Gold Medal for NBC in Suckitude

Well, I didn't want to start watching the Olympics, but then the golf got rained out on Saturday, and I'm flipping channels and realizing "Hey, I really do enjoy watching water polo", and got moderately sucked in. As I've stated many times, I don't enjoy sports on tape-delay, but it seems like NBC really spent a good deal of money to place a number of medal-events in the morning in Beijing, which translates to prime-time here.

Still, I had a horrendous time trying to figure out the television schedule on the NBCOly page. This was frustrating. You'd think they'd figure have this figure out, right? I was pretty sure I had the US-China basketball pegged for Sunday morning. It was not on when I thought it was. Oh well, the golf was riveting anyways, so I watched that (along with the Red Sox cheesing against the White Sox, but that's a different story).

OK, so turn to the hyped 4x100 Men's freestyle swim relay on Sunday evening. I'm watching Phelps swim in the semis of the 200 free. The announcers make note that he'll only have an hour before the next race, and how this could affect him, etc. This was 10:15 Beijing time. And I'm looking at my clock. Which is also set to 10:15. Are we exactly 12 hours from Beijing? Then why was the schedule so hard to read? Wait, that doesn't make any sense at all. Shouldn't we be closer to 15 hours away?

That's when it hit me. We are 15 hours away. And that's why it was so confusing.

NBC is broadcasting the games live on the East Coast. And on 3-hour tape delay on the West Coast. This information is hard to find. Much of the late night stuff on USA and CNBC is actually live. But not the prime-time or Sat/Sun morning events. And that does not please me. So, instead of waiting to watch the race, I just went to ESPN.com, saw the headline, and watched the highlights. And now I'm back to not caring. How difficult would it have been to show this live across the country? It happened at 8:30 Pacific - wouldn't more people have watched then, as opposed to waiting for 11:30?

I'm clearly not the only one confused, as now all previews of tonights 200 free finals mention that it's at 10:16 eastern. But we on the west would have to wait three more hours to see it, like it's an episode of Lost.

Sports need to be shown live, people.

Other things I didn't like about the first weekend of Olympic coverage...

Bob Costas
George Bush
Bob Costas interviewing George Bush. (did he actually say "this aggression will not stand"?)
Pre-determined story lines (even ignoring American athletes who weren't part of the plot)
Sappy piano music
Women's Badminton announcing team (who did not appear to have ever seen badminton played outside of a backyard)

That'll do for now.