Editor’s note: The author is a senior at Fairfield and the sports director at WVOF. He is working as an intern on NBC’s Olympic coverage, and will check in from Turin for the next two weeks.
TURIN, Italy – I’ve only been here a couple of days and I’m already missing my college kid sleep schedule. Between jet lag and ridiculous hours, I’ve been kept busy and awake. From Friday afternoon to Tuesday night I have slept 15 hours, flown nine and worked 34, but I figure this is the Olympic games and I have the rest of my life – or at least until spring break – to sleep. In a couple of days, Torino, or Turin as we call it, will be hopping with athletes from all over the world, but NBC, who I’ve worked for since the early days of Olympic preparation last summer, has been running like a well oiled machine in preparation. The media village, located at a place called Riberi is anything but a four star hotel. It is a series of connected buildings surrounding a courtyard…or mud-yard in this case. It was renovated just for the Olympics, which makes me frightened to think of what it looked like before hand, but it works for what it is: a place to crash when the NBC crowd isn’t working or enjoying the town, which generally seems to be about 5 out of every 24 hours. I am one of roughly 120 NBC interns working in a variety of departments, and the only one from Fairfield. Syracuse makes up about half the crowd with Ithaca, Iona, and LaSalle making up about a quarter of our group. The rest are scattered all over the country. Most of us spend our days (some of us our nights and wee hours of the morning) in the International Broadcast Center. (IBC) All the different divisions of NBC can be found here, and I am in the GM Chevy Moments rooms most of the day. The cafeteria serves free food all day, and there have been alleged sightings of notables such as Bob Costas, Dick Ebersol, Jamie Sale, the gorgeous Canadian figure skater, and a few notables I saw myself including commentators Scott Hamilton and Dan Jenson, who won gold medals for the stars and stripes in figure skating and speed skating, respectively. My biggest surprise came however the evening I arrived in Torino. When I first got to my room, I saw that my roommate had already moved in but wasn’t present. I was getting myself settled in when my roommate did return from his errand, and it just so happens, that the wonderful folks at NBC put me in a room with Boston Bruins rink-side reporter Rob Simpson from the New England Sports Network. Of the three thousand plus students at Fairfield I would only expect roughly 25 to know who he is, but as a big Bruins fan and aspiring sportscaster, rooming for three weeks with somebody who I watch on TV makes my ecstatic. I realized sometime in early January that I would be over during the Super Bowl, which did stress me out for a while. When my beloved Patriots were bounced from the playoffs, the thought of potentially missing the big game didn’t bother me quite as much. But I didn’t wonder if I would stay up until 4 a.m. Italian time to watch the game knowing I would have to be at work at 9:30 a.m. the next day or if I would go to bed. Well it was neither of the above. While 95% of NBC was cramming into the few American sports bars in town, and drinking their faces off, I was at the IBC transcribing an interview done earlier that day by Jimmy Roberts with the infamous American skier Bode Miller, who among other accomplishments, has admitted to SUI – Skiing Under the Influence, and may be the best skier in the world when he isn’t liquored up. I was doing that until about halftime. After taking the 2:30 a.m. bus back to the media village, I watched the fourth quarter for a while in German, and a little bit in Italian with Rob. So work has been eventful and the games haven’t even started yet, but on Friday the magic and the madness begins with the opening ceremonies. So far I’ve been very impressed by the way NBC operates like a team. Often I can’t even tell who is the boss of whom. Everybody is excited, and I think I’m beginning to catch the Olympic fever as well. I’m not sure even cowbell can cure this one.
Rory Duyon is a senior at Fairfield University and working an internship throughout the month of February with NBC at the Olympics in Torino, Italy. He will be checking in on a weekly basis with the mirror to share his Olympic experience
Heres a picture and a link to get that picture of rob simpson if you want to put it in there since I mention him
http://www.boston.com/sports/nesn/aboutus/onair/robsimpson/
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