NBC to stream London Olympics closing ceremony live online

NBC announced it has changed plans and will stream Sunday’s Olympic closing ceremony live online.

Sunday’s ceremony from London will still air on a tape-delayed basis on NBC in prime time. For the opening ceremony, NBC took some heat for not making the event available to anyone in the United States for hours after the fact.

NBC has since found that streaming live all of the Olympic sports events online has not cut into its prime-time audience, which has been unexpectedly bigger than the 2008 Beijing Games.

The closing ceremony is scheduled to start at 1 p.m. PDT.

Goooooooooal!

Andres Cantor, the Spanish-language broadcaster with the boisterous goal calls, matched Mexico’s stunning goal in the opening minute of the men’s soccer gold-medal game with his usual verve.

For those who don’t know about Cantor, his minutes-long yelling of g-o-o-o-o-o-a-a-a-a-a-a-l-l-l-l after a team scores is legendary in sports circles. The bigger the moment, the better his call.

When Mexico stole a pass in Brazil territory just after the opening kickoff and Oribe Peralta rocketed in a 20-yard shot only 29 seconds into the game, Cantor let loose with his call and repeated it several times, holding it for what seemed like an impossible length of time.

NBC cut back to the studio, where broadcaster Al Michaels deadpanned: “That was a test of the emergency broadcast system.”

— Dan Loumena

Phelps getting in the swing

A week after ending his incomparable Olympic swimming career with 22 medals, Michael Phelps signed up as renowned golf instructor Hank Haney’s latest pupil. He will be featured in “The Haney Project,” which is shown on the Golf Channel.

“I’m excited about this project with Golf Channel and I’m looking forward to working with Hank and see what we can do together on the golf course,” Phelps said in an announcement.

“He wants to win his club championship,” Haney told the Associated Press. “He wants to play golf so bad. He’ll be all right. It will take him a little while, but he should improve really fast. Michael has got such long arms. But it’s funny, because whenever anyone makes a comment that a guy has got a lot of potential, they’re always talking about one thing — he hits it a long way. The translation is he hits it everywhere.

“The guy with a lot of potential is athletic, long and in search of his golf ball.”

Haney, the former swing coach of Tiger Woods, has previously worked with actor Ray Romano, Charles Barkley and radio host Rush Limbaugh in the television series, which is in its fifth season.