Thank you for making the Rio Olympics awesome
At some point during the Olympics— the days very much blur together at this point— I was sitting at my desk yammering about judo or handball or whitewater slalom kayak racing or something. A coworker asked me if I was always into the Olympics this much, or if it was only because this year I was hosting a podcast. I told him that the podcast existed because I love the Olympics, and not the other way around.
I don’t know why I’ve always loved the Olympics so much, I just know that when I was 9 years old I recorded the entire ’96 Atlanta Games on as many VHS tapes as it took. I missed a lot of summer sporting events during my childhood because I spent every summer at camp. I don’t think I saw an MLB All-Star Game between 1998 and 2005. But somehow, thanks to the Sydney Olympics being in September 2000, the dates always aligned and I never missed an Olympics.
In 2004 I watched the Athens Olympics on TV, having already visited the site in Olympia where the Ancient Games were held. I’ve actually been back a second time and can say what a cool feeling it was to run on the original Olympic track in Greece.
In 2008 I went to the Olympics as a fan and saw swimming, track and field, basketball, wrestling, soccer and table tennis. I saw Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal, and felt compelled to say the words of the national anthem out loud because I saw strangers from other countries looking at me as it played. I also ate deep fried scorpions, met a Chinese boy in an Allen Iverson jersey at the Great Wall of China and experienced the enormity of the Games when you catch them in person.
In 2012 I worked for NBC for a month during the London Games, as a sleep-deprived web producer for NBCOlympics.com. If you clicked a link to check out a photo gallery or find the live stream of Mat 2 during the 55 kg freestyle wrestling repechage, chances are I put it there.
But I’ve never experienced an Olympics quite like Rio, when SI let me co-host a daily podcast called “Very Olympic Today” –named after a quote from Cool Runnings—on a feed called Sports Illustrated at the Games (despite the fact that, as we reminded listeners many times, we weren’t, you know, at the games).
The response was incredible. Not just the number of people who listened, but the number of people who sent us messages or wrote us iTunes reviews about how much they enjoyed it.
Listeners reached out to us from the Netherlands to talk about their national handball teams and from South Korea to tell us what the badminton commentators sound like on TV there. We heard from people in Hong Kong, Sydney, London, and all over the U.S. We heard from a Kiwi, married to a Hawaiian, living in Utah, who wanted to share some rugby knowledge. One day we mentioned Anchorage, Alaska and the next day we got a tweet from a guy in Anchorage who was delightfully surprised his home city came up.
We heard from listeners who competed with and against Olympians in high school, who added context and stories about athletes we watched on TV. We heard from listeners who were missing the Olympics to spend time with family in the hospital, or to through hike the Appalachian Trail, who were using us as a means to keep up. Another time we asked a question about cycling, posted the episode at 4 a.m. and a listener responded with an answer within an hour. He was in London, but that speed still amazed me.
Thank you to all of you.
The original concept for the show was my idea. I always love watching the minor sports that don’t receive as much media coverage, and I thought a show with two people who are not experts in every sport, but simply watch 18 hours of the Olympics on TV every day could connect with an audience. And wouldn’t it be funny— and work best logistically— if we tape every night at 2 a.m., so that the sports are finished and people have it for their morning commute? Who cares if I get four hours of sleep every night because I need to wake up before a 9:30 a.m. handball game? It’s only a few weeks.
Fortunately my co-host Alex Abnos liked the idea and I give him a ton of credit for the show’s success. But building a community around our show to the extent that we did was unexpected, and is something I’ve never come close to experiencing before.
We somehow climbed as high as No. 6 on the list of top sports podcasts in iTunes. Despite an obvious bias in the ratings that helps boost new shows—our five star ratings piled up, but we were nowhere close to the sixth-most listened to podcast— it was still hilarious to see us keeping company with such famous neighbors. I believe we were No. 15 on Stitcher, and one day we were atop the list of the most buzzworthy podcasts on Spotify. (Take THAT, Hillary Clinton podcast!)
All somehow because people wanted to see who would win the #Quadrathlon, our silly competition in which we drafted teams in various sports, or to see whose advice I would take when I finally declared my allegiance to a team in my new favorite sport, rugby.
In addition to the listeners, there’s also a long list of people to thank who helped make my Olympics both possible and fun. Many of these thank yous were done on the final episode, but I will repeat them here.
Thank you to:
Alex Abnos, an awesome co-host and co-producer, a quick editor, and a perfect partner for this project. Ben Eagle and Ryan Hunt, who gave this an initial greenlight and a ton of support. Dan Bloom for the support since I started working on SI’s podcast team. Lindsay Schnell who added a ton to the podcast feed with her awesome reported episodes. Bette Marston, Jamie Lisanti, Michael Blinn, Adam Pincus, Ben Estes and the rest of the SI night staff for their production help. Eric Single, who produced Audibles while I was away from the NFL for three weeks. The SI social team: Bill Carey, Stef Gordon, Mike Fiammetta, Xandria James and Madison Hartman for their help and for enabling my temporary schedule to work. Other SI celebrities like Chris Stone, Jon Wertheim and Grant Wahl, who shared the podcast with their esteemed voices and Twitter followings. Richard Deitsch, who did the same, and also came in the studio for a guest segment. Chris Chavez for telling everybody he met about it on the ground in Rio. J.J. Javelet of the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team, an actual Olympian who called in from Rio.
Thank you to SI’s amazing staff writers, whose tireless work helped our little podcast get noticed. I tried never to take it for granted that people around the globe reading Tim Layden’s dispatches from Rio scrolled past my podcast embedded in the middle of the story. (And occasionally clicked on it.)
Thank you also to my friends and family who listened, and even those who didn’t but have still always been encouraging and supportive. And thanks to my girlfriend Sam, who seemed surprisingly cool about barely seeing me for three weeks.
Thank you to the people I forgot to mention too. It was an accident.
And now, some sleep. And to shave my Olympics beard. Probably. And to finally watch season three of BoJack Horseman, plus a little more non-sports TV, before finding out what I missed in the world of preseason football.
I hope you enjoyed the Olympics as much as I did, but you probably didn’t. Unless you’re Usain Bolt. Usain Bolt probably enjoyed the Olympics more than I did. But you’re probably not Usain Bolt.
The Olympics, despite being screwed up in so many ways (corruption, greed, doping, often leaving host cities worse off), will always have a special place in my sports fandom heart. When they are at their best, they are simply the best. And it was incredible to spend the last three weeks (daily since before the Games even started!) not only watching so many amazing athletes with so many incredible stories, but sharing this experience with so many other people. You were hopefully able to hear the enthusiasm in my voice, even on nights taping went past 3 a.m.
In 2020 I hope to be in a position where I can cover the games live from Tokyo. That would probably mean a very different style of coverage from me, but it’s a major career bucket list item. I like to think this little podcast was a step helping me get there, and for that I have many people to thank.
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