🕓 Olympics viewing schedule chaos because of time zones every single time

Four in the morning. That is when the swimming final I actually cared about aired last Olympics, and I set three separate alarms for it and still somehow slept through two of them entirely. This happens every single cycle without fail. Whatever event I am genuinely invested in lands at some brutal hour here, while the host country's own broadcast schedules everything for a perfectly comfortable evening slot for them. Athletics finals at two in the morning, a badminton match I had actually circled on my calendar starting at half past three, it never seems to line up with anything close to a reasonable hour on this end of the world. Tried recording an event once instead of losing sleep over it, which meant spending an entire following workday actively avoiding my phone, avoiding colleagues who might casually mention the result, avoiding even glancing at news headlines, purely to keep the outcome a surprise until I could actually sit down and watch it properly that evening. Made it about six hours before someone in the office lunch queue ruined it completely with one careless sentence about a medal count. A relative on the US west coast apparently deals with a nearly identical problem depending on which specific games are actually on, so the inconvenience genuinely just rotates around the globe depending on wherever the host city happens to be that particular cycle. Nobody actually wins this scheduling lottery every single time, some region always ends up with the short end of it. At this point I have mostly given up on watching most things live. I check results the next morning over coffee instead, which is easier on my sleep schedule but does feel like it quietly defeats half the actual point of following a live sporting event unfold in real time in the first place, that specific shared tension only really works if you do not already know how it ends. Does anyone actually manage to stay properly committed to live viewing across the entire two week stretch, or does everyone eventually cave and just switch to reading results the next day the way I clearly have?

Missed an entire swimming final live last cycle purely because of the time difference, woke up to results already spoiled through a notification before I had even opened any coverage myself that particular morning at all. Started deliberately avoiding my phone screen entirely during Olympic weeks after that one specific incident happened to me, and it has stuck ever since.