How Peacock’s Gold Zone is energizing Olympics coverage

Gold Zone, NBC Sports’ whip-around coverage of the Olympics, didn’t debut with the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. As far back as the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, the network had experimented with the format—using multiple screens to cover simultaneous live events, a technique that had been popularized since 2005 by RedZone coverage of the NFL. But Paris did mark the first time that Gold Zone had run on NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock, providing real-time coverage of all 39 sports with zero embargoes. Gold Zone will return on Peacock for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games in February.

Molly Solomon: We decided to create a new class of Olympics programming. We wanted to take a format that sports fans were acquainted with, NFL RedZone whip-around coverage, and pitch it to hardcore sports fans to watch the Olympics like that. We’d never given the audience a front-row seat to everything that was happening at once.

Amy Rosenfeld: NBC declared, “We are not going to hold anything back. Nothing is embargoed.”

Solomon: I’ve never felt as much energy in an Olympics control room as I did in Gold Zone.

Rosenfeld: That control room was not for the faint of heart.

Solomon: The first day I walked in there, you could see it was a unique product. It was fast-paced, frenetic. I thought it could appeal to younger viewers. It was almost like FOMO: You’re scrolling your social feed, where you feel like you’re catching up with what happened that day.

Rosenfeld: A sports producer’s worst nightmare is when you’re trending on Twitter. That is never good news. My sister texted me about two-thirds through day one and said, “Hey, #Gold Zone is trending.” And I thought, Oh God, I’m going to have to go on LinkedIn and get another job and it’s all over for me and I should have gone to business school.

Cohost Scott Hanson is known for his on-camera exuberance. On day three, while tracking several Americans in different sports who were simultaneously going for gold, he got so excited that he began pounding his desk and lacerated a finger on a stray binder clip.

Hanson: I was bleeding all the way down to my wrist. It got into my dress shirt, splattered my notes. Sometimes I get carried away. The next day, everybody came to set with a Band-Aid on their right pinkie.

Solomon: The secret to the success of Gold Zone is energy. It helps drive the fun.

Hanson: I hope all of us have an injury-free Games in Milan.

On August 5, 11 days into its Paris Olympics coverage, Peacock delivered the moment fans had begun clamoring for, bringing together on-screen for the first time the two famous RedZone hosts: Andrew Siciliano, afternoon host of the Games coverage, and Hanson, who was covering prime time.

Rosenfeld: I didn’t realize what cult figures those guys are and that the idea of the two of them kind of passing a baton and cohosting was going to shake the earth.

Hanson: I always thought the majority of the sporting public didn’t know there were two RedZones. [DirecTV’s RedZone channel, with Siciliano, launched in 2005; NFL Network’s RedZone, with Hanson, launched in 2009.]

Siciliano: I knew it would resonate. My phone started blowing up. Not just with texts from friends and family but from people I hadn’t heard from in years. The Spider-Man meme was popular, the two Spider- Men pointing at each other.

Conjuring Anchorman, Siciliano tweeted, “Ron Burgundy and Wes Mantooth couldn’t do it, but Scott and I can.” Which of course begs the question: Who is Ron and who is Wes?

Siciliano: I’ll let you decide who’s Ron and who’s Wes.

Hanson: I’m not biting on that.

Siciliano: There’s not going to be a fight in the alley, and I don’t think anyone is going to kill anyone with a trident.

Hanson: I keep a trident in the closet just in case things get out of control.

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