What It’s Like to Cover the Olympics
Like most journalists, I had never considered being hit in the head with a javelin a potential job hazard. That all changed at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
I stood near the track as athletes warmed up for a robust day of Olympic competition. As a producer, it’s not unusual to find yourself on the field, backstage, often with a camera crew and living with constant anxiety of accidentally ending up in the shot. But the fear of being impaled by a flying stick was new to me. I was ultimately spared, and, in retrospect, probably unnecessarily worried about death by track and field. But bizarrely enough, such a moment didn’t even feel that strange to me at the time.
I was covering the Rio Olympics — my third — this time as a producer for NBC Sports. Before that, I had covered the 2012 Games in London and the 2014 Sochi Games for The New York Times. All three were a blast — a front row seat to the Model United Nations of sports. The Olympics is where a tangled mess of storylines meet and where fates are determined, sometimes by the thousandth of a second (if you’re a luger).
But none were what I expected.
