The team at NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford is gameday ready.
Sixty-five cargo containers packed with gear for the 600 reporters, anchors, producers and camera crews heading to Paris to cover the Summer Olympic Games were dispatched across the Atlantic months ago.
In Paris, the Café de L’homme, with its breathtaking views of the Eiffel Tower, has been transformed from a scenic tourist dining spot, into a temporary homebase for some of the staffers who will helm Olympic coverage that starts Friday, July 26.
Back in Stamford, the iconic Olympic rings and a scaled-down replica of the Eiffel Tower adorn the entrance to the cavernous 300,000-square-foot NBC Sports complex on Blachley Road (below). There are Paris-themed throw pillows scattered on chairs in the lobby of the behemoth $100 million broadcasting facility based in what was once the headquarters of hair color giant Clairol.
Further inside, 28 hut-style broadcast booths, some borrowed from the set of “Saturday Night Live,” are lined up end-to-end in neat rows. They will host a who’s who of athletes-turned- announcers and veteran NBC Sports talent, calling events happening an ocean—and several time zones—away.
Food trucks are booked and thousands of gallons of coffee ordered to caffeinate the estimated 2,000 people who will converge on the 33 acres in Stamford’s East Side that has been NBC Sports home since 2012.
For, while Paris may be the leading lady of this Summer Games, her hard-at-work supporting cast will take their places here in the city. Every Olympic moment broadcast to US audiences will pass through the Stamford campus.
“Our broadcast center is incredibly versatile. We can do play-by-play and analysis for
our major events, and we’ve got all of our studio shows here. We have the flexibility and capability to bring top-notch storytelling and reporting to the masses, all under one roof in Stamford,” says Westport resident and Golf Channel host Damon Hack who will be one of the few in Paris manning afternoon coverage for his third Olympic assignment. “For the entirety of the Olympics, the building will be buzzing.”
For more than two years Molly Solomon, the executive producer and president of NBC Olympic Production, and her team have trained for this. They’ve worked with the goal of producing round-the-clock Olympic coverage so seamless that—if all goes to carefully calculated plans—viewers won’t even notice that many of the key broadcast players will not be joining lead primetime anchor Mike Tirico near the base of the Eiffel Tower (or, at least not joining him in person).
“We’re ready,” says Solomon, as she takes a break in her Stamford office in mid-May. “With all this planning, it gets to the point anchors and reporters can’t control in Paris or at home.
Take the weather. There’s no control room knob that will allow producers to manipulate the forecast along the River Seine on July 26 at 7:30 p.m.
At that moment, the Opening Ceremonies is expected to begin, featuring a flotilla of 100 boats carrying the athletic delegations first-of-its-kind Parisian Opening Ceremony, Jefferson says he’s thinking most about the 70 camera lenses NBC Sports crews will have fixed along the scenic waterway. Rain and wind could wreak havoc on plans to capture what should otherwise be a majestic moment from one of the most photogenic cities in the world. The goal is to make it all seem effortless, says Jefferson. “You don’t want things to be off by a beat and that’s the goal of everyone in the control room,” he says. “Even a few beats in television can feel like an eternity.”
Making It Work
“The Covid-19 epidemic expedited so much, and really taught us how to do things in one place when they’re happening in another,” says Amy Rosenfeld, NBC Sports senior vice president of Olympic Production. “As much as we all might like to be in Paris, we’ve learned it isn’t necessary and that Stamford can and will be the hub and heart of the coverage.”
High-speed transcontinental technology, in this case 40,000 miles of cable transversing the Atlantic (which end-to-end is almost enough to wrap the earth twice), along with the wonders of broadcast special effects have made it possible for NBC Sports anchors and play-by-play analysts to cover live events from a series of side-by-side soundproofed booths, so modestly appointed they could pass for backyard storage sheds. Producers sit in adjoining booths with sliding windows, making it possible for them to pop their heads in (literally) to chat with their talent teams.
Dan Hicks, the Greenwich resident and veteran NBC Sports and Golf Channel anchor, will be based in Paris to cover Olympic swimming events, but notes the technological resources in Stamford means audiences don’t even notice when he’s calling a golf tournament from headquarters. “We’ve gotten so good that during the 2021 Open Championship, I had my friends and family watching and say, ‘How is Royal St. Georges? It looks great.’ And I had to say, ‘I’m actually not there, I’m calling it from Stamford.’ ”
During the 2012 games in London, Jefferson was part of a team of 3,000 NBC Sports employees dispatched to the United Kingdom. Now, he notes, a relatively sparse 600 will travel to Paris, while 2,000 will report to work in Stamford.
“What being here does is save us the cost and expense of building an entirely new broadcast facility in Paris that we really don’t need,” Solomon says. “We’re sending the reporters, the anchors, the cameramen who really need to be at the venues. The rest we can do here.”
To get its talent and production capacity Olympics ready, Jefferson said the team began working immediately after the conclusion of the Beijing Winter Games on preparations for this summer’s 17 days of coverage showcasing 329 different medal events to be featured on multiple networks in the NBC family, including Peacock, USA, E!, the Golf Channel and CNBC.
That included growing NBC Sport’s digital network capacity from 50 to a whopping 220 gigs and adding new studios and control rooms in Stamford.
The team also held boot camps for new analysts and play-by-play announcers on the finer points of broadcasting live coverage from a remote base.
And the 65 previously mentioned cargo containers shipped from an NBC facility
in Monroe, CT, to France containing pre-configured portable broadcast kits in pieces called “ribs”, were assembled and distributed to specific venues throughout the host country.
Another team and set of equipment was dispatched to Tahiti to capture Olympic surfers catching waves off the French Polynesia territory.
Telling the Story
While the digital age has made it possible to telecast an international sporting event from far-flung continents, it will also pose some real-world challenges for producers, who need to be ratings-minded and consider their audiences’ fleeting attention spans. “We’re completely cognizant of the fact that by the time an event makes it to primetime, the results will be on everyone’s devices,” says Rosenfeld.
The network has worked overtime to plan thoughtful coverage focused on telling stories within the stories, intended to take viewers beyond the finish lines and medals podiums.
“So, if Simone Biles, for example, does a vault that no one has done before, we want to tell the audience what goes into doing that vault, and what makes it such a monumental achievement,” says Rosenfeld. “If a story or an athlete comes out of nowhere, we want to be able to tell that story, too.”
If that means tracking down a jubilant grandmother of a surprise medalist from the Midwest for some color commentary, Stamford, once again, becomes a better place to start than Paris.
This beyond-the-results thinking extends to the upcoming Paralympic Games, which begin August 28. The network is working to elevate the stories of American athletes competing there, while bringing more expert talent with physical challenges to the forefront, says Rosenfeld, “with plans to do even more when the Games come to Los Angeles.”
“We’ve come to think of covering the events as the easy part,” says Solomon. “The rest is what we have to do to bring the athlete’s stories to life.”
Stamford’s Golden Moment
With NBC Sports serving as the broadcast epicenter, there’s local economic gold in having Summer Olympic Games coverage based here.
While an estimated 600 employees walk through the network’s doors on a typical weekday, the daily census will more than triple throughout the Games.
“All of these people need to eat and sleep,” says Rosenfeld. To accommodate them, hotels throughout Fairfield County and beyond are booked to capacity, with careful consideration given to the sleep needs of shift workers. “We try to keep crews together based on schedules, so if folks are sleeping during the day and working all night, the other half of the hotel isn’t doing the opposite.”
Rosenfield estimates this round-the-clock workforce will consume 100,000 meals and down some 13,500 cups of coffee, along with a hefty side of stress. A contingent of food trucks will be brought to campus to add options for workers logging extra-long shifts.
“One thing we’re really focused on for these games is thinking holistically about the human beings who do all this,” Rosenfield says, noting the time differences between Stamford and Paris will disrupt the circadian rhythms of even the best sleepers. So urgent care trailers, along with on-site therapists, camped at headquarters will be part of the effort to keep everyone in good physical and emotional shape.
Naturally, city officials are bullish on what this temporary influx of personnel means for its business community, particularly hotels and restaurants.
“As much as we look forward to the excitement of the Olympics, the impact of having NBC Sports presence herein Stamford during the Games is a big moment for the city too, and one we’re proud of,” says Leah Kagan, Stamford’s director of economic development. “You’ll see it particularly downtown, where we expect to see a real impact on the restaurants and the pedestrian traffic that comes from having a major event like this in the city. So, there’s a lot of interest in making sure their team gets a warm welcome and has a good experience here.”
Paris 2024
Games of the XXXIII Olympiad
Fri., July 26 – Sun., August 11
Opening Ceremony
July 26 at noon, airing again in primetime
For a complete guide to the games, visit nbcolympics.com
For More of Our Local Olympics Coverage, Check Out:
- Q&A With Molly Solomon
- Q&A With Dan Hicks
- Front-Row Seat: Fairfield County Native Oliver Bub Heads to Paris Searching for Gold