Live From New York! (Part Two)
Posted 8/28 at 7:02 AM
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I know the Olympics are over, but here are a few final thoughts on what life in New York was like for two weeks.
The most surreal aspect of the Olympic adventure was that our commentary was coming from the stage of Saturday Night Live. Yes, that’s right. From the very same stage that Steve Martin did “King Tut” and Dan Akroyd and John Belushi belted out their cover of “Soul Man” I was working the Olympics.
About a dozen events were called from New York. The main reason was that the number of folks needed to do all the sports was more than the International Olympic Committee wanted in Beijing. While there is no substitute for being at the venue, weightlifting is one of the sports that can be done effectively from a distance. We were getting the world television feed (which is essentially the only live feed there is) and had a real-time “Commentator Information System” that kept us up to date with who was lifting what and where they stood in the standings. The only thing we missed out on was if someone got injured; we didn’t have the resources to know exactly what was happening.
In fact, The New York Times did a story on the New York-based commentators and I even got a mention as doing weightlifting. That was cool.
What was also cool was walking to work everyday down the 8th floor hallway past the autographed photos of past guest hosts of SNL and into one of the dressing rooms to do our prep. Then we walked onto the stage which had been converted into an Olympics Central with ten audio booths and a whole nbcolympics.com enterprise, blogging on events, updating content and uploading video.
We would spend two hours calling the “A” session of weightlifting (the 10 or so top lifters) and then we would retire to our office to figure out what part of the competition was the most dramatic and how best to tell the story. We had basically (on average) 20 minutes to tell the story of something that had unfolded over a 2-hour period. I know that many people want to see everything live from the Olympics, but the fact is that these competitions are played out over a large amount of time and there’s no way to do it all live or you’d end up with a very short list of sports being covered.
A lot of people asked me how I got to learn about weightlifting (as well as fencing). First, I did a lot of online research and even hit the library to understand the mechanics of the two lifts: the snatch and the clean and jerk. Assistant athletic trainer Jason Biles also walked me through the biomechanics of the lifts. In addition, the NBC research staff pulled together a 300+ page manual including the history of the sport in the Olympics, the rules and biographies of key lifters. Once we got to New York, we had researchers both in New York and in Beijing to confirm pronunciations and other details. Then again, I was sitting next to a two-time Olympian in Shane Hamman.
It was a great experience all the way around. I’m catching up on my sleep and I’m getting ready for another season of Grizzlies basketball!
Posted 8/28 at 7:02 AM