It was not a bad question, but by this point, it was overkill.

“What’s going on there?” she said.

Miller’s helmeted head was bowed and he was unable to answer. The clock kept ticking, and I expected NBC to turn its camera elsewhere or for Cooper to say, “Thanks, Bode, you had a great race.” That did not happen. And there was no interview with the gold medalist, Kjetil Jansrud, to plug in and change the tempo.

Instead, Cooper, a former Olympian who won a silver medal in the giant slalom at the 1984 Games, tried to comfort Miller, putting a hand on his shoulder. In all, NBC lingered over this scene for 75 seconds — as Miller continued to weep, as he walked away, as he was comforted and as his wife embraced him. He might have cried on his own, for his brother, for joy, for the way his life had changed. But had the tears not been provoked by Cooper’s questions, we probably would not have seen that emotion.

Dan Hicks, who called the super-G race for NBC, talked over some of this tearful imagery — unnecessarily — mentioning how Miller had seemed like a different skier than in the past and how his emotions “continued to flow out.” Yep, we saw that.

Emotion is a real and honest element of athletic triumph and defeat. And you don’t want a network to tell its journalists to stick to soft questions when interviewing the winners. But in this instance, Cooper and NBC lacked the sensitivity to know when enough was enough.

It did not end there. Later Sunday, Miller visited Matt Lauer in the studio on Sunday night.

“You always strike me as someone who likes to keep your emotions pretty close to your vest, and yet this has been a pretty challenging year for you,” Lauer said to Miller, again bringing up his brother’s death and his public custody battle.

Miller, who did not bring up the interview, said he talked to his brother at the start, saying “give me a couple hundreths today, give me that little extra push.”

He continued: “Then for it to come down and be as close as it can possibly get in ski racing and end up with a medal, it just seemed kind of connected. At that point, I was just pretty overwhelmed with the feeling of getting a little bit of help from my brother.”