2021 Tokyo Olympics: How To Watch The Summer Games

ACROSS AMERICA — With the opening ceremony of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics now less than 10 days away, passionate Team USA fans can begin planning their schedules around when their favorite events will be aired on television.

Something that will be a bit harder to prepare for is what has become inevitable in recent Olympic Games in the social media era: spoilers.

“The 24-hour news cycle, combined with social media, makes it increasingly unlikely you’ll make it to that after-work hour uninformed,” a Wired.com blogger wrote during the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Tokyo is 13 hours ahead of New York City and the entire Eastern U.S. time zone, meaning prime-time events in Japan will occur during prime sleeping hours for many American sports enthusiasts.

NBC, the network airing 2021 Olympic contests on its family of networks, will have a livestream and broadcast some events on a time delay. But that will hardly be good enough for anyone with a phone subject to getting push notifications from news networks on the results they’d much rather learn about while watching live.

“In 2012, a mobile alert informed me that Gabby Douglas had won the all-around gold in gymnastics, several hours before I could get to a television,” the Wired.com blogger wrote.

Take the opening ceremony.

Set for 8 p.m. Japan time on July 23, that’s a 7 a.m. ET kickoff for the widely popular event introducing Olympic teams from countries around the world.

By the time NBC airs it at 7 p.m. ET, anything significant that may have occurred in the ceremony would surely be old news by then.

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Super die-hards intent on avoiding any spoiler possibility — even if it means waking up early, staying up late, or altering work schedules — can do that via several NBC livestreaming options.

NBC’s free streaming platform Peacock, FuboTV and NBCOlympics.com will livestream the Olympic opening ceremony at Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium, according to The Sporting News.

NBCOlympics.com already has the broadcast schedule from July 21 to Aug. 8 for NBC, Peacock, USA, CNBC and The Olympic Channel. Although the opening ceremony is on July 23, a scattering of soccer and softball games are scheduled before then.

The Sporting News also has a full schedule of every Olympic event planned to be televised.