Lindsay Czarniak was whispering to her producer through her earpiece, trying not to let Angela Ruggiero hear her. The United States women’s hockey team was trailing Canada with two minutes left in the gold medal game, and Czarniak needed to figure out how this was going to work. In a few moments, they’d go live, and she’d have to ask Ruggiero — who won gold with Team USA in 1998 — what it felt like to watch the next generation lose.
“I’m like, oh dear God, we’re gonna have to go on, and I’m gonna have to be asking her about Canada winning the gold medal,” Czarniak told Awful Announcing in a recent phone interview. “I know that she was gonna be good with what she said, but I’m like, that sucks, you know what I mean?”
Then Hilary Knight tied it with 2:04 left. Everything changed. The game went to overtime, and Czarniak had a few minutes to completely recalibrate what she was going to say and how she was going to say it. Megan Keller scored 4:09 into the extra period. Gold. Ruggiero’s phone started blowing up with messages from her 1998 teammates, all of them texting at once, watching the next generation pull off what they’d done 28 years earlier. And Czarniak had about 10 seconds to merge the natural questions bubbling up in her head with the structured plan they’d prepared before the red light came on.
“I felt like I had so many just natural questions that I wanted to ask her from being in that moment with her,” Czarniak said. “But we obviously had the plan of what we thought we were gonna hit on with her based on the video that we know we had and the moments that played out in the game. And it was just super exciting, and then it was over before you know it, and she’s off on a plane to Milan, and I’m like, oh no, we have the rest of the show.”
That moment — sitting in the Stamford studio next to Ruggiero, watching her process the U.S. winning gold while texting with her old teammates, having to pivot from preparing for a loss to celebrating victory in seconds — captured what made the Milan Cortina Olympics different for Lindsay Czarniak. She’s been part of NBC’s Olympic coverage on and off since 2006, but something about these Games felt more human, more raw, more willing to show the messy reality of what it takes to perform under that kind of pressure.
The women’s hockey gold medal game wasn’t even the only dramatic overtime finish Czarniak experienced during the Olympics. Four days later, on the final Sunday of the Games, the men’s team played Canada for gold in a game that mirrored the women’s final almost identically. The game was tied 1-1 after regulation before Jack Hughes scored in overtime, giving the United States its first men’s hockey gold since 1980. Czarniak’s USA Network team was one of the only shows still broadcasting that day, and they were in their production meeting when the overtime goal was scored.
“We were all watching, and we watched it down to the final second, and like there were tears,” Czarniak said. “It was just so exciting to be able to watch it and watch it with all of them because we were sort of all invested in this thing.”
Those two hockey games — sitting next to Ruggiero as the women won gold, watching with her production team as the men did the same — captured what stuck with Czarniak about Milan Cortina. The people mattered as much as the competition. The crew that came together from different parts of NBC Sports for two-and-a-half weeks, some of whom would never see each other again.
Working alongside analysts who’d lived these moments helped Czarniak understand what she was watching in ways she never had before. Ashley Wagner was calling figure skating coverage alongside her when Ilia Malinin collapsed in the men’s free skate. Malinin was the only person in the world who could land multiple quadruple Axels. He’d dominated all season. All he needed was a decent performance to win gold. Instead, he botched multiple jumps and fell to eighth place in one of the most shocking moments of the entire Games.
Wagner had competed in Sochi in 2014, and she’d lived through the pressure Malinin was experiencing. She explained to Czarniak what was happening as it was happening. Malinin couldn’t have been more prepared, Wagner said. He came in confident. But at some point during his program, something switched. He started letting things in, whether it was pressure, social media, expectations, or just the weight of being the overwhelming favorite.
Then Wagner shared her own story. She told Czarniak about a competition where her legs froze. She literally couldn’t move because of the anxiety building up in her body. Her coach recognized what was happening and decided to teach her how to skate through it. He pushed her to maximum exhaustion in practice, to the point where she’d feel that same paralysis again, so she’d know what to do when it happened in competition.
“I was like, this is so fascinating to me that these athletes are wired so differently, and they do have such a different amount of pressure now because it comes at them from different ways,” Czarniak said. “It just highlights how they’re all also human, but at the same time, it highlights how they’re also kind of superhuman, and that they can flip a switch back and pull, they can get their shit together, unlike anyone else can.”
The conversation stuck with Czarniak because it explained something she’d been noticing throughout the Olympics. The pressure these athletes face is fundamentally different than what previous generations dealt with. Michael Jordan never had to play with thousands of people analyzing his every move on social media. These athletes are getting it from angles that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago. But they’re also more willing to talk about struggling with it, which creates richer storytelling but also opens them up to even more noise they somehow have to block out.
Malinin did the required NBC Sports interview after his eighth-place finish. He posted a couple of days later about what he was going to perform for his exhibition skate. Alysa Liu talked openly about taking time away from skating before deciding to come back despite people telling her she was crazy. Mikaela Shiffrin came back from a disappointing performance in Beijing and proved what it takes to rebound from public failure.
The vulnerability was everywhere at Milan Cortina, and it made the Games feel different than any Olympics Czarniak had covered before.
“I really did feel that it was more noticeable,” Czarniak said. “And I do think that maybe part of that is the openness that some athletes had to talk about their pressure, insecurities. I’ve been seeing like Ed Sheeran posted something about no one talks about failure and how important that is, because how many times people who have achieved the highest level have really failed.”
That openness has created what Czarniak described as a crossroads moment for sports journalism. Athletes now control their own narratives to some extent through Instagram and TikTok, sharing what they want, when they want. But there’s still a need for traditional interviews that can dig deeper than what shows up in a social media post and ask the questions athletes might not think to answer on their own.
“It’s a very interesting time for journalism, because it’s like this crossroads,” Czarniak said. “It’s like this morphing of traditional journalism and very much none, so like, where are we landing?”
Czarniak has worked NBC’s Olympics coverage as a correspondent in Torino in 2006, hosted desk shows in Beijing in 2008, stepped away from ESPN for 13 years, then returned for Beijing in 2022. She’s seen the evolution of how the Games are covered and consumed. The favorable time zone in Milan — six hours ahead of Eastern Time — meant she was covering events live as they happened rather than wrapping up tape-delayed coverage. When you’re elevated, and the stakes are as high as they are at the Olympics, she said, it adds this element of giddiness and excitement and feeling like you’re going to throw up all at once.
“It just allows you to flow,” Czarniak said. “In those moments where you’re calling something or you’re part of watching what is a gold medal game or moment, that’s what it feels like from my perspective as a broadcaster. It’s just fun. It’s just like pure fun and adrenaline.”
Flow was the word that kept coming up. Ruggiero talked about it. TJ Oshie — who worked as an analyst on men’s hockey coverage after retiring from the NHL — talked about it. When you’re in flow with what you’re doing, it feels like you’re skating on top of it. The pressure doesn’t disappear, but it becomes manageable, almost easy.
That’s what Czarniak saw throughout Milan Cortina. Athletes are in flow even when facing the biggest moments of their lives. Analysts who’d lived those moments explaining what’s actually going through your head when everyone watching thinks it’s over. Production teams watching gold medal games together and crying when Jack Hughes scored in overtime. All of it added up to something Czarniak struggled to fully articulate even weeks later.
“At the end of the day, we’re all walking out of here today, and there are some of us will never see each other again, probably,” Czarniak said. “But it’s like you were this part of this really special 2.5-week period where it’s like you can’t recreate that because of the emotions that go along with it. It’s like there are highs and there are lows of the actual events that you’re covering, and that in itself is unique because it’s like a constant, consistent championship type of event.”
The Olympics ended weeks ago. Czarniak is back covering the Big East Tournament for NBC Sports now, back to the regular rhythm of the season. But Milan Cortina won’t let go.
“Every time I do it, I kind of realize again, like it really is such a big part of the job and also the excitement of the job, the people that you’re with,” Czarniak said. “So that’s always been on my radar with it because it’s really special.”
And sometimes the most special moments are the hardest to put into words. You just had to be there in the Stamford studio with Ruggiero when Megan Keller scored, or in the production meeting when Jack Hughes beat Canada. You had to feel it to understand it. And for two-and-a-half weeks in February and March, Lindsay Czarniak felt all of it.