NBC Idiotically Spoils Own Olympic Coverage

Seventeen year old U.S. Olympian swimmer Missy Franklin won the gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London early on Monday. The event wouldn’t be shown until hours later during NBC’s Olympic primetime coverage on tape delay, meaning viewers would have to successfully avoid Internet spoilers and watching sports networks like ESPN all afternoon and early evening.

NBC has been ripped by viewers and critics alike for holding the perceived most important or popular Olympic events until primetime without ever showing them live earlier in the day on television. It only makes sense for the network to show the events in primetime, but it’s inexcusable not to also show them live and then replay them in primetime. It’s something that’s no doubt hurt the experience for fans that accidentally view or hear spoilers, but hasn’t been a hindrance to the network’s ratings.

However, what NBC did on Monday night during their primetime Olympic coverage was just stupidity at its highest level. Just a handful of minutes before the network was going to air the 100-meter backstroke, which Franklin won, the network aired a promo for Tuesday morning’s “Today” episode in which it mentioned the gold medalist would be reunited with her parents for the first time during the games. Thus by showing this promo NBC spoiled their OWN EVENT.

This wasn’t the first time during the opening days of the Olympics that NBC has spoiled one of its own primetime events either, though it is the first time it’s done so during its actual primetime showing. On the opening day of the Olympics on Saturday NBC’s Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who’s generally one of the best around, idiotically gave the final results to the highly-anticipated Ryan Lochte/Michael Phelps event in the men’s 400 IM, which the network later aired in primetime.

It’s hard enough for fans to go almost an entire day without seeing or hearing who won certain events via television or the Internet, but hearing the news on NBC’s own coverage is just irresponsible and bad business on the part of NBC. It also goes against everything NBC Sports anchor Bob Costas said during the opening night of the events when he told the audience that the events they’d be seeing were previously recorded, but that they wouldn’t be spoiled on the air. The commentators haven’t done the spoiling, but the network certainly has.

NBC really should be ashamed of their coverage thus far during the Olympics, but I’d almost guarantee that they don’t and won’t care, because they’re shattering records according to EW.com.