It was 3 in the morning Saturday, and Dick Ebersol, the longtime head of NBC Sports, was on a second-floor balcony at the plush Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, looking out over shimmering Lake Geneva, the French Alps off on the horizon, another victory cigar burning hot-red in the dark.
Just hours before, NBC had won the right to televise the 2010 Winter Games and 2012 Summer Olympics to viewers in the United States. The deal cost $2.2 billion and extends NBC's franchise over and identification with the Games; NBC televised its first Olympics from Tokyo in 1964 and has broadcast every Summer Games since 1988.
After the deal was signed, there was a celebratory banquet at the hotel, and there were rounds of toasts. Now, out on the balcony, with the cigar, a potent Cohiba, a Cuban, of course, there was finally time for a moment of reflection -- in particular, about the last bit Ebersol had said in the banquet hall as he'd gone around the room.
"I can't sit down," he'd said to those gathered there, "without telling you how much I've enjoyed all of this. But this is my last negotiation."
For Ebersol, who will turn 56 on July 28 and will be 65 in 2012, this $2.2-billion deal, his last Olympic deal, marks the capstone to a life whose professional arc has been tied, again and again, to the Olympics.
At 19, Ebersol dropped out of Yale to help ABC prepare its telecast of the 1968 Winter Olympics from Grenoble, France. He was the first Olympic television researcher, working with the legendary Roone Arledge.
In the mid-1970s, at NBC, Ebersol played a key role in launching "Saturday Night Live." He left the network, then returned in 1989 as president of NBC Sports. Chairman of NBC Sports since 1998, he was the key player in the 1995 deal by which the network secured the rights to televise each edition of the Games, Summer and Winter, from 2000 through 2008. That two-part deal, both pieces negotiated in secret, cost $3.5 billion.
The deal struck Friday was an open auction conducted at IOC headquarters in Lausanne. NBC topped ABC and Fox; sources said neither put forward a bid anywhere near NBC's.
The 2010 and 2012 Games are so far away that no one knows yet where they'll be. The International Olympic Committee will pick the 2010 site on July 2. Three cities are in the running: Vancouver; Salzburg, Austria; and Pyeonchang, South Korea. The IOC will pick the 2012 city in 2005. New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Madrid and others are in the race.
