The finals are scheduled for someone else's breakfast

Olympic timetables are written for the biggest broadcast market awake, and athletes absorb the cost in their bodies.

A swimming final at ten in the morning is not really a final. It is a heat with medals attached.

Sprint and power events are sensitive to time of day in a way that is well established and rarely argued about. Core temperature rises through the day, muscle is more compliant in the late afternoon, reaction time sharpens. Athletes who have spent four years racing at seven in the evening are asked to peak before lunch because a network on the other side of the planet wants the result before its viewers leave for work.

The sport pretends this is neutral because everyone in the pool faces it equally. That is a weak defence. It is equal the way a headwind is equal: nobody gains, and the event is diminished for everyone. Times are slower, races are more conservative, and the version of the athlete who shows up is not the one the qualification system selected.

There is an unequal part too, and it is the part nobody schedules around. Athletes from the host region are living in their own body clock. Athletes who flew eleven time zones are being asked to produce their best neuromuscular output at what their internal clock still reads as three in the morning, several days before the adjustment is complete. Morning finals push that mismatch in the worst possible direction for anyone travelling east.

I understand the money. Broadcast rights pay for the qualification pathways, the officials, the drug testing, the small federations that would otherwise send nobody. Refusing to schedule for television is refusing the funding model, and people who say otherwise usually have no plan for the shortfall.

But there is a middle setting and the movement never tries it. Rotate. Let the finals sessions belong to the local evening at one Games and to foreign prime time at the next, and let the rights fees be priced accordingly rather than assumed. Or split the difference by discipline: give the events most distorted by early starts, the sprints and the throws and the pool, the evening slot, and put the endurance events, which suffer less from clock shift and more from heat, in the cool morning where they belong anyway.

What we do instead is hold the marathon at six in the morning for the weather and the hundred metres at eleven for the advertising, and describe both decisions as athlete welfare.