McKay to Work Games for NBC

Jim McKay, the legendary ABC broadcaster who came to personify America’s relationship with the Olympics as the Games grew into a made-for-TV event, will work the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City for NBC, network executives announced Wednesday.

The 79-year-old McKay--or, as NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol called him, “Mr. Olympics”--will do triple duty in Salt Lake City.

McKay will work in the studio alongside NBC host Bob Costas. He will do the sort of “up close and personal” features that ABC pioneered and that have become a staple of NBC’s Olympic coverage. And, Ebersol said, McKay will offer commentaries.

“We are absolutely thrilled,” said Ebersol--whose Olympic career dates to the 1960s and to the Winter Games in Grenoble, France, where he worked in 1968 for ABC as McKay’s researcher.

Costas said that having McKay on the set would lend “perspective and prestige.”

McKay said, “I’m looking forward to it and [it] should be absolutely the most fun I’ve had in a long while.”

The Salt Lake Games will be McKay’s 12th Olympics.

McKay’s Olympic career seemed to be over, however, after the 1988 Calgary Winter Games. NBC or CBS have owned the U.S. rights since 1992; NBC now holds the rights to every Summer and Winter Games through 2008.

After an overture from Ebersol, however, ABC Sports President Howard Katz gave permission for McKay to work the Salt Lake Games for NBC.

“Unprecedented generosity,” Ebersol said Wednesday.

Katz, however, said it was an easy call: “If there’s any person who has earned the privilege of doing another Olympics, it’s Jim McKay. I just thought it was the right thing to do.”