He still doesn’t remember calling the Oleksiak race. It was the biggest swimming event of the Olympics for his viewers, and it’s a blank space in his mind. He knows he nailed the call of her getting gold, but he is still stinging from botching her name in the middle of the race.
“I am more embarrassed about that one than I am about the Phelps one,” he says. “That’s a Canadian moment And I f—ed it up.”
Friedman is 45. He is not here by accident; he earned this assignment over many years. But he sits in Olympic Aquatic Stadium and says, “I feel today like I’m starting over.
“Everything I do, I have to work on it to make sure that I don’t do that again. Basically, that’s a message: Nothing you did before was good enough. You better find a way to make it better now.”
He re-dubbed the Phelps race for future airings, but he asked producers to keep the old one. Someday, he will watch it. He has studied the best franchises in sports, and he has learned: You succeed by breaking yourself apart after you fail.
I’m like anybody else who watches sports on TV: I have announcers I love and ones I don’t. There are voices that soothe and those that grate. Some announcers just don’t do their homework and don’t even realize when they mess up. I don’t expect anybody to be perfect. But as we sat here Friday, it occurred to me that I wish every broadcaster took as much pride in the job as Elliotte Friedman.
