SIMON COWELL and the death of the Olympics — discuss. And can a 21-year-old Californian nymph save the Olympic Movement? Discuss further. Indeed, join the debate across the Atlantic because the Olympics is choking and Cowell has it by the throat.

The facts are these: a television ratings war is being waged in the United States, Fox has scheduled Cowell’s American Idol aggressively against NBC’s Olympics coverage and has it on its knees.

Olympic television audiences are significantly down on previous Winter Games. Viewers have voted with their remote controls and rather than watch the best in the world at the Olympics, they have gone for the half-decent wannabes in the US instead.

The New York Times has taken it so seriously that it addressed charges of Olympic murder to Preston Blackman, Fox network’s scheduler in chief. “I swear on my family that nothing we did in any way was a result of facing the Olympics,” Blackman replied. “We’re not trying to kill anybody.”

Cowell was less diplomatic in the Hollywood Reporter newspaper. “The US and the UK are in the same boat this year,” he said. “We’re not interested in Swiss people winning things, genuine or not.”

Cowell is not strictly right about the UK, where audiences have been good, but the point is nevertheless a serious one. The Olympics’ most valuable audience is in the US and this is the one that is dwindling. Viewing figures are down 36 per cent from Salt Lake City four years ago — perhaps understandably because those were on home territory — but they are also down 17 per cent on Nagano , Japan, in 1998 and 44 per cent on Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994.

And disappointing NBC is not in the interests of the IOC. The network is a key Olympic paymaster, having coughed up $2.9 billion (about £1.65 billion) to take its coverage through to London 2012.

Of key interest, then, to the IOC and NBC is this: do these shrinking audiences tell us that the Games are losing their appeal in the new world of reality television, or are they simply saying that the US is having a shocking Olympics? It does not help that the failure in chief has been Bode Miller, a non-conformist who likes a drink, who was billed by the American media as its lead character. Miller would have made a magnificent Olympic hero, but he has now raced four times and won nothing apart from disapproval for being in the bar the night before the downhill. It does not help that he is not only denying NBC the wins they want to show, but he has taken to denying them a post-race interview, too.

Part of this is expectation management. The US are third in the medal table which, historically, is not a bad finish. But when the alpine skiing team declare that their goal is eight medals and they have only one — and have for their motto “Best in the world”, when they clearly are not — then expectations tend to be disappointed.

The point, at this stage of the Games, is that NBC has one last hope — the women’s figure skating, which started last night and finishes tomorrow. And yes, the battle is on. Tomorrow’s climax will be up against American Idol. Last night’s short programme went against a two-hour Idol special.

But if the Olympics does not win here, it never will. The women’s figure skating is the event for Americans. The US have won gold in three of the past four Games. Indeed, not far behind the “Who shot JR?” Dallas episode, in sixth place on the all-time most-watched US television shows, is the infamous Tonya Harding versus Nancy Kerrigan women’s skating from Lillehammer.

That explains why NBC could have done without Michelle Kwan pulling out injured. Kwan is by far the highest-profile American skater; her arrival followed a “will she, won’t she make it to Turin” soap opera and included a heaving press conference in which a reporter from Access Hollywood television show asked her for a Valentine’s date.

This does something to explain her level of celebrity, the kind that could match American Idol. But Kwan got injured, so Americans shifted their attention to Sasha Cohen, the aforementioned Californian, who was fourth in Salt Lake City. They like Cohen because at the opening ceremony in 2002 she was standing next to President Bush and handed him her phone so he could say “hi” to her mother. They also feel that they have been waiting a while for her success story to come to fruition.

Which is probably the reason why some of them elected to switch her on instead of Cowell last night. What they will have seen was her skating last and finishing first. She is three-hundredths of a point ahead of the favourite, Irena Slutskaya, of Russia, which is a good place to be. But, boy, what pressure. She not only has to see it through and win gold tomorrow, but she has to beat Simon Cowell in the process. That is victory for the US and for the Olympic Movement, too.