Decider’s Guide to Watching the 2016 Rio Olympics: And We Are Live (on a Tape Delay)

Just before the beginning of tonight’s Opening Ceremony, there were a lot of negative comments on Twitter and the NBC Olympics Facebook page about NBC airing the festivities on a delay. How important is it, really, that we see Gisele Bundchen walk the runway live vs. 45 minutes or an hour later? The Opening Ceremony is a “live” spectacle in the sense that a lot of people are interested in watching it, but it doesn’t suffer from a short delay.

The opening film was a fairly boilerplate pastiche of Rio shots and bullet points about Michael Phelps and the other U.S. hopefuls. As Forrest Gump said: That’s all I have to say about that. Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira and Hoda Kotb are on, and Hoda is so, so soooo excited to be on television. I mean, like soooo excited. Michael Phelps is doing an interview from the holding arena where Team U.S.A. is waiting, and he has a little grey in his stubble confirming that he is actually aging (at least a little).

NBC Sports has flipped on its live feed at NBCOlympics.com and on the NBC Sports apps for iPhone, iPad and Roku. I haven’t seen reports of any problems on Amazon Fire TV, Windows phone, etc., so I assume all systems are go on every platform.

The Opening Ceremony begins at 7:30 with The Most Beautiful Things In The World, an NBC Sports original film that celebrates the world’s athletes coming together in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The film is narrated by actor Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring, who owned the Los Pollos Hermanos chicken shacks / was a meth kingpin on Breaking Bad).

Order food. Make sure the kids have something to keep them busy. Charge your mobile devices. Have a quiet moment of meditation. You have one hour. If you’re looking for information on how to live-stream the Opening Ceremony on your iPhone, iPad, Roku or other device, we have that all right here.

The Opening Ceremony will be tape-delayed by one hour on the East Coast, so things are about to get rolling in Rio. Photos of Team U.S.A. in their blue blazers, white pants and funky red-white-and-blue shirts and loafers are starting to pop up on Twitter.

Having mastered the Kentucky Derby, former Olympic figure skaters Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir are on hand in Rio for their distinctive brand of fashion and color commentary. In this interview, they talk about their own memories of walking the red carpet in the Opening Ceremony.

Weir is trolling the fashion boundaries pretty hard here in an ensemble that includes a navy pen-striped frock/jacket/something with a corsage of what is either golden bows or bronzed dog biscuits. He’s also wearing a trio of pearl-inspired rings and — outside the frame — hunter-green stack-heeled boots.

Todd Longwell at VideoInk reports that Rio Olympics-related videos have generated 1.1 billion views over the past 90 days. According to his reporting from video analytics firm Tubular Labs, those videos have been roughly half from Facebook (558 million), half from YouTube (516 million), and a sliver from Instagram (28 million).

The NBC Olympics Facebook page, which has 2 million followers, has been posting three or four items an hour today, including videos, photos and stories from NBCOlympics.com. The YouTube clip pictured above of Katy Perry’s “Rise,” the official anthem (is that really a thing?) of the 2016 Rio Games, has had 27 million views since posting two weeks ago to her YouTube page.

Justin Gatlin won the 100-meter race at the 2004 Athens Games, and two years later he tested positive for steroids. He has said all along — and tells Chris Collinsworth in this interview — that he has never taken performance-enhancing drugs or used topical steroid treatments.

“I had no reason to,” he says. “At that point in time [2006], I had no reason to. I was an Olympic gold medalist. I was a double-gold world champion in 2005.” Why take steroid from some podunk relay meet in Kansas? Gatlin says he thinks a disgruntled masseuse rubbed the steroid cream on him.

Collinsworth says “It’s hard not to be skeptical,” and it is hard not to be skeptical. Still, it was 10 years ago, and it’s pretty remarkable that Gatlin ran within 0.01 seconds of Usain Bolt in a race earlier this year. They’ll likely face off again in the Olympic 100-meter sprint on August 14.

Bob Costas’s sit-down interview with Michael Phelps is getting prominent placement on the NBC Sports apps for iPhone, iPad and Roku. “In my eyes, London wasn’t all that great. I didn’t prepare for it; we all know that,” Phelps says of the 2012 London Olympics. “Eventually, I just started wanting to do it again. I started finding that hunger again.”

Athletes declaring themselves “hungry” ranks right up there on the Sports Cliche List — an actual thing — with “having a passion for the game” and “giving 110 percent,” but most athletes are competing more often than every four years. The Olympics are different. This is Phelps’s fifth Olympics, he says Rio is the hardest he’s ever trained, and it’s fascinating to see him motivated by the logic that he can actually outperform his physical peak.

Bonus: There’s video of Phelps sinking a hundred-foot put in some golf tournament, and he talks about gaining 43 pounds — 43 pounds! — between London and starting his training for Rio.

The 2016 Rio Games may turn out to be our first split-screen Olympics.

Between Donald Trump’s live-action reality show, Rio’s bubbling cauldron of poop, the Russian doping scandal, the looming specter of the Zika virus, the threat of drug gangs and riots and the actual Olympics generating wave after wave of live event updates in a way we only experience when the games are in the Western Hemisphere, two screens may not be enough.

I’ll be jockeying four, in fact — a 42-inch LG with a Roku Streaming Stick, a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone — and cycling through them throughout the day. If our links to NBCOlympics.com aren’t working for you on certain devices, Tweet us with the #DeciderOlympics hashtag and let us know what device you’re using.