How strange it is that NBC makes all this fuss about showing the best Olympic events in prime time -- so much so that it tape-delays the show three hours so that it can also be shown in prime time on the West Coast -- only to have these events drag on into what turns out to be the wee hours of the morning on both coasts.

Thursday night's women's all-around gymnastics competition didn't finish until after 1 a.m. EDT -- and so, of course, it didn't finish until after 1 a.m. PDT too.

It was so ridiculous and probably so embarrassing for NBC that it spent a considerable amount of its prime-time coverage Friday night recapping what viewers missed the night before. All the way down to showing analyst Bela Karolyi's unabashed cheering for winner Nastia Liukin's floor exercise routine. Except this time Liukin and silver medalist Shawn Johnson were in the studio sitting next to Karolyi while they watched it.

Make no mistake: It's great that NBC is managing to show some Olympic events live, at least to the East Coast. It just seems that if the network was going to manipulate the starting times in Beijing it could've done a little better job of it so that the events might also finish in prime time.