Did you wonder at all why we were able to watch Michael Phelps in primetime even though Beijing is on the other side of the globe? There is a reason: NBC begged the Chinese to schedule the swimming finals in the morning (Beijing time) so that they could be televised in prime TV-watching time on the East coast.

NBC got no such dispensation for the track & field events. These will take place in Beijing’s primetime, which is morning on the East Coast and pre-dawn here (Beijing is 12 hours ahead of EST, so 15 hours ahead of us).

So what is NBC going to do about this? You guessed it: they won’t show you any track & field finals until primetime, which in Seattle will be more than 12 hours after the event actually happened. Meaning that if you want to maintain any suspense about who’ll win the main events, you’ll have to stay away from the Internet from about 7am until 9pm–in other words, you’d have to quit your job.

We got our first taste of this Saturday, for the 100m dash. My roommates watched it live on CBUT at 7:15am Saturday. I saw the TIVOed version at about 10am. Then I went to breakfast with my girlfriend, did about four loads of laundry, watched the Mariner game, spent three hours out on Green Lake in this giant floatie we have, came back to the house, cooked dinner, watched the Seahawks game–and then, when I checked NBC, they were showing the 100m SEMIFINAL.

NBC calls this “showing the events when the majority of people are available to watch,” as if they could only show them once. (Besides, as the Seattle Times’ Ron Judd points out, they tend to show the marquee events nearer to midnight, the better to keep viewers watching until the end of the advertising telecast.)

What it actually means is that everyone will find out the results so far in advance that the events lose any suspense. Basically, NBC might as well not show the Olympics at all, or spread the telecasts over a few weeks, like ESPN does with the World Series of Poker.