NBC Hosts Will Not Attend Winter Olympics

As the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games approach and COVID-19 concerns mount, NBC Sports will not send any of its announcing teams to China, a spokesperson told USAToday Sports Wednesday afternoon. 

“The announce teams for these Olympics, including figure skating, will be calling events from our Stamford (Conn.) facility due to COVID concerns,” Greg Hughes, senior vice president communications, NBC Sports, said in a phone interview. 

"We’ll still have a large presence on the ground in Beijing and our coverage of everything will be first rate as usual, but our plans are evolving by the day as they are for most media companies covering the Olympics.”

The network’s Olympic host, Mike Tirico, will still be in China for the Feb. 4 opening ceremony and the first few days of the Games, but will then leave for Los Angeles to host the Feb. 13 Super Bowl, which also is on NBC this year. 

Many of the announce teams for the various Winter Olympic sports were already scheduled to be based in Stamford. NBC employed a similar strategy for its coverage of the Tokyo Summer Olympics in July-August 2021, although some of the broadcasting crews were on site for the most popular sports. 

That of course was well before the omicron variant began raging around the world, creating increasing concerns that anyone traveling to Beijing, from the athletes of the world to accredited members of the media, could test positive while at the Games and have to spend days and even weeks in quarantine. 

“The Beijing model is going to be very similar to Tokyo in that the heartbeat of our Olympic operation will actually be in Stamford, Conn., at our NBC Sports headquarters. We’ll have more personnel there than in the host city,” said Molly Solomon, president and executive producer, NBC Olympics Production.