NBC Sports confirmed Wednesday it will not send announcers to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing regarding a surge in the COVID-19 omicron variant in China, USA Today reported.
"The announce teams for these Olympics, including figure skating, will be calling events from our Stamford [Conn.] facility due to COVID concerns," Greg Hughes, the NBC Sports senior vice president of communications, told the outlet in a phone interview.
"We'll still have a large presence on the ground in Beijing, and our coverage of everything will be first-rate as usual, but our plans are evolving by the day, as they are for most media companies covering the Olympics."
NBC's Olympic host Mike Tirico will still be traveling to Beijing to cover the first few days of the 2022 games before going to Los Angeles to cover the Super Bowl.
Although Team USA will participate in the games this year, U.S. officials will not attend.
President Joe Biden announced a diplomatic boycott against the games last month in response to alleged human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims, according to The Hill.
"The athletes on Team USA have our full support," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Dec. 6. "We will be behind them 100 percent as we cheer them on from home."
"We will not be contributing to the fanfare of the games. U.S. diplomatic or official representation would treat these games as business as usual in the face of the PRC's [People's Republic of China] egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang, and we simply can't do that."
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