be reached at dbauder@ap.org or on Twitter@dbauder. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/david-bauder.