For two weeks I had the comfort of falling asleep on the couch to the late-night susurrations of skaters skating and skiers sliding. Now what am I supposed to do?
The weirdness of the Beijing Olympics was perfectly mirrored by the intricacies and dead zones of NBC’s Peacock streaming service, through which I assiduously avoided the network’s clear overprogramming of curling. (Note to execs for 2026: The novelty’s worn off.)
The Tokyo Summer Olympics coverage relied too heavily on highlights and studio banter, but here you could tune in and take in, for example, all of the roughly hour and a half of the women’s 30K freestyle cross-country ski race, and then linger as the camera didn’t cut away but kept on recording every one of the 60 finishers, including Dinigeer Yilamujiang of China in last place, greeted at the line by Therese Johaug of Norway, still giddy after winning 25 minutes earlier, who proceeded to hug her and help her with her equipment, the audio catching her ask, “Are you happy?”
“Yeah, I guess,” was the dazed reply.
Other times there would come a break in, say, a figure skating competition, and yet a single camera would remain focused on the empty seats with a Zamboni slowly circling in the distance, as incongruously upbeat American pop came over the arena’s sound system.
If those instances when there was seemingly no one at the video-streaming switch made for eerily fascinating television, what was missing?
It was a long time ago, but some of the most memorable sports coverage ever had to have been Jim McKay’s hosting of ABC’s 1984 Winter Olympics from Sarajevo as the old city got buried in a once-in-a-half-century snowstorm, interrupting competition, leaving McKay to wing it with impromptu travelogues and weather reports.
There was nothing close to that this time around, partly because of Covid restrictions, partly because of the police state, partly because there were almost no announcers on hand for the action or for reporting from outside the Olympic bubble, instead calling it all from a studio in the least interesting place I can think of: Connecticut.
Maybe the winningest moment came from losing. While Mikaela Shiffrin, so overhyped in the leadup to the Games, was wiping out and otherwise coming away empty-handed across six downhill events, her charm and thoughtfulness in answering a journalist’s questions were disarming, almost unheard of for such a star. “I don’t feel that I deserve it,” she said of the public outpouring of encouragement, “the kindest words I could ever imagine,” following what she called her “failure,” adding, after four straight minutes of explication, her hand to her forehead, “I’m going to stop talking.”
The boys back in the studio laughed at that last one, but the Olympic spirit was in there somewhere.