Meet the four Long Islanders on NBC's Olympics coverage team

STAMFORD, Conn. — One of the most important sites of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics is a former Clairol shampoo factory in Connecticut’s second-largest city.

It is there that NBC Sports has a sprawling 115,000-square-foot broadcast operations center that sits 3,983 miles from Milan.

Among the 1,600 employees based in Stamford are four native Long Islanders who are working tirelessly to bring 3,200 hours of Olympics coverage to viewers on NBC and its cable, streaming and online platforms.

There’s Billy Rebman, a former Newsday paperboy from Baldwin who is NBC Sports’ director of research; Rob Landau, NBC Sports’ executive vice president of business operations, who is from Port Washington; Matt Casey, a 1998 Newsday All-Long Island first-team high school quarterback from Garden City who is a coordinating producer on NBC’s daytime Olympics show, and Lane McKenna, a 25-year-old production assistant from Rockville Centre who already is working her second Olympics in less than three years at the network and is gearing up for a third: the Summer Games in Los Angeles in 2028.

“Working on the Olympics is incredible,” McKenna told Newsday. “It gets really, really exciting, and it's exciting looking to L.A. and just the potential of what that could be as a domestic Olympics. It's been a really incredible time working here. I'm really grateful. A normal work week, it's sort of like 9-to-5. Once the Olympics starts, you're really on 10- to 12-hour shifts. It's 22 days in a row. But it's all worth it.”

Remote beehive of activity

NBC has 1,000 employees on the ground in Italy for the first Olympics in that country since 2006 in Torino. But as much of the work that can be done remotely is being done in Stamford.

The facility is a beehive of frenetic energy for a company that, in addition to the Olympics, on Feb. 1 restarted weekly NBA coverage for the first time since 2002 and last weekend broadcast NBA All-Star Game events; on Feb. 8 carried Super Bowl LX from Santa Clara, California, and is adding MLB games to its portfolio starting next month for the first time on a regular basis since 2000.

For the Olympics, the Stamford facility includes 17 broadcast booths where announcers can call events live while watching on monitors, 50 remote edit rooms and 35 multi-purpose flexible rooms that are used for items such as replay operations and remote graphics.

“Gold Zone,” the gold-medal peek-in whip-around show that is carried on NBC’s streaming service Peacock, originates out of Stamford. The show, which debuted in 2024, features among its hosts “NFL RedZone” veteran Scott Hanson.

On Friday afternoon, Hanson was in the Gold Zone studio introducing one of the most anticipated events of these Games: when American figure skater Ilia Malinin (aka the “Quad god”) was going for the gold. Malinin fell twice and also fell off the medal podium, finishing eighth. Still dramatic, though.

NBC is streaming 2,500 hours of coverage on Peacock and its other platforms. In 2006 in Torino, there were zero streaming hours. Peacock didn’t debut until 2020.

Torino was Casey’s second Olympics. A 23-year NBC Sports veteran who produced the Super Bowl pregame show in California before returning to Stamford for the Olympics, Casey has noticed more than a few changes in his time at the network.

“I was about as low on the totem poles as you get as a [production assistant] and promos, working overnight,” said Casey, 44. “Now it's different, much different. In ’04, I was in Athens. A big thing that's changed is just about all of us in Athens were on site.

“I worked the Torino games in ’06, and I was still in promos, and we were the guinea pig group testing out file transfers back home at [NBC headquarters at] 30 Rock at the time. So you can blame our group that that worked, and that every year it's sort of like more and more capability back home, and now it's basically just about everything can be done back home.”

The facility, which has its own huge cafeteria and on Friday had “Super Duper Weenie” hot dog trucks in the parking lot as a special treat for employees, is so large that two hallways are called “I-95” and “the Merritt” in honor of Connecticut’s main, often-clogged highways.

Landau, who turned 57 on Valentine’s Day, oversees operations, tech and engineering facilities — what the 26-year NBC veteran called “the soft underbelly of TV production.”

The Stamford facility, he said, came to be because of a 2011 decision by parent company Comcast to put all of NBC Sports into one location.

“There were some in Philadelphia,” he said. “We had some places up here in Connecticut already, and our headquarters had been in 30 Rock in New York, so we were running out of space in all those locations . . . This was a full gut of what had been a manufacturing center. It was all redesigned and recreated by a handful of historic Olympics operation engineers and the like, who did it while we were planning for and doing the [2012] London Olympics. It was a herculean task to do that while trying to pull off the Olympics.”

The facility opened for good in June 2013 with about 350 to 400 staffers plus freelancers, Landau said.

NBC had to adjust what could be done from the facility during COVID. Some of the forced innovations that came about during coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games (which were held in 2021) have lived on.

For example, the facility has a dedicated “Friends and Family” room where staffers monitor the reactions of the kin of athletes both in Italy and in their hometowns at watch parties for what NBC hopes will be tear-jerker moments. In 2021, the Games were held mostly without fans.

Also, in a nod to the new way people watch TV — on their phones — the facility has a room in which staffers prepare vertical videos so you don’t have to turn your phone horizontally to view them.

But perhaps the most widely hailed innovation at these Games are the drones NBC is using for its coverage in Italy. One headline called the drones “the breakout star of the Olympics.”

“The drone use of the coverage has been a game-changer,” Casey said. “I think just for people watching it, you see how fast they're really going. Just new looks at these sports that you've seen for 30 years that typically kind of look the same, like, ‘OK, it's cool.’ But now we have a drone following an alpine skier going 80 miles an hour.”

Deciding what to broadcast

How does NBC decide how much of those alpine skiers or figure skaters or curlers you will see on a given day? For that you can thank Rebman, a 35-year network vet who crunches the real-time numbers of what viewers are watching so NBC can decide what to show more of or less of during the next day’s broadcast.

“We basically handle all the program ratings,” said Rebman, 67. “That's like the report card — the audience’s. We get the data the day after the events. Basically, what my job is, we take that data — but mainly with NBC, because that's obviously the most important network of all — we take that data and we take a look at it, we analyze it, we see what the trends are, what seems to be working, what sports are working, what are not, maybe.

“We made some real-time decisions just a couple of days ago because we saw that as we were looking at the different trending and stuff like that, we were seeing some sports that were really resonating — i.e., the skating — doing very well and holding the audience. So we decided that's a sport that we want to give them, the American people, more of.”

What’s next for the Stamford Olympics-focused staffers? Well, after a quick breather, NBC’s coverage of the Paralympics from Italy — and from 3,983 miles away in a former Clairol shampoo factory — begins on March 6.

More tear-jerker moments? You bet.

“I love the Paralympics just as much as I love the Olympics,” McKenna said. “I always cry. Every day in the edit, I cry. It's very profound what these people are doing. So that's not lost on me.”