When everyone everywhere is being affected by a global pandemic, including us hunkered down in my wife's homeland, I certainly wondered how it might impact NBC’s Olympic Channel coverage of the FIS Cross Country and IBU Biathlon World Cup seasons. My coaching job was heavily impacted, as documented on this site. I anticipated perhaps a full season of covering the events as the OC was probably needing content by normal standards. I worked with NBC to set up an "at-home" broadcasting position here for the World Cup events. I waited like everyone else to see what FIS and IBU did with schedules. I watched the cases spike worldwide in the late fall. Still, the FIS and IBU continue to hold events in as tight a bubble as possible, with no reports of outbreak yet, with differing levels of support and attendance by the athletes and teams themselves, which is understandable from all angles. I've been safe with my family here. The season has started. I've been calling the races for the networks. Yay!
Our current OC/NBCSN Biathlon/CC commentators and producers: Bill, Budish, and Paige (photo last year). We're all now connected by computer.
Of course things change, especially in the Covid era. On top of that is the emergence of Peacock streaming app launched by NBC Universal this summer. I’d had the concept explained to me last winter in the commissary at NBC Sports over numerous lunches, not by anyone with any true authority on the matter, mind you, so it was all with a grain of salt to begin with. It seemed in those conversations that Peacock might provide some longevity and job security to the unprecedented level to date of produced-for-TV style shows of biathlon and cross country skiing. That was the intent with the OC to begin with—to grow the Olympic brand in the United States market. Whether that’s happened, I am not in a position to say, but my guess is, it has to at least some extent. This explanation I got about Peacock last winter jived with the emergence of the OC's intentions the past two years.
Whether it’s that Tokyo still hasn’t happened and both NBC Sports and the International Olympic Committee are taking a very challenging/expensive Covid detour; or it’s production staff has accordingly shrunk and the logistics of an Olympic Channel in the current environment simply cannot sustain a full Nordic sports programming calendar; whether it’s a market shift to non-produced world feed streaming on Peacock as a short-term or long-term strategy; or its a factor of all these things and more, which I suspect it is; the growth I’ve seen lead to commentating on biathlon, cross country skiing on US TV in the last several years, just shrank for the first time since I started all of this--meaning, in 17 years of covering these sports on TV, this is the first time we're doing less produced TV than the year prior.
This weekend’s double-sprint FIS Cross Country World Cup From Dresden, it turns out, will be my final XC Skiing World Cup for this season, as things stand currently. Again, it could change. FIS World Cup Cross Country content will move entirely to Peacock without production—i.e. no commentators, producers, or NBC-graphics/prepared content--for the remainder of the ‘20-‘21 season.
The bright side for those who like commentary is, The FIS Nordic World Championships are still planned to air on the Olympic Channel/NBCSN schedule for February/March. I’m not sure yet if I will have a role in it. IBU Biathlon World Championships in February is scheduled to air in full as well on NBC’s TV networks. But over half of the remaining IBU World Cups after New Years 2021 will be Peacock-only, live and on-demand streams of the world feed with only natural sound.
I know I'm going to get a lot of Tweets and Facebook messages, so I'm getting out front of it here, but I also want to reflect and give a reasoned perspective too.
I was finishing college in Vermont when Max Cobb, then-program director (now CEO) of US Biathlon, asked me if I could come over to Lake Placid and announce in the stadium for 1998/99 nationals and world championship trials. Accepting that invitation unraveled since into what has turned out to be a profession of sorts today.
I met Peter Graves as a young kid on the Iron Range when he took the job as director of the Nordic Center at Giants Ridge in 1984. I was 13, dabbling in ski racing, and both Peter and the new world class ski area 20 miles from my home, were bigger than life. He’d recently covered Sarajevo ‘84 for ABC Sports and would bring ESPN to Giants Ridge for the 1985 World Cup we held in our little corner of the world. Announcing ski racing really wasn’t even a thing before Peter came along. He had and still has the most awesome presence with his voice, and has always shown his passion for presenting ski sports to the public. I simply wouldn’t have conceptualized the commentator I am today without Peter. He set me up for what I do now, if in no other manner than to show me it was a thing and how it was done.
Peter and I did a few events after those biathlon events in Lake Placid, including a an IBU World Cup, in which he gave me some tips on using music for moods during the day in the stadium, and I learned his semantics behind the mic. All that got taken to a new level when we worked under stadium producer, Johan Thoren of Falun, Sweden, at the 2002 Olympics. I got introduced to “stadium production” there. I got some great experience working with Kjell-Erik Kristiansen calling biathlon and the women’s 30k Xc. KEK is still going strong. I hear him often in the bleed-over of the natural sound from the stadium in a good portion of the broadcasts I call today.
Peter at a IBU World Cup in Maine
After Salt Lake City, independent producer, Kent Gordis, worked with Max to get biathlon on The Outdoor Life Network in 2003. Kent fell in love with the sport while producing it for NBC in Salt Lake. I actually met Kent a year before when I worked as a spotter in the world feed TV truck at the 2001 pre-Olympic Cross Country World Cup. Ironically, I failed miserably at my first TV job as I was unable to spot Bente Skari, who was winning the race, amid all the camera shots that were fixated on Julia Tschepalova, whom Skari was catching from behind for the win. The producer went off on me because they barely got a shot of her winning, but Kent, who was directing cameras, was really nice. He let me know that all the shots were being shot too tight to see Skari—that, yes, I’d not spotted her, but she was really hard to spot with what I had to work with.
Kent holding court at dinner with my family in Brooklyn two winters ago. He is a family favorite.
Of all the people who I’ve met and befriended in sports TV, Kent is probably the most impactful on the TV work itself. He's the biggest reason I’ve gotten to call television and why I got off on the right foot. No offense to anyone else, but he's still one of my favorites. He's one of the smartest, funniest, most insightful people I know. Mimmu and the kids just love him. He’d heard me call the stadium at the Olympics and told Max that he thought we could build a biathlon following on cable—that it had all the makings of great sports television if I could bring what I brought to the stadium to the television screen. He secured Bob Papa, who’d done play by play for Salt Lake for NBC, to do play by play for the shows on OLN. Bob had all his notes and knew all the players, and was game. He and Kent really taught me what I needed to know to get started in TV. My favorite part of it all to this day were the pre-show, on-cameras at different points along the East River in Manhattan, implying we were in places like Oestersund, Kontiolahti, or Khanty Mansisk. It stilll cracks me up. Kent explained to me what I naturally did by instinct that worked for TV—which boosted my confidence—but more importantly he guided me when I did things that weren't good. Bob was simply awesome to work with too. He was a hands-off mentor who put me at ease and helped me find my voice and rhythm as a TV talker. My wife put together a book of well-wishing messages for my 40th birthday. Kent’s went something like, he could see a life in an alternate reality in which we might make a living, traveling to biathlon events, producing biathlon shows together for TV, and that’d be just fine by him. Indeed, Kent. Indeed.
He’d mentioned something about a highlight real he was going to put together for NBC in 2005. Next thing I knew, I got a call from Molly Solomon at NBC Olympics about commentating biathlon in Torino for 2006. I’ve been NBC’s biathlon guy ever since. Admittedly, it’s not a huge role in the scheme of NBC Sports, but it's one I’ve always felt fortunate to have. It sunk in when I sat across the aisle from Bob Costas at my first NBC Olympics production meeting in Torino. Big deal or not, that felt heavy duty to me.
First day in the NBC chair with Len Berman at the 2006 Olympics in Torino
Nordic ski racing in America cannot be discussed without Paul Robbins being in the picture. Though I knew him only peripherally, Paul was a tireless, good-natured, humorous, witty journalist who was essentially the institution of journalistic coverage of American Nordic ski racing for the better part of three decades. He was, in essence, a one-stop-shop for all Nordic journalism. As my former-junior-national-team-coach brother once said of Paul, you knew you did something great when you answered the phone and Paul Robbins was on the other end. That's presence.
Paul had covered the Olympic Cross Country and Nordic combined events for CBS from 1992 to 1998, then NBC for 2002 and 2006. He passed in 2007 leaving a gaping hole in all that he was for the sport for so many years. Paul's passing was like a reporting vacuum in our sports. Several entities filled that void, including a great string of journalists at Fasterskier.com over the years. Peter was very close to Paul, and he took on a lot of the print media and editorial space at Ski Racing and Ski Trax in Canada that was Paul's beat. It also left a gap in NBC’s commentator cadre for Vancouver 2010 for Cross Country and Nordic combined. As I was in-house already, so to speak, with biathlon, NBC gave me an on-air audition in March 2009, calling the FIS Cross Country World Cup Finale from Falun, Sweden, with Steve Schlanger on Universal Sports. I got the job for Vancouver 2010 for both sports on top of my biathlon duties. I went from obscure commentator in the International Broadcast Center in Torino, to holding down the NBC daytime coverage of Vancouver 2010 with Al Trautwig for the 2010 Games. Al and were on air more than anyone in 2010, almost all of it live. It was a precipitous rise in duty and impact in just four years with the company. In a word, it was awesome.
Al and me clowning around before an on-camera lead into a race in Sochi. He was a huge mentor to me. Simply great at what he did and always supportive of me.
NBC wanted to build some momentum into Vancouver with the Tour de Ski In the 2009-10 season. Steve Schlanger and I called it for Universal Sports, which is now NBCSN. It had been the network’s go-to event every year for cross country skiing until they made a bigger commitment to the Nordic World Championships in 2017, that has continued. I had to sit out a few Tours de Ski over the years due to my job as a college ski coach, but I believe that the Tour de Ski has been televised as a produced piece on an NBC-affiliated network every year since 2009. Sadly, that run comes to an end in 2021. It’ll still be on Peacock though.
Steve and me prepping for a Pyeong Chang race.
Market forces drive these things. NBC and the IOC stabilized Olympic sports in non-Olympic settings in the US TV market just a couple of short years ago by launching the Olympic Channel, and using NBCSN as a bigger platform for marque OC events. They hoped to grow the Olympic brand beyond 2 weeks every two years—to create a sort of Eurosport for America, minus all the snooker. They were trying for a more-committed and informed Olympic fan. Personal anecdotal evidence from Twitter followers in places like Tennessee, North Carolina, and Missouri, suggests it is working to some extent, though the metrics are completely blurry to me. I have no real sense of the actual impact. But if you weren’t watching biathlon or cross country skiing in 2015 and you watch it now, you catch my drift.
It isn’t hard to draw the line between Tokyo being delayed and the expense being perhaps too great to continue in the short run at least, to produce TV shows in all these Olympic sports for American television. The markets simply don’t seem large enough to expect that to happen, even if one might hope. Hope isn’t enough against a bottom line that’s falling through the floor amidst a pandemic devastating everything in the marketplace. I’ve often wondered how it even happens when the Olympics haven’t been delayed for a year due to a pandemic. We can assume and must acknowledge that the money that needs to circulate to support these things happening, just isn't circulating enough right now.
If you like the shows we do, it’s easy to get mad and take the cut programming personally. Don’t. I don’t, and it’s my livelihood. Don’t get me wrong, I’m bummed! I love what I do. But none of this is personal. It’s about numbers and business. I guarantee you, none of the numerous people who conceptualized, funded, hired, and created the infrastructure necessary to launch a USA Olympic Channel at NBC are celebrating sending un-produced world feed programming to Peacock. That wasn’t the intention a couple years ago with the OC, I’m sure of that. If it was, what would’ve been the point? Behind this development are losses of jobs of great, talented people who have put this whole thing together, and essentially created a TV market for these sports in the US, whether interest on its own could support one or not. TV is a volatile, competitive environment to begin with. Place it in a global pandemic, against a postponed Olympics, and an existential, uncertain shift to streaming, and you have what we have today. It is what it is, and it will adjust to the market, for better or worse.
I realize that tuning into a biathlon or cross country World Cup for some might feel like a salve of normalcy in a disrupted world to those who watch. I've gotten Tweets at least that suggest something like that. It certainly does some of that for me as well, despite the weirdness of the actual production, currently. But things aren’t normal. There’s a global pandemic at hand. If anyone thought that wouldn’t disrupt Olympic Channel programming of these sports, I think we’d be deluding ourselves. This is simply a symptom of far greater losses across the world due to Covid-19.
I’m glad that NBC, as rights holder to FIS and IBU programming in the US, is using Peacock as a place to at least see the sport even if viewers lose some insights that draw them in, and I lose some work I might have liked to do. Some folks will/would actually prefer it, I’m sure. But if you are one who wouldn’t, it’s ok to feel mad about it, but anger isn’t a rational response. Nobody is trying to screw you here. The pandemic is powerful. Things cost money, and popularity matters. The rights that broadcasters pay to show these sports, pay for the events you watch and the money the athletes make. The commercials the broadcasters sell when they buy the rights and produce them for an audience, pays the bills to do that. The more people watch, the more solid footing these sports have in the marketplace. If you like the shows with commentators and feel compelled to let NBC know that, it's good to let them know that, but getting angry about it or at NBC isn't productive nor rational. It's just business. But to be clear, these shows aren’t your or my birthright. They are market driven. So if you want to watch them the way you like them, the market has been set, and honestly, it has also been subsidized. We’re feeling the impact of losing the subsidy, as I see it, because the subsidy is from the profits generated by the Olympics actually happening.
I don’t know where this puts us for the future, but with the massive expansion of TV show coverage of these sports on American TV the past couple of years, retraction was always a distinct possibility—even without a pandemic. Because when you’ve gone from doing very little, to some of it, to all of it (which we did for 2 years running), the only way to "more" is, more premium spots on networks' schedules with more production, hosts, pre- and post-game shows, etc... Let’s be honest, That was never in the cards. The likelihood was in favor of a retraction, honestly.
I’m grateful to Peter, Max, Kent, and of course all the great people at NBC over the years, who have given me some of my proudest moments and provided a platform from which to share my passion for these sports with a greater swath of the American public. And it’s important to recognize that NBC continues that commitment at a level equal to or greater than we were used to just a few years ago. And I’m still planning and hoping to be around on air, just like always, just a little less frequently. Regardless, I’ve always said about commentating biathlon and cross country skiing on TV, that I never thought it would lead to anything and I’d be happy with what I’ve gotten to do and experience even if it all ended today. Which it hasn’t. And I still feel that way.