The Opening Ceremony schedule for the Winter Olympics from Sochi is on TV Friday night February 7 and the start time will be at 7:30 pm ET on the main NBC channel and there will be no live stream coverage of the event and it will be on tape delay coverage, like most of the events that will be shown in primetime throughout the week and the OC will be from Sochi's Fisht Olympic Stadium.
The actual event gets underway in Russia on Friday at 11 am ET and there are ways for people to stream it live, including downloading some illegal programs and also by jumping onto feeds from international carriers, including the BBC. The event will be live on BBC Two, but for those that wait, the entire ceremony will presented with all its pageantry and nationalistic flair as the Olympic athletes are introduced for each nation and anchors Matt Lauer, Meredith Viera and Bob Costas will be handling the coverage. Over 40,000 people are expected to attend the ceremonies and they come after the Olympics have actually started on Thursday.
The schedule on Saturday has 12 events going down, while Thursday saw the start of a handful of events, including qualifying for the snowboard slopestyle as well as alpine skiing and team figure skating. The Parade of Athletes will introduce everyone participating in the event and the Olympic Flame will be lit up at the stadium as well to officially start things off in style. The Olympics actually started up over 30 hours before the opening ceremony and one of the main reasons for this is the schedule, as there are 12 new events that hand out medals since the last Olympic games and the two week event simply needed more time to squeeze things in.
The opening is expected to have plenty of fireworks and pageantry and comes after the London Olympics had a massive opening event that paid homage to a number of English and British traditions and cultural touchstones, including James Bond and the Royal Family. Russia has already spent $51 billion on the Olympics and that has been good for basically nothing, as most of that money has been lost or wasted, while a number of projects, stadiums and hotels are not even finished after the nation had years to prepare for it.
The snowboarding, hockey and figure skating are expected to be some of the biggest draws of the tournament and some of those have started off already, with the slopestyle event starting before the halfpipe next week, and the skaters starting up the new team event on Thursday. The US has gold medal candidates in Shaun White and Ashley Wagner, while Canadian Mark McMorris will be looking to take gold in the slopestyle now that White has dropped out.
Many criticized White for not participating in the slopestyle, but after sustaining a wrist injury on a practice run, he opted to focus on the pipe and heal up, as he is dealing with ankle and shoulder injuries as well. The snowboard halfpipe comes next week, while the figure skating singles are also on the schedule next week and should be one of the biggest draws of the entire event. Hockey starts up next week as well and comes after Team USA lost to Canada in the gold medal game back in Vancouver.
Check here for the official NBC schedule for the opening ceremonies or for more on the entire Olympics schedule for snowboarding, figure skating, hockey and other events.
