NEW YORK – This time in the sports calendar, the friends of Mike Tirico’s mother start to notice him more and more.
Not that he is an unknown figure throughout the rest of the year. As NBC’s lead play-by-play voice on “Sunday Night Football” and its NFL package, Tirico has one of the most visible jobs in American sports. He enters his fourth Olympics as the network’s primetime host, and Tirico said that in recent months people have approached him with equal recognition regarding his Olympic work
“I think that speaks to the reach of the Olympics,” Tirico, 57, told USA TODAY Sports.
An overlap between football fans and Olympic viewers certainly exists. But Olympic audiences, at least for network viewership, tend to skew older.
“There’s a certain demographic that knows you because of the Olympics,” Tirico said.
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How Mike Tirico’s NFL prep differs from Olympics
Tirico’s Olympics boss, NBC president and executive producer Molly Solomon, called him “America’s host.” And when she travels with him, fans are asking about the Olympics.
“I’ve never worked with someone who does more homework than Mike – and who’s constantly challenging us, asking about things, talking to athletes,” Solomon told USA TODAY Sports. “No one is more prepared to cover the Olympic Games than MIke Tirico. He takes this role incredibly seriously.”
The diligence required to present more than 30 sports to millions of Americans every day for more than two weeks can be daunting. Tirico said that while broadcasting a football game, in which he knows 99% of the rules and the emergency punter for each team, the breadth of the Olympics makes that impossible.
“I’ll never get that deep,” Tirico said.
NBC has reporters and at every competition venue to dive into anything worth that level of detail, Tirico explained.
“For me, it’s ‘Who’s strong in these sports? What’s America’s history in these sports? Who are the crossover slash breakthrough athletes?’ Balancing all that. It’s definitely very, very different in terms of prep,” Tirico said. “To boil it down, it’s having knowledge at the top of the pool for the Olympics, and if we’re doing a game, it’s having knowledge to the very bottom of the pool.”
In addition to his preparedness, Solomon values Tirico’s perspective that he brings “on the fly” to help the audience understand what is happening.
“Most of our audience watches these sports only once every four years, so Mike has to be able to relate it to other sports, other scenarios, that they understand – and nobody does it better than he does,” Solomon said.
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Mike Tirico’s daily Paris schedule will look like this
Tirico will be part of the “Paris primetime” (2-5 p.m. ET) broadcast and will anchor the headliner “Primetime in Paris” (8-11 p.m. ET). By the time he signs off for the night, it will be after 5 a.m. local time in Paris. He estimates his head will hit the pillow sometime between 6:30-7 a.m.
To account for that schedule, Tirico will remain on U.S. time, he said. Once he wakes, events will be well underway. Tirico will track the action and prepare for both shows at the same time. The daytime show breaks will provide time to work with primetime crew for that night’s broadcast.
And in a blur, Tirico will be headed back stateside with an entire NFL slate ahead of him.
“There haven’t been many people who have the chance to be the lead voice on a sport like the NFL and be the Olympic host,” Tirico said, “and I love the fact I get to do both and get the opportunity.”
