If you asked the average American sports fan if he or she is well served by television, I suspect the answer would be “yes.” After all, there’s no shortage of football, basketball, and baseball; there’s a Golf Channel and a Tennis Channel; you can see the WNBA, softball, “The World’s Strongest Man,” Nascar, bowling, boxing, fishing, the national spelling bee, and poker, poker, poker on ESPN and ESPN2. Even soccer fans are well treated thanks to Fox Sports World and the UEFA Champions League matches covered on ESPN2.

So what’s to complain about? Well, visiting France, as I have been doing, allows for a different perspective, and it seems that in some ways, sports coverage on American television is inferior to what’s available on the Continent.

One big, inescapable reason — it’s so obvious you almost hate to bring it up — is the relative paucity of commercials. There’s also the fact that the ads in France tend to be weirdly soothing. You might see George Clooney claiming he can’t get through the day without a cup of Nespresso, but you’re unlikely to run across someone claiming he can’t get through the day without a pill to lower his cholesterol. If the French are going to have their programs interrupted, which like everyone else they are, it seems they’d rather be lured by visions of pellucid blue water into taking a vacation in Greece rather than listen to a professional fearmonger go on about acid reflux disease.

As for the sports coverage, it’s much more global in nature. This is partly because the French don’t have a sport they identify with nationally the way we identify with baseball and football, or the English do with soccer and cricket.

The sporting event the French care about most is probably the Tour de France, which only comes around once a year. That leaves plenty of room for everything apart from baseball and football — rugby, soccer, golf, tennis, basketball (including the NBA), track and field, swimming, motor racing, beach volleyball, boxing, sailing, and yes, poker, to give a partial list. If you’re the kind of American sports fan who prefers tennis to baseball, or track and field to Texas Hold ‘Em, it’s heaven, actually.

Things get even better when you factor in CNN International and BBC World, two channels to which Americans abroad are likely to subscribe. They may even get Al-Jazeera English and Britain’s Sky News without even asking for them. All these global news services — unlike the CNN you see in America — cover sports around the world in impressive detail, meaning you’ll be treated to recaps of most major American sporting events, including brawls, controversies, and gossip, not to mention the hard news of who actually won what game, with highlights provided. Sammy Sosa’s 600th home run will receive its due, as will the entry of Dikembe Mutumbo into the Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame.

There are also surprises. For instance, on BBC World I recently watched a 15-minute interview — sports as news — with the president of the Women’s Tennis Association. On one level, the interview was of a very high quality. Both interviewer and interviewee were articulate, and there were some interesting tidbits. For example, it was revealed that Venus and Serena Williams had suggested that, now that women have achieved equal pay status at all four grand slams, it was time to think about paying them even more than the men. It wasn’t clear they were joking. Still, it was informative, and, apart from the Tennis Channel, I can’t think where on American TV you would have seen anything like it.

In fact, watching the sports channels here, as well as the international news shows, you become increasingly aware of how many traditional sports Americans no longer care about, even when American athletes are involved in them. Turn on Eurosport or Sport+ in France and you might discover that America is playing Italy in indoor volleyball. Or you could watch Andy Roddick win the Queens grass court tennis tournament in England for the fourth straight year in a thrilling three-setter over the Frenchman Nicolas Mahut. It was a fantastic match, but how many people in America got to see it? And how many tennis fans will get to see as much of Wimbledon as they want?

For several days recently, you could tune into an international track meet and watch American athletes, virtually unknown in their own country, holding aloft bouquets of flowers as they took victory laps in a packed stadium in Oslo. There were almost no commercials, so you could witness not just the key moments, but the moments around the moments — the warm-ups, the celebrations, and the interviews afterward. For two or three hours, you could watch the human body at its peak of physical perfection flying down the track, twisting over the high-jump bar, soaring through the air in the pole-vault, and so on. It was wonderful.

Most of all, watching sports on television in Europe is an experience that draws you into the rest of the world, whether it’s the mysterious death of Bob Woolmer, the South African coach of the Pakistani cricket team, or David Beckham’s victorious final match at Real Madrid before his voyage to America and the L.A. Galaxy.

On European TV, all the world is a stadium, in which Americans not only play major roles, but minor ones that Americans back home are barely aware of. Of course, there’s the occasional snafu, as when the French decided to show nothing but French players during the first week of the French Open, but on the whole, the world of sports feels larger and more generous in Europe than it does in America, probably because it is less ratings driven.

The ultimate proof of this comes every four years during the Olympics, which can scarcely be seen in America at all. Instead, we are forced to endure “The Olympics,” a maudlin soap opera with athletic interludes presented by bambi-eyed Bob Costas, forever on the prowl for a sprinter with a missing leg before he cuts to the next block of commercials. To see the actual Olympics, you have to sneak across the border to Mexico or Canada or just about any other country in the world. But you’d have to have seen the Olympics somewhere else to know that.

bbernhard@nysun.com