'It Truly Takes a Village'
NBC's Olympics Point Person Thrives on Chaos

By Leonard Shapiro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 12, 2006

It's not easy sweating so many details in the months and years of planning that lead up to televising the Olympic Games, summer or winter. There's also hardly any way to prepare for the practically endless days and nights in the control room of the broadcast center once the Games do begin. But Molly Solomon, the NBC Sports managing director and coordinating producer for Olympic network and cable coverage, knows all about dealing with controlled chaos.

"Try toilet-training 2-year-old triplets," she said. "I like chaos. My life is chaotic. Our life is chaotic. But there's something to having people say to you, 'How do you do it?' which kind of inspires me."

She does it with a lot of help, including her husband, Geoff, an editor with Golf Digest ("Geoff cooks; I can't"), as well as friends, neighbors and grandparents. "It truly takes a village," she said, "and a spectacular nanny."

Solomon recently left them all behind and flew to Turin, Italy, where she'll spend a total of 39 days. Virtually every waking hour, she'll be involved in some aspect of an unprecedented 400-plus televised hours of the 2006 Winter Games on NBC and several of its cable networks through Feb. 26. Despite a six-hour time difference between the East Coast and Turin, more live Winter Olympics coverage than ever will be shown, most of it on cable, over 17 days of the Games.

Solomon has made at least a half-dozen trips to Turin in the past few years and has already been to Beijing twice to prepare for the 2008 Summer Games in China. As coordinating producer, she's involved in a variety of projects, from hiring technical production crews, producers and directors to securing on-air announcers and analysts for every sport. During the Games, she'll also produce afternoon and late-night shows.

She's had a major role in planning "Olympic Zone," a 30-minute show airing at 7:30 p.m. each weeknight before NBC's sports coverage begins, which will include local broadcasters using at least three network-produced segments. She's also overseen a new concept, "Olympic Ice," an hour-long nightly cable segment on figure skating that goes above and beyond the actual competition. Solomon was particularly pleased that 1948 men's champion Dick Button, the longtime voice of Olympics figure skating for ABC, will be hosting "Olympic Ice" with Mary Carillo. It's his first Olympics broadcast since the 1988 Games in Calgary.

"Getting all these people together is my favorite part of the job," Solomon said. "And then to see it all come together is very special. You love it, and you live it."

Solomon, 37, has enjoyed a somewhat meteoric rise since she joined NBC in 1990, a month after graduating from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her father was a career Army officer, and the family was often on the move. They lived in Oxon Hill for a few years when she was in grade school and then moved to Fairfax for two years of junior high before heading abroad. She returned to Fairfax for her senior year at Robinson High School.

At Georgetown, Solomon worked on the school newspaper and also had a part-time job in the sports department of The Washington Post. Before she graduated, she already had been hired by ESPN as a production assistant, in a six-month program that involves watching hours of mind-numbing sports events and pulling out highlights for use on "SportsCenter" and other shows.

But she also had applied at NBC and was asked to interview a week before graduation. As she was preparing for her Phi Beta Kappa induction, she got the call from NBC telling her she'd been hired as a production assistant for the princely sum of $8,000 a year. She chose NBC over ESPN, and not long after that, she was named as a researcher for the network's Olympics unit.

Some of NBC's top executives past and present began their television careers as Olympics researchers, including Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports and Olympics. Solomon knew the tradition that went along with being an Olympics researcher and said she was a bit intimidated at first.

"Then they told me I was expected to go around the world and find every good story I could. They told me if any of the stories I came up with were in the Sports Illustrated Olympic preview, then you didn't do a good job."

During the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, Solomon spent most of her time less than six feet away from Bob Costas, then and now the network's main Olympics studio host. She was responsible for briefing him with background details, statistics and anecdotes. Costas has since said he couldn't have gotten through those Games without her.

Solomon was promoted to a production associate after those Games -- the better, she said, "to really learn my craft" -- then produced a number of prime-time features for the '96 Summer Games in Atlanta. With NBC solidly locked into the Olympics at least through 2012, Ebersol asked Solomon to take over producing the cable telecasts of the 2000 Sydney and 2004 Athens Games, and she added the network production to her responsibilities last year.

Still, the toughest task she'll deal with over the next three weeks is being away from her three 2-year-olds -- Madeleine, Jonathan and Alexandra.

In Athens she brought along a webcam, and with Ebersol and many of her colleagues watching in the background, she'd get on daily and sing to the children. She'll do more of the same in Turin each day when the kids wake up.

Hardly the same as being at home, but it definitely beats the toilet training.