What's the deal with these "olympics spoiler" threads?

[Smith_3]

I thought olympic results were like football game results. They are breaking news as soon as the game is over. Why do people want to wait until a later time than the actual end of the race or whatever, to hear the results? Why does it have anything to do with timezones etc. ? :shrug:

[eShirl]

1. it's a courtesy to folks who don't want the results before they can watch the time-delay events

what's so difficult to understand about that? :shrug:

[Wetzelbill]

3. some people think they are live everywhere

Because NBC puts "Live" even on the delayed telecasts.

[Smith_3]

4. I see. Just, if I was interested in olympics I would want the results right when it happens.

But then again, I'm not such a sports fan.

[MiniMe]

8. And so you could open the spoiler thread

It allows people to discuss results they are excited about and not ruin the results for other people.

[Wetzelbill]

2. They don't show the results here

until long after they have happened. Some events are shown on the East Coast live, but I live in Arizona, for example, and by the time I watch a primetime telecast those events have been long decided. So if I click on MSN like I did the other day, and I see the headline in the morning that Lolo Jones clipped a hurdle and didn't medal in her race, well that ruined the race like 10 hours before I ever watched it.

[Smith_3]

5. Its just hard for me to imagine that it would be the same as watching it live.

If one knows that the race is already over anyway.

[Wetzelbill]

7. You have to keep yourself in the dark

It has the same anticipation just as long as you don't know what happens.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. NBC,, who have all the rights to US Olympic broadcasting, are a bunch of idiots

Yeah, the rest of the world expects popular sporting events to be broadcast live, and discussed. But NBC has decided that it won't show them (on broadcast TV, at least) until it's the evening in each time zone. So, people on the west coast of the US have to wait, say, until 9pm their time to see the USA-Cuba volleyball match - which will be about 17 hours after it happened. The height of absurdity was when an event (can't remember what, now) was shown live at about 10pm on the east coast, which would be 7pm on the west coast - a very popular viewing time, you'd think - but the west coast still had to wait at least 2 hours, because NBC records the entire east coast program, and then shows it in the west. They couldn't be bothered to show some Americans some live sport (I'm pretty sure there was American involvement in it), even when they easily could have.

So, to make up for the idiocy (and greed - it's about getting the largest audience sitting down and watching the whole thing, including adverts, rather than recording it and skipping the adverts), people are asked to keep the results of the Olympics out of thread titles, until the dinosaur NBC has managed to show it. That basically means waiting until 0400 GMT, or later.