Why is NBC screwing up the Olympics so badly? Bcuz Americans don't understand time zones
As I begin writing this on Sunday, 18 February 2018 at 1:07 p.m. MST, the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea is sleeping. It is early Monday morning in Seoul, 4:08 a.m., in fact, as I write this sentence.
I don't know if America is the absolute dumbest nation in the world, but certainly there has to be a more valuable use of precious airtime, when KOA's afternoon drivetime team, speaking live with Alan Roach (who is in PyeongChang calling men's hockey for NBC), asks: (1) What time is it there? and (2) Have you eaten any dog yet?
Ignoring the second question for the moment, meaning forever, and the follow-up question "How do you know you haven't eaten any dog yet, if you can't read the menu?" let's zero in on the inanity of the first, which Americans constantly are reduced to asking because apparently (1) We don't understand the three-dimensional shape of the earth, or how this shape rotates on an axis and (2) We don't know how to count numbers higher than our total number of fingers and toes.
Pictured below is Nuuk, Greenland. It is a beautiful, colorful, isolated place, the largest "city" in Greenland, population just over 17,000.
I hope you get the chance to visit there someday. For right now, for the purposes of this discussion, let's talk about what time it is in Nuuk, and not ask "did you eat whale?" The current time in Nuuk is 5:20 p.m. on Sunday. So get out your right hand, and count forward four fingers. This is how far ahead, timewise, Nuuk is from Estes Park, Colorado. It is four hours ahead.
In similar fashion, the current time in San Juan, Puerto Rico is 4:20 p.m. The current time in Havana, Cuba, is 3:20 p.m., as it is in New York City, New York. The current time in Chicago is 2:20 p.m. Are you starting to understand that, as you move farther east from Colorado, the people living in these places are farther along in their day? Our ignorance of this is somewhat like the old joke about "In London, they say, it's 10:30 p.m., do you know where your children are? In Paris, they say, it's 10:30 p.m., do you know where you husband is? Apparently in New York, at NBC broadcast headquarters, they say, it's 10:30 p.m., do you know what time it is?"
We are so focused on our own navels in America, we forget that other people around the world do not schedule their day around our clock. The reason I mentioned Nuuk first is because it just happens to be exactly 12 hours "behind" Seoul, South Korea. So if you live in Colorado and operate on a 12-hour clock, all you have to do to figure out what time it is in Seoul, South Korea, is (1) figure out what time it is Nuuk, Greeland, by adding four hours to the current time in Colorado, and then (2) flip a.m. to p.m., or p.m. to a.m. That "flipped Nuuk" time is the current time in South Korea, and, so that it doesn't completely throw you, in many instances it may be the current time in South Korea ON THE FOLLOWING DAY. Since we are doing this on Sunday afternoon, it is Monday morning in South Korea. But if we were doing this exercise on Sunday morning in Estes Park, say an hour or so after midnight, for example, 1:35 a.m., it would be 5:35 a.m. Sunday morning in Nuuk, and 5:35 p.m. Sunday afternoon in Seoul.
All of this is necessary because NBC really screwed up the women's Super-G, broadcast last Friday evening local time, because they somehow thought it was past our bedtime. (Let's work out the equation, without having to call Alan Roach. Friday evening in Colorado is later Friday evening in Nuuk, potentially early Saturday morning, which makes it sometime before or after lunch time in PyeongChang. So NBC's announcers (or the production crew, or whoever screwed up one of the most wondrously unpredictable results in Winter Olympics history) could not have been sleep- deprived when they (typically) focused on the unfairness to Lindsey Vonn having to make the first run among all competitors down the course (the book on this says it's "better" to be the sixth or seventh in run order, because critical inside information about the course starts circulating back up to the top, and "awful" to be later than 20th in run order, because the course is so carved up by then).
For whatever reason, this Olympics NBC loves "jumping the gun" on announcing medal winners. Up to this point they've been "right", in that the top competitors in alpine events are generally slotted among the first 20, similar to placing the best qualifiers in track in the middle lanes. Anything after these runs is considered garbage time, the "thanks for playing" formality extended to lesser competitors from lesser countries, who, odds would suggest, have very little chance of breaking into the top 10, let alone winning.
Update: As predicted, this video was removed from YouTube. Try this lesser one, or just recognize that NBC and Olympic lawyers are killjoys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7vlP5I52xs
You certainly didn't hear anything about Ester Ledecka from NBC during the "live" portion of the women's Super-G. They had already signed off and prematurely awarded the gold medal FIVE SEPARATE TIMES to Anna Veith from Austria, who was in first place halfway through the Super-G competition. This would be comparable to Joe Buck and Fox stopping last year's Super Bowl at halftime to present the Lombardi trophy to the Atlanta Falcon, and then again 5 minutes into the third quarter, and then again after the third quarter. It would have been super-stupid, and viewed as such by people who knew football.
Apparently NBC forgot that, in skiing and other sports not involving a massed start (like NASCAR), medals aren't awarded until all the competitors have finished. And so Ester Ledecka's miracle underdog Super-G run (and Ester was already a story because she also qualified in parallel giant slalom, a SNOWBOARD event), on borrowed skis, no less, is just an afterthought to American audiences, because we don't celebrate the world's greatest athletes or the world's most improbable success stories, we only fret over American athletes, and whether or not they are boycotting the post-Olympics celebration (?) at the White House.
I don't know if America is the absolute dumbest nation in the world, but certainly there has to be a more valuable use of precious airtime, when KOA's afternoon drivetime team, speaking live with Alan Roach (who is in PyeongChang calling men's hockey for NBC), asks: (1) What time is it there? and (2) Have you eaten any dog yet?
Ignoring the second question for the moment, meaning forever, and the follow-up question "How do you know you haven't eaten any dog yet, if you can't read the menu?" let's zero in on the inanity of the first, which Americans constantly are reduced to asking because apparently (1) We don't understand the three-dimensional shape of the earth, or how this shape rotates on an axis and (2) We don't know how to count numbers higher than our total number of fingers and toes.
Pictured below is Nuuk, Greenland. It is a beautiful, colorful, isolated place, the largest "city" in Greenland, population just over 17,000.
I hope you get the chance to visit there someday. For right now, for the purposes of this discussion, let's talk about what time it is in Nuuk, and not ask "did you eat whale?" The current time in Nuuk is 5:20 p.m. on Sunday. So get out your right hand, and count forward four fingers. This is how far ahead, timewise, Nuuk is from Estes Park, Colorado. It is four hours ahead.
In similar fashion, the current time in San Juan, Puerto Rico is 4:20 p.m. The current time in Havana, Cuba, is 3:20 p.m., as it is in New York City, New York. The current time in Chicago is 2:20 p.m. Are you starting to understand that, as you move farther east from Colorado, the people living in these places are farther along in their day? Our ignorance of this is somewhat like the old joke about "In London, they say, it's 10:30 p.m., do you know where your children are? In Paris, they say, it's 10:30 p.m., do you know where you husband is? Apparently in New York, at NBC broadcast headquarters, they say, it's 10:30 p.m., do you know what time it is?"
We are so focused on our own navels in America, we forget that other people around the world do not schedule their day around our clock. The reason I mentioned Nuuk first is because it just happens to be exactly 12 hours "behind" Seoul, South Korea. So if you live in Colorado and operate on a 12-hour clock, all you have to do to figure out what time it is in Seoul, South Korea, is (1) figure out what time it is Nuuk, Greeland, by adding four hours to the current time in Colorado, and then (2) flip a.m. to p.m., or p.m. to a.m. That "flipped Nuuk" time is the current time in South Korea, and, so that it doesn't completely throw you, in many instances it may be the current time in South Korea ON THE FOLLOWING DAY. Since we are doing this on Sunday afternoon, it is Monday morning in South Korea. But if we were doing this exercise on Sunday morning in Estes Park, say an hour or so after midnight, for example, 1:35 a.m., it would be 5:35 a.m. Sunday morning in Nuuk, and 5:35 p.m. Sunday afternoon in Seoul.
All of this is necessary because NBC really screwed up the women's Super-G, broadcast last Friday evening local time, because they somehow thought it was past our bedtime. (Let's work out the equation, without having to call Alan Roach. Friday evening in Colorado is later Friday evening in Nuuk, potentially early Saturday morning, which makes it sometime before or after lunch time in PyeongChang. So NBC's announcers (or the production crew, or whoever screwed up one of the most wondrously unpredictable results in Winter Olympics history) could not have been sleep- deprived when they (typically) focused on the unfairness to Lindsey Vonn having to make the first run among all competitors down the course (the book on this says it's "better" to be the sixth or seventh in run order, because critical inside information about the course starts circulating back up to the top, and "awful" to be later than 20th in run order, because the course is so carved up by then).
For whatever reason, this Olympics NBC loves "jumping the gun" on announcing medal winners. Up to this point they've been "right", in that the top competitors in alpine events are generally slotted among the first 20, similar to placing the best qualifiers in track in the middle lanes. Anything after these runs is considered garbage time, the "thanks for playing" formality extended to lesser competitors from lesser countries, who, odds would suggest, have very little chance of breaking into the top 10, let alone winning.
So if you haven't heard anything about Ester Ledecka of the Czech Republic before reading this blog, you need to drop everything right now, and watch this video before it gets removed for copyright violation. You may not understand all the words, but, if you are not a robot or a burned-out husk of an individual, your soul will thrill to the excitement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7vlP5I52xs
You certainly didn't hear anything about Ester Ledecka from NBC during the "live" portion of the women's Super-G. They had already signed off and prematurely awarded the gold medal FIVE SEPARATE TIMES to Anna Veith from Austria, who was in first place halfway through the Super-G competition. This would be comparable to Joe Buck and Fox stopping last year's Super Bowl at halftime to present the Lombardi trophy to the Atlanta Falcon, and then again 5 minutes into the third quarter, and then again after the third quarter. It would have been super-stupid, and viewed as such by people who knew football.
Apparently NBC forgot that, in skiing and other sports not involving a massed start (like NASCAR), medals aren't awarded until all the competitors have finished. And so Ester Ledecka's miracle underdog Super-G run (and Ester was already a story because she also qualified in parallel giant slalom, a SNOWBOARD event), on borrowed skis, no less, is just an afterthought to American audiences, because we don't celebrate the world's greatest athletes or the world's most improbable success stories, we only fret over American athletes, and whether or not they are boycotting the post-Olympics celebration (?) at the White House.
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