At the 2004 Summer Olympics Andrea Joyce, a fixture on CBS Sports and now NBC Sports, turned 50. Men could age on TV. Women did not have that luxury.
“I guess this is it for me,” she told Dick Ebersol, then the chairman of NBC Sports and the Olympics. But Ebersol didn’t care about her age. Neither did viewers.
Joyce, who is now 69, has been a recurring character in America’s sporting life since joining CBS Sports back when the first George Bush was president. Some of the reporting highlights: tennis and figure skating, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, not to mention those 35-plus years of Olympics coverage. A big birthday She will r eport on diving for the Summer Olympics in Paris in July and early August before returning to Paris to anchor NBC’s coverage of the Paralympic Games at the end of August and early September.
For good measure, she recently released a children’s book on women gymnasts and last year was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame. It’s a hell of a run to her 70th birthday, which lands between those events. “Everybody keeps saying, ‘What are you gonna do?’ And I said, ‘I think I’m getting my birthday present,’” she says.
“I get to go to Paris twice. I get to do something I’ve never done before, which is host a Paralympics on site . It’s humbling and exciting.
After all these years to be able to have that feeling, it feels like such a gift.” This time the end is near. Really.
Joyce’s logic is to “ke.