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The life of an NBC researcher
SYDNEY -- If you wake up and smell the coffee in Sydney, you're probably not far from the NBC compound at the International Broadcast Center. Have a cup. Officials say they have 16,000 pounds of Starbucks coffee here, proving the network that paid $3.5 billion for five Olympics really does have bean counters. In the next month nobody will have earned their stripes -- and sips -- more than the network's Olympic researchers, the unsung heroes genetically altered to function without sleep while keeping encyclopedic recall of split times, hometowns and superstitions at their forever-typing fingertips. Need a good centathlete? Try an Olympics researcher. The position is considered the broadcast industry's plum entry-level gig, a surefire springboard to upper-echelon production and executive positions. The list of research alumni include Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports; Peter Diamond, senior VP for Olympics programming; Michael Bass, senior broadcast producer for the Today show; Jeff Zucker, Today's executive producer; Steve Ullrich, the network's director of talent and promotion; and others. This year NBC's chief team of five researchers -- the crew swells to 30 during the Games -- went to 19 countries, covered 19 world championships and produced 5,565 pages of Games factoids for their 441 hours of network and cable coverage. Joe Gesue, the head of the research department, reminds his team to look for its gems in the Games' humanity rather than their quantification. Gesue and I have crossed paths this year in every state from New Jersey to New South Wales, and a dozen Indianas and Mississippis in between. Our Manhattan offices are one block apart, but I don't recall seeing him in New York. Ebersol was the original researcher, hired while still a student at Yale by ABC's Roone Arledge to feed information to the network's announcers before and during the 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble, France. Sitting next to the 14 monitors in his IBC office, Ebersol explains why Arledge created the position after the '64 Innsbruck Games: "The day after events were completed, the people at ABC would read the papers, and time and again they found, for example, that the father of the skier who just won had been an Austrian freedom fighter in the hills. This was just the sort of detail Roone felt created a sense of empathy with the athlete." Ebersol traveled the globe, at one point landing at a nearly barren health sanitarium in the Bavarian Alps. "There was nobody there except for the coaches of the American ski team," he says. "Forget about room service; there was nobody to make the beds. Then the most unusual place for a U.S. team was set up at Tahoe where they had placed a tartan track way up on a mountain to duplicate the altitude of Mexico City. The infield was nothing but sequoias and trees." Ebersol had some life. From Monday to Wednesday he'd cram in his classes at Yale. From Thursday to Sunday he might be off in Europe, using his 15 hours in the air as an in-flight study hall. Bob Costas recalls the day in 1992 when Bud Collins was reporting from Barcelona's tennis venue in the second segment of what was to be a seven-segment, seven-minute package. Collins began his report by saying that the mixed-doubles team from Madagascar had been distracted by news of the day's coup attempt in their country. "Give me something about the coup," Costas told his research staff before quickly going back on air. "So as I'm talking a minute later," Costas explains, "I'm getting word in my ear that 10 plotters had seized control of a radio station but had been thwarted from doing anything else. So I was able to report, 'The coup has failed beyond the fact that they were able to change the station's format from rap to country and western.' " Molly Solomon was Costas' right-hand researcher at those Games. "Ten seconds before we went on the air," Costas says, "Molly would tell me, 'It's the swimmer from Peru, not the volleyball player from Brazil,' and I'd look up like I knew what I was talking about." In 1991 Solomon was sent to Donaueshingen, Germany, to cover the world weightlifting championships. "There were no hotels, so I was staying in someone's house," she remembers. "I felt like the ugly American. I couldn't speak German. My only way to bond with the lifters was to drink with them. So the Russians would throw me in the air and catch me." Having judiciously bonded, Solomon left with dozens of personal nuggets and a bottle of Tylenol. She is now the coordinating producer for NBC's Olympics cable coverage. The crew for this quadrennium includes Rob Penner, a Princeton grad who was assigned to cover the world gymnastics championships last year in Tianjin, China. After landing in Beijing, Penner inquired about transportation to the outlying city, 90 minutes from the capital. Take that truck, he was told. Penner then crammed his way onto the shuttle with 30 of his newfound companions, including one seatmate who was carrying a cage full of chickens. Danny Goldman, a Yale grad, recalled an interview with Italian singles sculler Nicola Sartori. Since neither spoke the other's language and Goldman could find no interpreter facile in both Italian and English, Goldman posed his questions in English, had them translated first into French and then Italian before the tales wound their way back into English. No word on whether phrases such as "take it one race at a time" made it through the multilingual filtration process. On the first day she arrived in Milan last fall to cover the world flatwater championships, Abby Lorge was trying to find her way to the racing venue. Then came a glimmer of hope. "I saw these disproportionately bulky men walking past me," says Lorge, who was searching for signs of team warmups but noticed that these men were well dressed. As they drew closer, she saw the telltale pieces of luggage each man was carrying: paddles. Lorge was in right place. Later that year she traded espresso shots in Florence with Italian water polo players who conducted interviews with Lorge clad only in Speedos. Jamie Horowitz was at the European basketball championships in Paris when the Yugoslavian team was refusing to grant interviews to American journalists in the aftermath of war. Horowitz approached Vlade Divac for help. "Politics is politics," Divac told him. "Sport is sport." One-by-one Divac pulled over his teammates for interviews and acted as translator, downing a fresh cup of coffee for each teammate. Divac isn't playing in these Olympics, but the network may have to name an honorary coffee closet for him. In May Horowitz flew from a network seminar in Salt Lake City through San Francisco to Sydney. Horowitz, who turned 24 on May 11, began his journey on the 10th and touched down in Australia on the 12th. Chalking it up to the sacrifices researchers make in the name of their craft, Horowitz filed a missing birthday report with the immigration department upon his arrival. SI writer-reporter Brian Cazeneuve, the magazine's Olympics expert, is already in Australia gearing up for the Games. Check back daily to follow his behind-the-scenes reports.
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