“The United States, officially the most dominant Olympic team in all of team sport history. Eight straight golds! The U.S. gets it done once again.” – Noah Eagle on Team USA women’s basketball winning an unprecedented eighth straight gold medal
“We needed these Olympic Games. I haven’t felt this type of Olympic energy in so long.” – Tara Lipinski on the 2024 Paris Olympics
“It’s a Hollywood opening to the run-up to July 14, 2028.” – Mike Tirico on the LA28 handover
Star-Studded Paris Olympics Closing Ceremony, Featuring “Handover” to LA28 and Parade of Athletes, in Primetime at 7 p.m. ET/PT on NBC and Peacock
STAMFORD, Conn. – August 11, 2024 – NBCUniversal’s coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympics concludes tonight at 7 p.m. ET/PT on NBC and Peacock with primetime coverage of the Paris Olympics Closing Ceremony featuring a “handover” to Los Angeles for the 2028 Games and the Parade of Athletes, highlighted by Team USA.
Tonight’s primetime coverage will feature Jimmy Fallon, Emmy Award-winning host of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, joining two-time Sports Emmy Award-winner and NBC Olympics primetime host Mike Tirico to host NBCUniversal’s coverage of the Closing Ceremony for the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad from Paris’ Stade de France. Joining Jimmy and Mike will be Terry Gannon, 1998 Nagano Olympic figure skating gold medalist Tara Lipinski, and two-time Olympian in figure skating, Johnny Weir, who will be calling their fourth Closing Ceremony together.
Global megastar Snoop Dogg, who has been a part of NBCUniversal’s coverage of the Paris Olympics throughout the duration of the Games and is a California native, will participate in the LA28 “handover” segment. Grammy and Academy Award-winning artist Billie Eilish and Grammy-winning group Red Hot Chili Peppers are set to perform, while Grammy Award-winning artist H.E.R., also born and raised in California, will sing the National Anthem at Stade de France. The LA28 Countdown will be hosted by five-time Olympic medalist, tennis champion and entrepreneur Venus Williams. Countdown to LA28 will follow the Closing Ceremony on NBC and Peacock.
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Following are highlights from today’s coverage of the Paris Olympics on the platforms of NBCUniversal:
CLOSING CEREMONY
Mike Tirico on Tom Cruise’s entrance: “(IOC President) Thomas Bach told me his advice to LA28, ‘Do you. Do LA.’ And it’s a Hollywood opening to the run-up to July 14, 2028.”
Johnny Weir on host-city Paris: “The flame has lit the City of Light this entire Olympic Games. It feels so sad to have the flame go out, but Paris will shine so brightly after this immense competition.”
Katie Ledecky, a flag-bearer for Team USA during the Closing Ceremony, on LA28: “I’d love to swim in 2028. I think swimming in front of the home crowd would be incredible. I’m going to take it one year at a time and give my best effort each year, and we’ll see if I make it to LA.”
Tara Lipinski: “We needed these Olympic Games. I haven’t felt this type of Olympic energy in so long. It was refreshing, it was accessible, the way that some of the venues were meshed together with some of the most iconic landmarks in the world was surreal. It is just a reminder of the power of the Olympic Games. We all came together. The feeling of joy and hope and camaraderie – just walking the streets of Paris or watching back home – the energy is palpable.”
Weir: “One of my greatest memories was actually trading Olympic uniforms in the Olympic village. I’ve got a great parka from Kazakhstan. It’s about that unity of being athletes that you don’t usually get to mingle and mix with. You get to meet them, you get to hear what their lives are like in their sports, in their countries, and you definitely feel as an athlete -especially so many Olympic sports are niche sports that the world pays attention to once every four years – you come together and you feel like you’re part of something much bigger than yourselves.”
Lipinski on the experience of a Closing Ceremony: “The Opening Ceremony is the welcome party – the Closing Ceremony is the afterparty. You’ve made so many friends and you can just finally run around and feel free. It is so exciting to be out in this stadium looking at a sold-out crowd. It gives me goosebumps.”
Lipinski on the Olympic rings being raised: “There’s always a part where I get emotional and it’s happening. I just feel this overwhelming feeling of joy for all of these athletes in this stadium. You see these rings rising, and you just know that they’re sitting there looking up and, as cliché as it sounds, all of those images, those long training days, all the sacrifice, this was their moment.”
Weir on the symbolism of the Olympic rings: “Once an Olympian, always an Olympian. You live your life for those rings… no matter how removed you may be from your own Olympic experience, you always get a touch nostalgic and a little bit choked up when those rings are rose.”
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
Noah Eagle on Team USA claiming its eighth straight gold medal: “The United States, officially the most dominant Olympic team in all of team sport history. Eight straight golds! The U.S. gets it done once again.”
Ahmed Fareed on France’s two-pointer with a foot on the three-point line at the buzzer, preserving a one-point win for the U.S.: “The U.S. wins by one point – and half a foot.”
LaChina Robinson on Team USA women’s basketball winning its eighth consecutive gold medal: “No one can really understand the pressure that comes with a streak like that, and that’s how the United States started this game. You could feel the weight, the pressure. 61-0. That’s a lot. But boy, did they prevail in the toughest of circumstances.”
Head coach Cheryl Reeve to Zora Stephenson on the legacy of Team USA women’s basketball adding pressure: “At no point in time did I feel any weight of that. We obviously have great players in the USA, so just helping them to reach their greatest heights was our mission. If we happened to win gold together, and it happens to be eight, okay. But it was our ‘one.’ It was our one special journey.”
Robinson on Alyssa Thomas’ physicality: “Alyssa Thomas comes down the court like a pinball. Bouncing, squeezing her way to the hoop. Get out of her way!”
LA28
LA28 Chairman Casey Wasserman to Mike Tirico on what to expect from Los Angeles hosting the 2028 Olympics: “We are what we are. We are, in many ways, the cultural capital of the world. You’re going to see a lot of star power, a lot of excitement, a lot of energy, and a place that is truly diverse and brings the world together.”
Wasserman to Tirico on LA28’s venues: “We start with what is the most remarkable stadium in football [SoFi Stadium], where we’ll have the Parade of Nations and Opening Ceremony as well as swimming. We go back to the Coliseum, the first venue ever to host three Olympic Games. The home of the Lakers [Crypto.com Arena] will have gymnastics, we’ll have beach volleyball where the sport was invented in Santa Monica. The best of what LA is and the venues allow us to showcase these Games in an extraordinary way.”
Wasserman to Tirico on what LA28 learned from Paris: “The willingness to really think outside the box…the things that really break the traditional mold of Games presentation. Those things are risky, which is why a lot of Games don’t take them, but we give [Paris] a ton of credit for doing them. We won’t copy those, but it will force us to think about how we can do those things differently and take advantage of our city and our landscape to present the Games in our unique way.”
BOB COSTAS, AL MICHAELS, AND MIKE TIRICO DISCUSS PAST, CURRENT, AND FUTURE OLYMPICS
Bob Costas on the importance of LA28 to the Olympic movement in the U.S.: “We come to Paris, a wonderful, historic setting. Every backdrop, arresting. And then from there, on to Milan-Cortina for the next Winter Games. It looked to me, and it’s turning out this way, like a chance for the Olympics to get its groove back. From an American perspective, you come to Los Angeles in ’28, this is the time – obviously viewing habits have changed, the way people feel about sports may have changed – but this is the time for the Olympics to get its groove back, and it’s turning out that way.”
Al Michaels on the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics: “The country needed something to galvanize it, to make us feel more united, and only at an Olympic Games can something like that happen.”
Michaels on the Olympic Games in general: “It’s the one time when everybody kind of gets together. The world comes to one place… it’s a feel-good thing. How many things in life at this point, especially at an international level, are feel-good? Very few.”
Tirico on Michaels and Costas: “You guys have been pretty perfect over the years, and for so many of us… the soundtrack of our sports lives and our Olympic lives.”
WOMEN’S MARATHON
Kara Goucher on Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan winning the women’s marathon in an Olympic record time after earning bronze medals in the 5,000m and 10,000m: “This is the most impressive thing I have ever seen from a female marathoner. Knowing the week Sifan Hassan has had to get to this point, winning two bronze medals and coming back today, hanging in there. This course did not do her any favors, it was so difficult. I actually am in shock at what we just witnessed.”
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ABOUT NBC OLYMPICS
The NBC broadcast network and streaming service Peacock are the company’s primary platforms for its coverage of the Olympic Games Paris 2024. NBCU owns the U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games through 2032, which are scheduled for Paris (2024), Milan Cortina (2026), Los Angeles (2028) and Brisbane (2032).
— NBC OLYMPICS —