Maybe it’s the effect of the global post-Covid rebound. Maybe it’s a collective reprieve from the doomerism of our ecological and political end times. Maybe it’s simply a reflected orgasm of the Parisian streetscape, the sense of occasion created by young athletes at the peak of physical health sweeping across this metropolis-sized monument to early-modern bombast. But for whatever reason, these Olympics have sparkled like no other Games in recent memory. A city given over to revolutions, occupations, copulations, and decapitations, in a country without a government, has come thrillingly to life for the Olympics – and nowhere has Paris shone more brilliantly than on the world’s TV screens.
The Olympic Games are always a media event as much as a sporting one, of course, and this edition is no exception. But thanks to the advent of streaming and the organizers’ inspired decision to convert Paris into a single, city-wide stadium – to make the city, as much as the athletes, the star of the show – the 33rd Olympiad has arrived at a perfect moment to create the ultimate sports media spectacle. Volleyball by the Eiffel Tower; fencing in the Grand Palais; swimmers leaping into the Seine under the gilded Fames of the Pont Alexandre III; treacle-coated horses zig-zagging in the shadow of Versailles like members of the Sun King’s court dancing a Sarabande; that Canadian guy emptying his guts at the end of the triathlon: truly, these Olympics have felt more vivid, more memorable, more saturatingly epic than any other Games this century. Even those events held away from the Parisian sights have projected a basic monumentality: from the crepe-thin margins in the men’s 100m and Femke Bol’s thundering finish in the mixed relay to the agony of the medal-denying dong, all the podium contenders in Paris have seemed to respond to the drama, history and scale expressed by the city around them.
In the US, the feeling of giddy, overflowing possibility created by these Games has been heightened by the staggering wealth of options available to viewers. For competitors, the Olympics are about giving everything in the pursuit of glory, and host broadcaster NBC has brought something of the same spirit to its coverage of events in Paris. Jimmy Fallon! Snoop Dogg at the dressage! Colin Jost reporting live from the surfing in Tahiti! Peyton Manning recapping the French Revolution during the opening ceremony! Steve Kornacki at the Maricopa County-ready Big Board, breaking down the numbers of the US-Australia swimming rivalry! There is seemingly not a single network star that NBC has not mobilized for these Olympics – and after the Lalasian tedium of Fox’s coverage of this summer’s soccer-heavy opening months, the 24/7 blitz of talent that NBC has unleashed to cover the summer’s Olympic punctuation mark has felt oddly refreshing.
It’s not even that these headliners – or any of the other network big guns NBC has flown to Paris – have been particularly impressive. Snoop Dogg has attracted a lot of attention but his main task has been to swan about Paris taking the mildest interest imaginable in events featuring US medal hopefuls. Michael Phelps – who now looks like he’s raising money for an early stage venture capital fund with a multi-sectoral focus on crypto, wearables, and drones – brought a measure of in-studio gravitas to the coverage of the swimming events, but he’s so far ahead of anyone else in US Olympic history that his comments have an alien, oracular quality that seems utterly detached from the reality of what today’s Olympians are going through.
Main NBC anchor Mike Tirico, observing the strictures of a dress code that could best be described as dad casual (white-soled trainers, suit, no tie), has kept the show bobbing along from a studio featuring an Eiffel Tower backdrop with some little pot plants along a window sill; the overall effect has been to suggest that NBC took over a dentist’s waiting room off the Champ de Mars for the duration of the Olympics. In his folksy, jovial style, Tirico has performed the critical work of throwing to ad breaks with strange staccato bursts of verbiage that always seem to come out like this: “Simon Biles / and the women / going for gold / on Tuesday / after a memorable Monday / in Paris / Paris France / the host city / in the heart of Europe / of the 33rd / Olympiad / or as they’re also known / the Olympics / the Olympic Games / or in French / lay jee oh / les Jeux Olympiques.”
None of this has really mattered, though, because there’s simply so much going on, with so many different ways to absorb the action, that the average viewer has had little time to linger on the defects in NBC’s coverage, its bum notes and missed entrances. These are the streaming Olympics, the first true Olympiad of the age of perpetual content; the real masterstroke of NBC’s coverage is not in its talent roster or studio design but in the decision to use streaming arm Peacock to make every single Olympic event available to viewers live and on demand. No longer are American Olympics fans at the mercy of network producers deciding which three or four events to show live across a patchwork of basic cable channels; now everything is at the viewer’s fingertips, and the experience of watching the Olympics at home is infinitely modular and customizable.
What’s emerged from this rare broadcasting flash of inspiration is a sporting buffet so rich it’s almost suffocating, with aggregate daily broadcasts regularly exceeding the number of hours in the day. On Sunday 4 August, for example, Peacock streamed a total of 45 hours and 24 minutes of Olympic events, including – in their totality – the six-and-a-half-hour final round of the men’s golf tournament and the three-and-a-half-hour women’s cycling road race. As a viewer there is no way to stay on top of this. The only solution is to succumb, to give in to the torrent of content utterly like a swimmer getting swept along by the mud currents of the Seine.
The viewer experience on Peacock is, perhaps unsurprisingly for an enterprise this ambitious, far from glitch-free. The feeds regularly drop out and default to an aerial vista of Paris, so much so that the most frequently viewed event on NBC these Olympics is probably “Coverage will resume shortly. Enjoy a view of the Seine River.” The “recap” show featuring an AI-generated voice of Al Michaels was designed, I imagine, to tailor highlights to each viewer’s preferences, but the actual highlights package, with its creepy artificial broadcast voice narration, seems like a waste of viewing minutes when there’s so much live action to enjoy. There’s also a disorienting amount of duplication, with two completely different streams for the same event – featuring different commentators – frequently available on NBC and Peacock simultaneously. Amid the NBC streamingverse’s oceans of Olympic content, the ragtag collection of hyperventilating Americans, self-important Brits and chirpy Australians (god, so many Australians) calling the action have let slip a healthy number of clangers and clichés. The Swedish table tennis finalist Truls Möregårdh, we were told shortly before he lost three games in a row to hand gold to China’s Fan Zhendong, is a “Viking on the court” thanks to the definition of the veins in his neck. Commentator Steve Schlanger urged viewers at the start of the seven-hour men’s road race, meanwhile, to “get comfortable, grab a cup of joe and perhaps a croissant if you’re shopping local”. (Peacock’s streaming offering is powerful, but not so powerful that it can teleport viewers to Paris.)
Above all, these Games will be remembered as the High School French Olympics, in which a bunch of native English speakers on commentary throughout the Anglosphere convinced themselves they could revive the memories of eighth-grade French class and wrap their tongues around the language of Lautréamont. Place names throughout Paris have regularly been mangled into verbal forms no halfway-decent French speaker would recognize. At various moments I’ve heard Sacré Coeur rendered as “Sukrah Coor”, the Pont Neuf made into the “Pontt Noof”, and “Pontt duh Leynah” for the Pont d’Iéna; in the men’s rugby sevens final, Rupert Cox greeted the sight of French star Antoine Dupont barrelling down the left wing to set up France’s second try with his version of “C’est magnifique”: “Seh mug-nah-feek!”
A particular challenge for NBC’s play-by-play team has been the (admittedly tricky to pronounce) neighborhood of Montmartre, which most have chosen to deliver as an agglutination of low moos and bleats: “Mooomaaaaaaah”. There have been less forgivable slips and biases, too. As confusion reigned over the places in the men’s 100m final, NBC’s athletics commentators failed to provide viewers with any kind of explanation of the rules to determine a photo-finish winner. (Back in the main studio, the ever-obliging Tirico did clear things up later on by clarifying that it’s torso/clavicle position that matters.) The constant hyping up of the rivalry between the US and Australia by veteran pool duo Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gaines eventually grew a little tiring: if you’re a 330 million-strong superpower fretting over the athletic threat from a nation of 26 million, it’s probably a sign you’ve entered irreversible decline.
But these are ultimately minor criticisms in what has been a bell-ringingly successful broadcasting spectacular. Like, I imagine, the overwhelming majority of viewers, I’m no more than a casual observer of most Olympic sports. These Games have exposed me to events, competitors, and whole sporting vocabularies I never would have discovered without the choices unlocked by streaming. Thanks to Peacock and its glorious world of spectacle-snacking possibility, I’m now familiar with the concept of what one commentator called a “sloppy 10” in archery; I know that the goal when rotating through a vault routine in the gymnastics is to “look like a pencil”; I understand that skeet is for some reason contested to the type of chillwave dance soundtrack you might hear in the lobby of a W Hotel; I recognize that in dressage a “quiet tail” is the paramount objective, the ne plus ultra of equine achievement, and that in equestrian more generally the length of the horse’s nickname is always inversely proportional to the length of its official name (“Next up is Fedarman B or as he prefers to be known, Bruno”).
I now know my middle blockers (a position in volleyball) from my chop blocks (a table tennis shot designed to disrupt the opponent’s rhythm), my canoe sprint from my kayak cross. The final lap of the men’s mountain bike race was perhaps the most gripping sporting spectacle of the year. The mixed team air pistol final looked like it was taking place in a high school gym, but it was heart-thumpingly entertaining and yielded the Games’ most memorable style icon, the unflappable, silver-haired, and now silver-medaled Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikeç.
NBC’s Olympics coverage has had its fair share of longueurs and stumbles, but there was no way for the broadcast to fail once the decision was made to open the streaming floodgates and give viewers the chance to consume everything everywhere all at once. The Gold Zone “whip-around” show has featured a cast of mostly annoying American meatheads braying charmlessly about Team USA. Jost phoned his crosses from the surfing competition in and mostly gave up once his tootsies got cut on the coral reef off Teahupo’o. NBC paid Martha Stewart to go watch the dressage for some reason. But who cares? It’s the Olympics, and no sporting show on Earth comes close to matching it. Paris has set a new bar for coverage of the sporting mega-spectacle, heralding a future – across all sports – of more competition, more content, more ways to bring spectators within sniffing distance of the action. The humanity! The magic! The monuments! The multi-screen streaming opportunities! The real legacy of these Games is not athletic but televisual; its greatest feats belong not on the podium, but to the platform.
