MILAN – Alan Roach’s giant, baritone voice is easily recognizable to any sports fanatic.
It echoes off the rafters of arenas worldwide. It blares out of the loudspeakers at football stadiums and can be heard for what feels like miles.
He’s the public address announcer at every Colorado Avalanche and Minnesota Vikings home game. But in between, he’s been the long-time, familiar voice of the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and FIFA World Cup, plus dozens more of the biggest sporting events in the world.
So when he did his 18th Super Bowl on Sunday night in Santa Clara, Calif., between the Seahawks and Patriots, one wondered when — or even if — he’d get to his seventh Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy.
The answer? How about Tuesday night?
In less than 48 hours, Roach went from tweeting on his X account, @MileHighRoach, a picture from his perch at the Super Bowl with the words, “perpetual, eternal, everlasting, ceaseless, endless, infinite, unending, interminable, boundless, continuous MAY THIS INCREDIBLE RIDE NEVER END! Thank you @NFL for 18 times here, in this seat, for the greatest single-day sports event in the world” to then tweeting a picture inside Milano’s Santagiulia Hockey Arena with the words, “Wow! Thanks to the magic of air travel, time zones and lie-flat seats, I’m here!! My first assignment – USA v CAN Let’s go! Preliminary Round seems like an understatement for this clash. Viva Italia!”
How’d he do it?
“In hindsight, I don’t know why I didn’t poke around at NBC, because I’m guessing they probably had some sort of flight that went directly from San Francisco,” Roach said, laughing, after announcing two hockey games Wednesday at the Milano Santagiulia arena, including a late-night contest between Sweden and host Italy.
That was a reference to clearly Mike Tirico, the play-by-play legend for the Super Bowl who is also the host of the Olympics on NBC, having a private jet lined up to get him to Italy for his duties here.
Roach, however, boarded a red-eye flight from San Francisco to Newark five hours after the Super Bowl, then connected there and landed in Milan at 7 a.m. Tuesday. Hours later, he was rinkside announcing the United States’ 5-0 win over Canada in a women’s preliminary game.
“Thankfully, I had some lay down seats and I got good sleep,” Roach said with his deep voice but behind very red eyes. “So I made it to Canada-U.S., and that was pretty good way to burst out of the box.”
Roach swore, amazingly, that he wasn’t tired as he left the arena around midnight Thursday.
“I do this a lot through the year, traveling around, but I’ll admit this one I was worried about,” he said. “Super Bowl Sunday was one of the most stressful days because first, it’s Super Bowl Sunday, but I didn’t just have the opportunity to wake up and go, ‘Okay, I’m gonna announce the Super Bowl today. Get ready, get my suit.’ I had to figure out what I’m packing in my bag to go to Italy, what I’m checking in a box to ship back home to Colorado. And I’m doing all that at six o’clock in the morning before the Super Bowl. So it was the most stressful Super Bowl day that I had, and I was kind of thinking, ‘Why did I put myself into all of this? What’s it gonna be like?’
“But once I landed yesterday, I felt great. I could have announced a game at noon. Luckily I had ’til 8, but I could have done it much earlier.”
Still, doing an Olympic hockey game is not like doing an Avalanche game.
Next to him alongside the rink is another P.A. announcer who is essentially translating Roach in Italian. And there’s a cadence and rhythm to it.
“That was kind of crazy,” Roach said. “These other guys have been here for four or five or six days, and done some games already, and done that ping pong, back and forth. It’s tricky because I’m saying a position and a number, then stop, and then I’m saying a name that went with the old position and number, and then I say a new position and number, and stop. But I’ve done it before, so I kind of had it back in my head how it worked.”
Roach considers himself the luckiest guy in the world to witness and embed himself into the coolest sporting gigs in the world.
“I called my wife yesterday and I said, ‘You know, for as crabby as I was on Super Bowl Sunday when I talked to you before the game, I feel great now, and I’m very glad I did this,’” Roach said. “I’m so lucky. I get offered all of these cool things. And other than doing a good job when I get there, there’s nothing I do that makes me deserve any of these more than anyone else. So I just try to do a good job and hope I get asked back.”