The Opening Ceremony of the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics is set for Friday. On Wednesday, NBC Universal confirmed who its on-air hosts for the opening ceremony would be.
Mary Carrillo will join Terry Gannon as the hosts for Friday’s event. The news came after TODAY co-anchor Savannah Guthrie announced she would stay home as authorities continue searching for her mother, who was abducted from her Arizona home over the weekend.
While Gannon may be a known face to many Olympic viewers on Friday, he was already making a name for himself in the Triangle before switching to broadcasting.
Who is Terry Gannon?
Terry Gannon is a former basketball player and sports broadcaster for NBC’s Olympic coverage for both the Summer and Winter Games.
Gannon went to North Carolina State University, where he played basketball for the Wolfpack from 1981 to 1985. He was a member of the 1983 Wolfpack, known as the Cardiac Pack and one of the most improbable Cinderella teams in the history of the NCAA Tournament, defeating the Houston Cougars, 54-52, to win the national championship.
Gannon was on the floor for Lorenzo Charles’ game-winning slam dunk to beat Houston as time expired. Gannon was one of the best three-point shooters in the nation that season and still holds the NC State record for career free throw percentage.
The team and its players are widely regarded as the most famous in the school’s history, and were the subject of an ESPN documentary, “Survive and Advance.”
Gannon worked as a graduate assistant for head coach Jim Valvano after he graduated and briefly played professionally in Europe.
How did Terry Gannon become a broadcaster?
Gannon made the switch to broadcasting on the advice of Valvano, who himself turned to broadcasting after his coaching career was over.
Since then, Gannon has been praised as a sportscaster with one of the widest ranges of game knowledge.
Gannon started with local sportscasts around North Carolina before joining ABC in 1991 and was asked to cover a sport nearly as far away from basketball as you could imagine: Figure skating.
“I got a call Monday morning from the executive producer at ABC, and [he] said, ‘We need you to go to Tokyo next week,'” Gannon told WRAL in 2022. “Because I played for a guy able to take on every challenge and other aspects of life, I was able to say yes and quickly figure out how to do it.”
Gannon would remain at ABC until 2010, when he was brought on to provide play-by-play for the Golf Channel, which was owned by NBC Universal.
The 2026 Winter Olympics will be Gannon’s eighth Olympic Games. He covered various Olympic sports in those broadcasts, ranging from figure skating to golf and even Olympic rowing. While he has hosted four Olympic closing ceremonies, Friday will be Gannon’s first opening ceremony broadcast.
NBC announced over the summer that Gannon would join NBC Sports’ NBA coverage team as a play-by-play announcer for 2025-2026 after the NBA returned to NBC’s airwaves for the first time in more than 20 years.
What sports will Terry Gannon broadcast during the 2026 Winter Olympics?
According to NBC Universal, Gannon will cover figure skating along with 1998 Winter Olympic figure-skating gold medalist Tara Lipinski and three-time U.S. figure skating champion Johnny Weir.
Gannon has provided play-by-play for figure skating for more than 30 years and was part of figure skating coverage for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi (2014), PeyongChang (2018) and Beijing (2022).